Vitality's Signature

By ROBERT HUGHES

The French artist Honore Daumier (1808-1879) is the cartoonist's god, though of course he is much more than that. It's impossible to think of an outstanding 20th century caricaturist, from David Low to Ronald Searle and David Levine, who doesn't owe something fundamental to him. Most people know him only through his prints, those distillations of vengeance in which, through a long career, Daumier impaled the dignitaries of bourgeois France on his lithographic crayon. No greater visual satirist ever lived; none, one may be fairly sure, ever will.

The diffusion of Daumier's satirical prints has been such that they tend to overshadow the rest of his work. Toiling against unrelenting deadlines, working sometimes on eight stones at a time, he made literally thousands of them for magazines like Le Charivari. In fact there were only two moments when he was able to give his time entirely to drawing and painting for their own sakes, producing images that were not designed for mass reproduction. The first was just after the 1848 revolution, when press censorship put him out of work. The second was after 1860, when he was fired for a time by Le Charivari. Nobody can guess how many watercolors and drawings he turned out during these interludes -- one of his writer friends, Theodore de Banville, remembered a studio full of "cartons overflowing with drawings, so swollen that they could not be shut" -- but only a tiny fraction of them has survived. Quite a lot of that fraction went on view last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in "Daumier Drawings," jointly organized by the Met and the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut of Frankfurt.

To see this exhibition is to see why Charles Baudelaire, reviewing the Paris Salon of 1845, placed Daumier, as a draftsman, in the company of Ingres and Delacroix. He was, of course, different from both. Unlike Ingres, Daumier wasn't interested in ideal form or perfect "Greek" contour, even though classical prototypes inform his work -- how far, one can easily judge from his scenes of refugees straggling across an open landscape, which bear a distinct relation to the friezes on Trajan's Column, known to him from engravings. He loved to guy the sacred Antique, but it was the kind of satire that could only be done by an artist fully intimate with his target. And although he got a lot from Delacroix, admiring the fluidity of his line and the power the older artist brought to painting the victims of barbaric force -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios has a long resonance in Daumier's work -- Daumier didn't share his love of the exotic. For Daumier, everything worth drawing happened right under his nose, in the railway carriage, the estaminet, the cellar, the butcher's shop or the lawcourts. Like Balzac or Dickens, Daumier worked out of immersion in the muck and detail of life as it was lived.

In his hands, the act of drawing acquired an extraordinary power and range. It was, in one sense, sculptural: the dense shadows of ink wash convey the shape and width of a head or a body with such emphasis that you feel you could almost lift it off the page. Drawings like Two Men Conversing or The Drinkers are so vivid in their tonal structure, and at the same time so natural and unpretentious in their expression, that you feel included in the meetings they depict. Daumier's line is always in motion, and startlingly responsive to the perceived moment. It is rarely just an outline: it surrounds the form with the haze of energy, made up of scribbled marks, suggestions and hints. It is the record of a sensibility that continually probes and is always correcting itself in nuances. In other hands, such ambiguity would seem fluttering. In Daumier's, it is the signature of an explosive, unappeasable vitality.

One sees it at full stretch in The Soup, with its tremendous image of a working-class Earth Mother, as old as the tenant of a limestone cave but as new as the Republic, gorging herself from the steaming pot, while her infant sucks at her breast -- a continuum of blind appetite, expressed in rhythmical line. Here, the long Rococo tradition in French art of painting the lower classes as nifty milkmaids or idealized swains gets its coup de grace. Not all of Daumier's drawings have the fierceness of this one (how could any artist sustain it?), but they do share, in varying degrees, its essential spontaneity. His figures always seem to be going somewhere, doing something, and to be conceived in the active rather than the passive voice.

His repertoire of expression is immense. What artist ever did more with the smile, the shrug, the sneer of complicity, the lifted eyebrow -- the myriad signs of consciousness that lie outside the repertoire of classical art? Rapid movement is keyed into the very nature of Daumier's sketches. With their flicker of successive positions for a lawyer's hand, or a dog's legs, they burgeon in time as well as in space, thus seeming to predict Futurism. And indeed, just as Daumier's drawings contain his prehensile relation to the past, so they look forward to the more modern artists: the massive strong men and pathetic acrobats of Picasso's Rose Period are already in Daumier's carnival scenes. Giacometti was deeply influenced not only by Daumier's drawing but by his series of tiny, malignant caricature-sculptures in clay known as Les Celebrites du Juste Milieu.

If Daumier's appeal to other artists is inscribed on the art that came after him, his enduring popularity with a more general public comes from wider sources. Basically, Daumier lives because for more than a hundred years people have realized that he was on their side -- a tribune of the singly powerless against the collectively powerful. This is not an attitude an artist can simply adopt; he or she must feel it deep in the bones, as by instinct, which Daumier clearly did.

Nowhere is it more brilliantly manifested than in his lawcourt drawings: the pompous judges, the robed lawyers whispering their deals and making their pleas, the cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine, abstract and inhuman, operating far beyond the lives it is supposed to regulate, masticating its diet of human hope.

And how did Daumier do this? By fixing his pincer gaze on the theatrics of the law. In the drawing known variously as For the Defense and The Lyric Advocate, the lawyer's court robes puff out in baroque splendor -- one thinks, perhaps not irrelevantly, of Bernini's bust of Louis XIV -- on the hot air of his rhetoric, as he gestures at the man in the dock, a Jean Valjean whose simian face betrays not the slightest comprehension of what is being said on his behalf. Emphasized by the dark mass of the lawyer's sleeve, the short distance between him and his client is like a space between two worlds.