kevinlDESMA9: Extra Credit Event: Hammer Museum

Even though I was at UCLA for over three years, I have never visited the Hammer Museum or any of the museums I’ve written about for that matter. It sits in the middle of all the tall office buildings on Wilshire, which is interesting since usually you would find a museum isolated with huge gardens around it like the Getty.

Hammer’s collection by French satirist Honoré Daumier stood out among the others because of its bold criticism of life in contemporary France. It took me awhile to actually interpret some of his drawings, since many of them incorporated deep-rooted issues. His drawing called “Past-Present-The Future” depicts a very well fed three-faced man, each face with an increasingly meaner expression from past to the future. Since most of his art criticized the life in contemporary France, I interpreted this drawing as the face of the government becoming harsher with its citizens. Another picture that stood out was called “The Bathers” and depicted a man and a woman each getting ready to use the bath. The man was quite hefty, while the woman was the complete opposite. This may have represented the generalization of how men and woman looked at the time, with men generally not worried over their figure and women generally a lot more self conscious and wanting to be thin. The “Nadar elevating photography to the level of art” drawing was easier to interpret and basically represents how Nadar’s work in photography is gradually becoming worthy to be called art in Daumier’s eyes, though in the picture Nadar is riding an air balloon and elevating physically.