Honoré Daumier. Ein Meister der politischen Provokation

In the organizer's words:

What is it all about?

Inspired by his father and Konrad Adenauer, Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Hellwig has amassed the largest German collection of works by Honoré Daumier (around 4,200 works) since his school days, which he donated to the Städelscher Museums-Verein in Frankfurt in 2024 for permanent loan to the Städel Museum. He has repeatedly published, lectured and curated on Daumier in Germany and France. In his illustrated lecture, he will show that Daumier was not only the creator of caricatures critical of lawyers and society, as many know him, but that whenever censorship in the politically highly divided France of the 19th century allowed it, he only worked politically and fought for his republican-liberal convictions with his art.

Who is our guest?

Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Hellwig, born in Saarbrücken in 1940, has been a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main since 1969, specializing in corporate law and the legal profession. He is a partner in a large commercial law firm and an honorary professor of European corporate law at the University of Heidelberg. He has been involved in voluntary work for decades, in Frankfurt local politics, in professional legal organizations in Germany as well as at European and international level and in cultural institutions, including the Städelsche Museums-Verein. In addition to all this, he has built up his Daumier collection and has devoted himself intensively to this versatile and influential artist (draughtsman on stone and paper, painter and sculptor), whom Max Liebermann admiringly called "monstrous".

Admission: Free of charge for members of freunde. Guests pay €4, students €2.

Price information:

Price at the B.O.