Art
Siegel, Lee
ART curators explain Daumier's depictions of Quixote as...
...When the noble and corrupt, of emigrants in flight, of lovers kissing and 20: 23 April 1993 Commonweal children running, of the faces of ordinary people, of mytho- the most socially progressive France had known...
...Fraught with revolu- em cast, a dual Cartesian nature...
...LEE SIEGEL to power, and had himself proclaimed Napoleon III...
...A vivid idea of what human life should be, how Quixote's quest to fulfill the chivalric ideal...
...However, he also created numerous drawings A fixed sense of the eternal and a tenacious grasp of the in chalk, charcoal, conte crayon, and watercolor that captured transitory are the fundamental conditions of satire, and of the small motions of daily Parisian existence as they continued Daumier's art especially...
...Revolutionary Socialists drew up plans for utopian so- Philippe-who thought of himself as a romantic adventurercieties...
...liberal Socialists made a coalition with Republicans as a pear, caricatures history in this work as a windmill, not a and elbowed out moderate, middle-class reformers...
...History and politics tremble in the air around Charles X, fled to England and Louis Philippe, the Duc them, yet though they are surrounded they are not engulfed...
...It's tempting to say that Daumier was a great car- III's regime his prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, deicaturist because he lived through great events...
...2, contains over 100 of these rarely seen works, along with a Dogged and vigilant, riding a white steed, the gaunt, lancehandful of Daumier's finest political caricatures and several bearing Quixote leads his corpulent sidekick, slouched forbeautiful paintings in oil...
...The most powerful political statement cades in the streets in 1848 and the Republicans and Socialists an artist can make is that private life extends beyond the reach established the Second Republic...
...In some pictures Quixote's lance resembles print...
...Artists, though, have a way of draw- of being human...
...ward on his donkey, through interminable space...
...The curators of sitory weight of stomach and bowels...
...unselfish inwardness...
...The whose career in Paris, the crucible of politics and taste in the circumstantial element, thought Baudelaire, was what made each nineteenth century, spanned several upheavals in government age modern in its own moment "every old master has had his and in fashion...
...Unlike writers and tion...
...Of course, Daumier is mostly renowned for the own modernity...
...and of a relative, circumhistory of the modern city...
...his squire follows behind, courageously bearing the tranagainst the dull recalcitrance of practical life...
...Daumier identified his ef- far from symbolizing the artist's ambition, represents his ethforts to be taken seriously as an artist, they go on to say, with ical nature...
...ART curators explain Daumier's depictions of Quixote as reflections of his psychology, they reflect a very contemporary notion of projection...
...In two Some of the most moving and enigmatic works in the show drawings, there is a single tree, as in the set Giacommettiare the series of drawings Daumier made on the subject of Don his wiry figures influenced by Daumier-designed for the first Quixote and Sancho Panza...
...Circumstance provided everyone cades...
...We are accustomed to thinking of art This exhibition contains powerful drawings of passengers works-as well as people's opinions, insights, and observations- on a train and travelers waiting on a bench, of lawyers and judges as "projections" of a person's particular condition...
...At first Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a freehe curbed civil liberties, but at the same time he made his regime lance writer living in New York...
...starting in 1832...
...Avid ample of madness at war with reason, nineteenth-century fig- for an eternal dignity, the knight charges forward into emptiures like Dore imagined a marginalized idealist heroically set ness...
...As they had since 1789, Parisians threw up barri- ly and decently lived...
...In one painting in oil, the ity is to get a deeper understanding of what Daumier's art is all pair descend into a pale gold valley from shadowed heights, about...
...a newspaper caricature from 1867 stomach and bowels run through history-are never exposed...
...Commonweal 23 April 1993: 21...
...He or she is driven to excoriate a particular considered a painter as well as a caricaturist but that he never abuse only for the sake of accommodating the entire condition attained that kind of esteem...
...If, as Baudelaire stroyed the narrow, winding streets that had existed since the said, Daumier was like Moliere in the way he rapidly cut to the Middle Ages and replaced them with wide boulevards, partly core of a person's individuality, then French history at the time to make it impossible for insurrectionists to throw up barriwas the Comedie Francaise...
...To be modern and true, artists had to seize the nearly 4,000, largely political, lithographic caricatures he made flotsam and jetsam of present appearance...
...In it the poet gave the definition of beauty a modbegin in the countryside...
...The wizened knight, search for an ennobling existence...
...It is one of Daumier's finest political third of Parisian workers were either starving or subsisting on caricatures...
...They struggle upward in essential toil, the twin elements artists in the eighteenth century, who saw the Don as an ex- of a primordial labor that is both spiritual and fleshly...
...makes the connection between the artist and the eccentric out- Yet a satirist's ethics have to be as broad as the landscape Quixote sider explicit...
...Without it, the depredations of power-the gauntlet a pen and his shield a palette...
...That general condition is what the social caring from their lives without being personal.The Norwegian nov- icaturist "distills" into the culture-bound moments he or she elist Knut Hamsun called creatively engaged detachment an captures to make them familiar to later times...
...The ethical point of view is he did with the street performers who populate his work begin- to the satirist's works what developing fluid is to a photographic ning in the 1850s...
...The artist responsible for representing Louis charity...
...The theme was a popular one among romantics like the sky stretched out beyond them in layers of gray, azure, Gustave Dor6 (1833-83), whose famous series of illustrations and mauve...
...It's true, too, that Daumier wished ardently to be journeys through...
...In one drawclass...
...human beings should live and be allowed to live, gives satire No doubt Daumier identified with Quixote on some level, as its meaning in a specific context...
...Whether he was thinking of Bauto revolve through the whirl of momentous events...
...Bonapartists giant...
...To sort out their perplexing qual- performance of Waiting for Godot...
...d'Orleans, ascended to the throne...
...Between 1867 logical, religious, and historical scenes...
...during all of Daumier's life...
...The timeless perspec- and 1869 he restored freedom of the press and of assembly tive of how people strive to live and the temporal perspective and the liberalization of the empire was complete...
...In terms of class formation, political structure, and physwith a role to play, and their parts and the various sets they ical appearance, Paris was in a state of perpetual transformation played their parts against illuminated one another...
...Just as imof how they do live-the Don and Sancho-radiates through portant as these political metamorphoses, throughout Napoleon all of them...
...Alongside that idea, their interpretation of the Quixote TEMPORAL BUT TIMELESS pictures as expressing "the search for an ennobling existence" DAUMIER AT THE MET seems like a mechanical nod in the direction of an artistic distance the curators don't really believe in...
...In 1852, however, Louis of politics...
...to be remembered, for two weekly newspapers on and off to the end of his life, they had to "distill the eternal from the transitory...
...Placed in power by the Friends drink together, fathers gently bathe their children in the Liberals, Louis Philippe administered the rule of the middle Seine, workers look the viewer proudly in the eye...
...this show follow that romantic lead in the wall texts and the The two figures are the rudiments of Daumier's art, both his catalogue, writing that for Daumier, the Don symbolizes "the political satire and his social caricature...
...For Daumier to have made it again and again is esNapoleon executed a series of deft political maneuvers, returned pecially quixotic today...
...In the exhibition's final work, Daumier has renfor Cervantes's novel are probably the best known images of dered the pair in oil on wood as almost a complete abstracthe attenuated knight and his pudgy squire...
...Though the strongest wind may send events spinning, it plotted to put Louis Napoleon, Napoleon's nephew, back on cannot stop the streaming generations of ordinary lives, quietthe throne...
...The current delaire's essay or not, Daumier transposed his friend's aesexhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on through May thetic formulation into moral terms in his Quixote series...
...In 1863, several years before Daumier began his Quixote series, Baudelaire published his famous essay, "The Painter of Revolutions, whether in politics or in taste, never Modern Life...
...Beauty," he wrote, "is made tion, the history of modern times is largely the up of an eternal, invariable element...
...His venal minister, Guizot, believed poverty was the re- ing a woman leads a child across a bridge, the two of them strugsult of a moral deficiency in the poor, and by 1847 nearly a gling against the wind...
...Daumier's career began roughly around the time of the July All this is by way of a final remark on Daumier's studies of Revolution in 1830 when the last Bourbon ruler of France, ordinary people...
...The greatest visu- stantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or al urban poet is Honore Daumier (1808-79) all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions...
Vol. 120 • April 1993 • No. 8
