MADISON, WI.- Daumier Lithographs: Characters and Caricatures opens December 23, 2016 at the Chazen Museum of Art. This exhibition is drawn from the Chazen’s collection of nearly nine hundred prints by the great French caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), follows the artist’s development as the foremost satirist of his day.

Daumier began his career during a short period of relaxed censorship in France and took advantage of the opportunity to directly caricature King Louis Philippe I. Daumier’s gleeful prints frequently portrayed the king as a pear, and often as corrupt. By 1835 the king had reinstituted censorship of images and Daumier turned his attention to his fellow Parisians: fads of the bourgeoisie, lawyers, and feminists were all regular targets.

The fictional Robert Macaire, an unrepentant confidence artist always running a new, outrageously fraudulent company, was a frequent subject. When the streets of Paris fall to bits as the result of poorly made asphalt, Macaire is shown as a corner-cutting contractor. When Napoleon III took the throne, Daumier invented Ratapoil (Hairy Rat or Ratskin) as a stand-in for the regime. An agent provocateur and paid supporter of the king, Ratapoil was always shown with a cudgel, his preferred tool for political debate.

The Chazen Museum of Art opened in 1970 as the Elvehjem Art Center to further the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s mission of education, research, and public service. In 1978 it became the Elvehjem Museum of Art, and in 2005, in honor of a lead gift toward expansion, was renamed the Chazen Museum of Art. The expansion opened in October, 2011, doubling the size of the museum. The new building is joined to the Conrad A. Elvehjem building by a dramatic and functional bridge gallery. The Elvehjem Building is dedicated to the memory of the president of the UW–Madison from 1958 to 1962. The Chazen is a division of the College of Letters and Science at the UW–Madison.

The Chazen is home to the second-largest collection of art in Wisconsin: more than 20,000 works include paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and decorative arts. The permanent collection covers diverse historical periods, cultures, and geographic locations, from ancient Greece, Western Europe, and the Soviet Empire, to Moghul India, eighteenth-century Japan, and modern Africa. The collection continues to grow thanks to artwork donations and purchases.