Daumier's Rapier Pen

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 27, 2000 | by Joanna Shaw-Eagle

Honore Daumier's artwork captured the turmoil of 19th-century France. Now, for the first time, Americans can see the full extent of the satirist's achievement, as well as his weaknesses.

Honore Daumier, caricaturist, painter and sculptor, was the greatest satirist of his day, and perhaps of all time. He was fortunate or unlucky to pursue his career during an era of social and political upheaval. Indeed, the first major retrospective of his art in the United States -- currently on at the Phillips Collection in Washington -- suggests that 19th-century France was, for him, the best of times and the worst of times.

Daumier was a dreamer, a man capable of imaginative flights of fancy, like his hero, Don Quixote, the subject of numerous paintings and drawings. He also was a practical man, like Sancho Panza, cognizant of the need to earn a living. As Don Quixote, Daumier worked to achieve recognition as a serious painter. As Sancho Panza, he profited (and suffered) from his ability to parody the social and political leaders of the day.

Daumier was, above all, a consummate draftsman and a master of line. This very skill may have thwarted his ambitions, for his failure to sell his oils led him to experiment with near-abstract renderings of figures and fleeting impressions of scenes. Though he was dismissed in the salons, he would influence artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, John Sloan and Alberto Giacometti.

As an illustrator, however, Daumier is singular in his skill at capturing man's capacity for evil. The son of a debt-ridden poet and playwright, he became a republican who sympathized with the poor of Paris -- the disinherited masses of the Industrial Revolution. (The artist himself led a precarious financial existence and often was dogged by creditors.) His cutting depictions of the vices, vanities and vulgarities of his age foreshadowed the vicissitudes of modern society.

But Daumier's talent and his politics proved troublesome for him. He was imprisoned for showing Louis Philippe, who became king in 1830 but abdicated during the revolution of 1848, as a bulbous pear and enormous glutton. (Poire is the French word for both pear and fool.) In his 1831 portrait of Louis Philippe as Gargantua, for example, the artist transformed the monarch into a greedy giant seated on a commode in the middle of Paris' Place de la Concorde. It is little wonder that Daumier went to jail for six months and was fined 500 francs -- a large sum of money at the time.

Today we laugh at these satires, but Daumier had a bitter side, too. The artist's 1834 Rue Transnonain, a biting indictment of Louis Philippe's "July Monarchy" and its massacre of citizens, depicted the death scene from a below-eye-level position. The murdered father, who had just tumbled out of bed dressed in a cap and nightdress, traps a baby beneath his body. Daumier strews other figures around at rakish angles. Blood is everywhere -- the artist seems to anticipate the police photographer with his unblinking graphic realism. The lithograph proved so popular that Louis Philippe felt obliged to search out all prints and destroy them.

Daumier perhaps was known best for his satiric lithographs printed for the republican publications Le Charivari and La Caricature. But in 1835, the government enacted laws restricting freedom of the press, and La Caricature had to close down. As a result, Daumier turned to social satire and book illustration. He spoofed the social aspirations of the newly rich with the 82-plate series Les Bons Bourgeois, and the pros and cons of their married lives in the 60-plate series Moeurs Conjugales. He also attacked the coldness of lawyers and judges in Les Gens de Justice. (His first job when he was barely 12 was with a bailiff at the courts, where apparently he quickly learned about the corruption of the legal profession.)

Daumier started painting seriously in the 1840s when he moved to 9 quai d'Anjou on the Ile St. Louis. There he watched the river people going about their daily chores, roughly sketching their activities in monochrome renderings. Fuzzy and impressionistic, these works lack the edginess of his caricatures.

In 1848, he turned to allegorical, mythological and religious subjects that also lacked his earlier bite. His 1850 Women Pursued by Satyrs is basically a rehash of Peter Paul Rubens' approach to sensual female seminudes. (Daumier had studied as a boy with a teacher who stressed color and used the works of Rubens and Titian as models.)

Commissions and documents show that Daumier had difficulty proceeding from sketch to painting to finishing work. Even the support of the eminent writer Charles Baudelaire and the influential painter Eugene Delacroix did not help his cause. The life of a painter surviving off commissions was not for him. His heart was not in them.

But Daumier had a big commitment and devotion to his alter ego, Don Quixote. He seemed to love the crazed old hero who was carried away by his misguided notions about chivalry. Daumier painted some 30 oils of Cervantes' hero, as well as portraying him with 41 drawings. The artist clearly confronts his own mortality in his three images of Don Quixote and the dead mule. The later, 1867 version, painted as he was turning blind just 12 years before his death, is the most moving. These works are worth the price of admission just in themselves. Anyone visiting Washington before May 14 should make a point of viewing the exhibit.