The sceptical hermeneutics and the pedagogy of seeing in the urban comedy of Honoré Daumier and Weegee.

• Grant number: 11/13123-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2012
• End date: January 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Plastic Arts
• Principal Investigator: Helouise Lima Costa
• Grantee: Marcos Tadeu Fabris Gonçalves
• Host Institution: Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Taking into account the demands for modern art codified in the Suvre of the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire and systematised in his essay The painter of modern life, this project intends to establish a comparison between part of the graphic work of the 19th century French caricaturist Honoré Daumier and the photographs produced by the North-American photojournalist Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, for the New York press between the years 30's and 40's. Both in their distinct places and historical moments produced an X-ray view of the city where they lived and worked, the former in the Paris of the Second Empire and the latter in modern New York. In order to consider the evaluation made by each artist of the urban landscape as well as the structural similarities between their works, one must examine the "documentation" of habits, social types, and typical situations of the daily life in large urban centres, also considering the formal articulations produced by each of them, their homologies, and their power of revelation of the socio-historical contents sedimented in their creations. The elective affinities between the two artists reveal their "artistic kinship", but also suggest the existence of a larger "artistic family" composed of a tradition of visual representation which by adopting the viewpoint of the lower classes show hidden aspects of the process of modernisation which some of the most important European and North-American metropolises underwent.