Genius of Caricature

...The son of an unsuccessful glazier-poet, Honore got very little schooling...

...Here, as elsewhere, he used the contrasts in bodies to dramatize the contrast in temperament, setting the earthy and smug practicality of Sancho against the weird romanticism of his unstable master...

...It is not so much for you I am doing this...

...Did these pictures reflect his own dual nature...

...Nobody today thinks that washerwomen or people in third-class carriages are dirty, ignoble subjects best avoided...

...He has left no dictum of any importance, except for his now often quoted maxim, "One must be of one's time"—that is, one should be concerned with the people, events, and atmosphere of one's own epoch rather than dedicate oneself to the shades of the past...

...But those who were able to see beneath the surface were quick to envisage him as a giant of a genius, one of the rare creators to rise from the special and ephemeral to the general and universal...

...But Daumier, utterly shy, reserved, non-intellectual, a man of few words, completely devoid of egocentricity, probably did not realize that none had dealt more crushing blows to glib dictatorships than he...

...Daumier, though he never fired a rifle, did more than any other ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...

...When he did, an adversary like Daumier had to confine himself to pointing out the social ills of the society, thereby keeping alive the flame of protest...

...I am referring, of course, to the four thousand lithographs he published in a long, busy life, drawings that were feared by the men in power but loved by the oppressed who, buying a copy of the satirical paper Caricature, and its successor, Charivari, knew that they were not alone...

...There are no histrionics, no melodrama— only a deathly silence...

...Genius of Caricature by ALFRED WERNER The a proper background to the period in which Honore Daumier, with a grease crayon, fought the totalitarian tendencies of a corrupt regime, you must read Heinrich Heine...

...he, more than any artist before or after, turned his skill into propaganda equaling the strength of several army divisions...

...Two fried eggs in the morning, and in the evening a herring or a cutlet...

...Did he really divide mankind into those who fight windmills, and those who fill their bellies...

...The exiled German poet and the French lithographer never met, though they lived in the same city, Paris, and belonged to the same generation...

...The Third Republic, though perhaps aware that the aging artist was one of its most loyal supporters, did not bother to acquire a single oil (while the Luxembourg Palace was being filled with government-purchased works by nonentities...

...Daumier's colors are lower-keyed than those of the Twentieth Century Expressionists ("he paints with burning clay," Elie Faure remarked), and he achieved his dramatic emphasis largely through the abrupt juxtaposition of masses in light to masses in shade...

...After his release, he was not a bit fonder of the king, whose pear-shaped face he kept on drawing with acid zest until increased censorship finished Caricature, and forced the other paper to desist from direct attacks...

...Asked to do caricatures of the exiled king, he refused the commission because he found it beneath his dignity to sneer at a man's misfortune, whoever he might be...

...Whatever else may have been absent from his life, Daumier never lacked friends...

...The press came and praised what they saw, but there were no buyers, and the show ended with a considerable deficit...

...But in Nineteenth Century France, in which most art students still clung to Poussin's insistence upon "a noble subject . . . free of workaday grime," the wisdom and advanced thinking of the few who upheld Daumier against the prejudices of the majority must be appreciated with proper emphasis...

...In a bedroom, clad in a bloodstained shirt, a workman is lying...

...The Revolution of February, 1848, restored to the French full freedom of expression, but Daumier had become somewhat disillusioned...

...But Daumier did not expect very much from life...

...For us who have been conditioned by many textbooks and countless museum shows to accept Expressionism as one of the great and legitimate styles in both painting and sculpture, it is not difficult to admire the furious stroke of Daumier's crayon and brush, his unpolished masculinity and assymetrical design...

...Curiously, when he died in 1879, few were aware that with him had gone not only a witty cartoonist but one of the greatest artists France has ever produced...

...The shopkeepers rejoice, egoism flourishes, and many of the best must don mourning...

...Manet had the elegance of an aristocrat, Courbet the recklessness of a true revolutionary, and Cezanne at least a rich father...

...Soon the over-ambitious demagogue was to find that his most serious adversary was not a living man, but a shady character born in Daumier's fertile imagination...

...in a print on which a crowd of street urchins is seen trying out the seat of the royal throne he voiced his skepticism towards the new politicians...

...Frenchman to make the loathed king surrender his throne...

...Except for this imprisonment, Daumier's life was rather uneventful...

...Though never well-off, he managed to earn a livelihood for two, until, in 1860, his employers suddenly decided that the public had grown tired of Daumier's inimitable style...

...His articles on art have appeared in a score of publications including Commentary, The American Scholar, and Saturday Review...

...Which of them is right, the idealist or the realist?, these pictures seem to ask...

...He was even less enthusiastic about Napoleon's nephew, Louis Napoleon, returning from his English exile with apparently liberal views, yet already planning the coup d'etat that Was to make him Napoleon the Third, Emperor of France...

...In 1832 Heine noted with dismay that the "Bourgeois King," Louis-Philippe, originally believed a liberal, turned out to be a reactionary, interested in the welfare of the rich only...

...His colleague, Courbet, could not understand this man, only a decade older in years, but patently hundreds of years older as far as self-restraint, patience, and skepticism were concerned...

...Indubitably, the master of the poignant word, and the master of the expressive line, would have found much in common: a sharp wit, a flair for the essential, and an abhorrence of any sort of tyranny...

...But this was an undeniable fact...

...The police were quick to suppress this print (contributed to Caricature as a supplementary plate), but not before Daumier's name had become a byword in France...

...In his workman's clothes and with his workman's behavior he surely disappointed those naive souls who expected an artist to affect flamboyant manners, and to dress in a red doublet or to wave a plume in his hat...

...In a famous cartoon, Daumier drew him as an imitator of the great Corsican, wearing Napoleon's two-cornered hat several sizes too large...

...A cartoon showing the potbellied king as an insatiable Gargan-tua, fattened at the expense of his subjects, drew him a prison sentence...

...There were no savings, and even though the Daumiers lived frugally in one of the oldest sections of Paris, the worry about the rent was something the aging man could not cope with...

...Was he a Don Quixote who would have preferred to be a Sancho Panza...

...When he was 70, they decided that he, who had never had the benefit of an exhibition, should have one at last, though Daumier himself, blind and failing physically, could not possibly attend...

...When Corot came to visit his friend, Daumier embraced him with tears running down his cheek: "My dear Corot, you are the only one from whom I could take such a gift without feeling humiliated...

...What do I need...

...One of the most versatile, too, although decades had to pass before his magnificent oils were recognized as trail-blazers of modern art, as precursors of Expressionism, which had no name until 1911...

...But one day he received a strange, short letter: "My old Pal, "I have taken over, at Valmondois near l'lsle-Adam, a little house, and I cannot think of any use for it...

...I wanted to annoy your landlord...

...This he could achieve best in his oils, which, in their summary treatment of forms, their simplifications, anticipate Georges Rouault, who was a child of six when Daumier died...

...Of the more than two hundred oils he produced, largely in the latter part of his career, those on the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza theme are the most significant (one may be found in the Metropolitan Museum of New York...

...But unlike the grandiloquent Courbet, Daumier would not make this refusal the occasion of a widely publicized flaming protest...

...The Republicans' demand for justice and freedom was answered with the bayonets of the National Guard...

...Compared to a Soutine he is, indeed, easy to take...

...His marriage to a very simple dressmaker fourteen years younger did not interrupt his daily routine of observing, and then drawing from memory, with rage or compassion, lawyers, judges, politicians, dandies, shopkeepers, fishwives and acrobats, as Dickens or Balzac treated them in literature...

...In the 1860's there was less demand for the kind of lithography Daumier produced with such amazing rapidity, and the aging artist felt that the time had come for doing what he always wished to do—paint...

...Moreover, his friends and partisans stood up for a man whom fate had denied the advantages enjoyed by other avant-garde painters...

...Walking with a colleague through a particularly depressing slum section, he remarked, his voice filled with commiseration: "We can console ourselves with our art, but these poor creatures, what do they have...

...He might have added: One should also be timeless, as indeed, much of his work is, since we can still enjoy and admire his cartoons, though the particular circumstances which inspired them are now largely forgotten...

...The idea came to me to offer it to you, and as I found that idea as good as any, I went through the legal steps of deeding the place to you...

...Middle-aged, the artist once more had to take up his only cudgel, the crayon, in defense of liberty...

...two other fallen forms are on the ground...

...To this day nearly every Frenchman knows what "Ratapoil" signifies: the cynical and ruthless agent-provocateur, aping his master whoever he be, and ready to commit whatever crime might help the great man quicken his ascent to power...

...The academicians of his day had, of course, no use for his spontaneity and suggestive planes of thickly piled pigment, but Cezanne learned a great deal from him, and so did Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and, among living Americans, Jack Levine...

...Like Courbet, the older man refused to accept from Napoleon III the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, knowing that by this empty gesture the Empire had merely tried to appease some of its enemies...

...But he also knew that a man as proud and as stubborn as his friend Daumier would have to be trapped by a fait accompli to accept a gift as generous as this...

...Did this series indicate that Daumier had grown more skeptical about the means and ends of humanity around him...

...Making a one-and-a-half foot statue to serve as model for numerous lithographs, Daumier called the figure Ratapoil, literally, "hairy rat...

...What we know for sure is that he stood for complete freedom of expression...

...Learning that soldiers, allegedly provoked by the fire of a sniper, had broken into a house and coldly killed every man, woman, and child, Daumier reacted by producing a lithograph, simply entitled, Rue Trans-nonain, le 15 Avril, 1834...

...This swaggering, evil-eyed feilow, armed with a club, stood for the underworld ruffians, hired by Louis Napoleon to help fight the republicans...

...Today, men of all nationalities pay tribute to this Frenchman on the 150th anniversary of his birth, but they no longer think of him exclusively as the David Low of the last century...

...Taught by a friend the technique of making lithographs, he found employment with the two satirical publications...

...For social-minded Daumier did not share his fellow-artist's enthusiasm for socialism...

...Under the Commune of 1871, Daumier served in the Federal Commission Federale of Artistes, but he opposed, in vain, the destruction of the Vendome Column, razed by the Communards as a reminder of Napoleon and the monarchy...

...Heine lived to see the end of this hated regime...

...No action is seen, only the aftermath...

...Daumier clearly understood that one standard could not be used to measure all people...

...He was too modest to think that his satires had undermined not only Louis-Philippe but also his successor, Napoleon III...

...Where, then, did he stand...

...More than a thousand men have been arrested," Heine wrote to the Augsberg Allgemeine Zeitung . . . the liberal journals are being suppressed...

...The force, economy of means, magnificence of plastic realization, and intensity of purpose in his drawings moved Balzac to maintain that he had "Michelangelo under his skin," and Baudelaire felt that Daumier was "one of the most important figures, not only in caricature, but in modern art...

...But the inelegant, inarticulate free-lancer Daumier had nothing to recommend or distinguish him...

...Belatedly, Corot had been discovered by the collectors, who were beginning to pay high prices for even the slightest of his works, and the painter, remembering his own poverty, knew what it meant to be without a roof over one's head...

...In these paintings, he made the most of the pictorial contrast between the unmaterialistic knight on a lean nag, and the gross servant on the fat donkey...

...Victor Hugo was honorary chairman of the exhibition committee, the famous Durand-Ruel Gallery was chosen, and the best of Daumier's graphic works were shown along with oils and sculptures...

...He might laugh at the idiosyncrasies of the humble in the street, and might make others join in his laughter, but their oppression by tyranny brought forth his rage...

...Now, at last, he could pour out the monumental images of his poetic mind without any restrictions as to subject matter, media, or deadline...

...Add to that a glass of Beaujolais, then some tobacco to stuff into my pipe, and anything more would be merely extra...

...People who saw this thickset man with the heavy dragging gait took him for a peasant or a shoemaker...

...Yours, Corot...

...In the first five or six years of his regime, Louis-Philippe did not feel strong enough to outlaw the opposition press altogether...

...He did not quite trust the nation's new leaders...

...Reporting on the revolution of 1848 he praised the French workers' "contempt of death," and emphasized the fact that there was no looting...

...The Ratapoils—forerunners of Hitler's stormtroopers—had two major duties: to incite the masses to shout "Vive I'Empereur!," and to beat down those who refused to do so...

...he remarked, shortly before his end...

...under him an infant, crushed by his fall...