Exhibit spotlights Daumier, caricaturist, commentator To celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of the 19thcentury artist Honoré Daumier, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers is presenting Honoré Daumier and La Maison Aubert: Political and Social Satire in Paris. Honoré Daumier's lithograph of Jacot-LeFaive from 1833, L.D. 173 is featured in the exhibition focusing on Daumier and La Maison Aubert at the Zimmerli Art Museum. The exhibition, which opened Saturday, features more than 100 of Daumier's lithographs and rare sculptures to emphasize the mastery of the artist who museum officials describe as the most skillful caricaturist of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and the Second Empire (1852- 1870). The noted publishing house La Maison Aubert challenged government authority by producing the widelyread satirical journals "La Caricature" and "Le Charivari," illustrated with Daumier's politically-charged lithographs. Focusing on the most subversive works within his oeuvre, the exhibition celebrates Daumier, who lived from 1808- 1879, as the great master of biting visual commentary on the political, social, and artistic events of his day. Organized by guest curator Florence Quideau, the exhibition features many works from the Zimmerli's rich Daumier holdings and loans from the Hammer Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art. The exhibition's sculptural centerpiece is "The Celebrities of the Juste-Milieu (1832-35)," a portrait-caricature series comprising 36 painted clay busts of politicians and other personalities of the July Monarchy. The Zimmerli museum is the only American institution to own a complete set of this exceedingly rare series of painted clay busts, made from the original works now housed in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The quickly modeled busts were kept in the workshop of publisher Charles Philipon's La Maison Aubert, where artists referred to them to create satirical lithographs for various journals. The sculpture series is displayed amid their lithographic counterparts to illustrate a still unique commission in the history of art: a series of three-dimensional statuettes made solely to be used as visual references for two-dimensional artworks. The exhibition demonstrates the power of the press in shaping French social and political conscience, while exploring how Daumier used lithography to express individual freedom during a period of government censorship. "The Zimmerli's caricatural busts are so subversive that they remained hidden from public view for over 50 years," guest curator Quideau, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Rutgers, has said. "By placing themamong some of themost important of Daumier's lithographs, the viewer can see and understand his unconventional process of conceiving two-dimensional images from three-dimensional maquettes. These works illustrate the artist's own dictum, 'Il faut être de son temps,' or 'One must be of one's time.'" The exhibition also presents Daumier's lithographs of genre scenes he made after 1835, when the overtly political journal "La Caricature" ceased publication due to reinstated censorship laws. These scenes of everyday life in Paris fromthe 1840s to the 1860s show various leisure activities of the Parisian bourgeoisie whose recently acquired wealth enabled them to enjoy new types of pleasurable outings. Programs being held as part of the exhibition include "Honoré Daumier's Célébrités du Juste milieu (1832-35): An Examination of the ZimmerliArtMuseum's Series," by Dr. Edouard Papet, curator of sculpture, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The event will be held on April 3 at 6 p.m. Also, "Laughing Matters: Daumier's Strategies of Humor," by Dr. Elizabeth C. Childs, department chair and associate professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis, will be presented onApril 5 at 2 p.m.