1835 -1875 · Parisian stage, dressing room and audience

Daumier observes the theater from both sides of the curtain: actors, comic characters, dressing rooms and spectators reveal play, social convention and collective pleasure.

Honoré Daumier frequents the world of Parisian theater intensely and represents it in the press, drawing and painting. His scenes are not limited to performance. Crispin and Scapin bring two types of Italian comedy into dialogue through masks, posture and an almost disturbing complicity. The Imaginary Sick refers to Molière and the power of the body played. The Melodrama shows how gesture, lighting and exaggeration produce popular emotion. In the dressing rooms, Daumier reverses the gaze: the spectators themselves become a social spectacle, observed in their attention, their boredom or their desire to be seen. Leaving the theater prolongs the performance in the street, while let the compact audience reveal a modern collective experience. Daumier knows the conventions of acting, but he paints them with rapid masses rather than with the detail of the setting. The collection thus shows an entire society playing, watching and commenting. The selection "Theater and comedy at Honoré Daumier" notably compares Deux Acteurs (Comedy Scene) and Leaving the Theater. His reading favors the material.

At Daumier, the theater does not stop at the stage: the actor plays one role, the dressing room plays another, and the audience observes while being observed.