August 25, 2004

Another museum to fall victim to the Bubble, the Tobu Museum of Art at the Tobu Department Store in Ikebukuro, Japan, has shut its doors in 2003. But before it closed, the museum showed a series of extensive exhibits from its massive collection of 3’000 lithographs by 19th-century French caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808-1878). Entitled „Honore Daumier Caricatures III-from the Tobu Collections,“ the exhibition presented some 150 of Daumier’s lithographs from his later years, in which the aging artist gave vent to his anger at the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War and at the oppressive Catholic Church.