Les courses de chevaux c. 19th century

Curator: We’re looking at Honoré Daumier’s lithograph, "Les courses de chevaux", likely from the mid-19th century. What are your first thoughts? Editor: Utter chaos, but in an intentionally humorous way. Look at the tangle of limbs and exaggerated features. It feels like a frantic, slightly grotesque satire. Curator: Daumier was, after all, a master of caricature. This lithograph was mass-produced; many such images would have circulated widely in Parisian newspapers. His social critiques often focused on the bourgeoisie, their customs, and obsessions. We might think about this interest in the industrial process behind image production: printmaking made critique accessible to a much larger audience. Editor: The horses, or what we can see of them, appear almost monstrous, while the onlookers have these elongated faces and ridiculous hats, but their attire looks intricately patterned. There’s a distinct cultural insensitivity here. It also strikes me as deliberately absurd. Consider the incongruity of portraying a horse race involving, perhaps, a Chinese setting…The title translates to ‘horse races’. It plays on Western stereotypes of China. Curator: Exactly! And that speaks volumes about how Daumier uses visual shorthand to critique broader social phenomena. The material elements, lithographic stones and printing presses allowed his political ideas, wrapped up in humorous illustrations, to penetrate everyday Parisian life, offering critiques on labor conditions and class disparities, cleverly hidden inside of these depictions. It seems like something absurd can bypass censor and go straight into public’s consciousness. Editor: The pen strokes that define forms have this kind of dark quality to them as well as looseness; it almost feels gestural and frenetic. This creates an aura of disarray, or possibly futility. Everything becomes fleeting like the expression on those men faces or perhaps an expression on a race horse face. Ultimately, his composition underscores the pointlessness of the whole affair. Curator: Thinking about its availability to the public thanks to the industrial revolution that enabled the creation of a piece, it makes me think about the role of media production and how that changes art itself! Editor: Agreed, reflecting on the layered satire embedded in familiar symbolic references definitely gives new insight into both Western assumptions and Daumier’s intent.