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Visual Arts: It's a jungle out there

In Daumier's abundant output, one subject remains constant: the human animal, with all its pretensions and pathos

Tom Lubbock
Tuesday 02 November 1999 01:02 GMT
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What Baudelaire said, stands: "One of the most important men, I will not say only in caricature, but in the whole of modern art." Honore Daumier is a stupendous figure. He's a great junction of western image- making. In Daumier - working in Paris in the middle decades of the last century - so many traditions of art, high and low, converged, got mixed- up and re-emerged transformed. One line leads from him to Munch and Picasso. Another, to Disney and HM Bateman. Looking back on Daumier, he's always pointing ahead.

But praise by legacy isn't necessarily that good. After all, those people who today will do you a crappy caricature on any pavement in Europe are also Daumier's heirs, still using the face-tricks he developed for political satire 150 years ago. And anyway, how boring these lineages are, the very stuff and stuffing of modern art history. The most interesting thing is the Daumier mixture itself, the way his art crunches so many distinctions.

This autumn's large Daumier show in Paris, at the Grand Palais, shows the full range. Here he is - jobbing lithographer and experimental oil painter, cartoonist and colourist, social observer and myth-maker. Daumier appears to be the dream universal modern artist, whose work fuses the elite, the popular, the comic, the serious, the masterly, the mass-produced, the politically engaged and the archetypal. And since this dream has lasted through our century, and thrives even now - witness the high-brow/demotic sallies of recent British art - Daumier's example may still be encouraging.

It is and it isn't. For Daumier himself these distinctions stayed very real. He enjoyed, in effect, separate careers. Chiefly, he worked for the newspapers.The masses of cartoons he did for his living, and with which he made his name, were a continually resented chore. His oil painting, with its amazingly inventive shape-making and and tangled flurries of brush-lines, was more or less a private hobby. His watercolours, occasionally sold to collectors, lay somewhere between. The exhibition's lay-out quite rightly keeps these activities separated.

And Daumier could hardly have appreciated some of the cross-overs that seem clear to us. Take one of his most original early works, the series of coloured clay caricature busts of Deputies in the National Assembly, from the 1830s. These are extreme and beautiful variations on the human head, toby jugs transformed, and - together with Degas' wax figurines - they stand among the most extraordinary sculptures of the 19th century. But like those Degas pieces, these fragile, unclassifiable little objects weren't made as works of art at all; rather as practical aids, models to draw from, so Daumier could have his political targets in front of him. It is little short of a miracle that they survived.

The modern viewer too can't help making genre distinctions. The caricatures that flourished under and against the monarchy of Louis Philippe still live. But after the brief Second Republic and Louis Napoleon's 1851 coup, a strict censorship was imposed. Political satire was replaced by a more social humour, and - though much loved at the time - this now has little life in it. Daumier's endless cartoons of middling bourgeois life all seem to bear an imposed comic grimace, on the faces and the bodies, a heavy dig in the ribs. No cultural barriers are broken here: this is an art that loses by being a low art.

It feels no great loss. But there's one Daumier joke whose loss is frustrating. This is the figure of Ratapoil, one of his most celebrated creations - an anti-hero who features in a series of cartoons made before the clampdown. He is an old soldier and represents the archetypal Bonapartist, a supporter of Louis Napoleon. His name means "skinned rat". One contemporary called this satire the Republic's strongest weapon. But personally I don't get it. I can't read this character. That is, I can't see how Ratapoil's body goes with Ratapoil's politics.

A counter-example: Colonel Blimp, the cartoonist David Low's character from the 1930s. It's easy to see how Blimp, with his red face, walrus- moustache and run-to-fat military bearing represents (so to speak) the forces of conservatism. But Ratapoil, who looks a far more interesting creature, a kind of devil, tall, skeletal, tattered, sneaky, vain, dandified, threatening violence, with his crumpled top hat, long coat, and Louis Napoleon whiskers - these signs don't signify, this figure doesn't figure. Is history to blame, or is it a language barrier? For the problem is really that one can't imagine Ratapoil's tone of voice.

Ratapoil remains something, though - a creature. And with all his many gifts, here is Daumier's central strength - as an anthropologist. This is where his various arts really do fuse. When his images speak, you stop thinking about what type of picture (cartoon, painting or sketch) it is. You focus entirely on the human subject. And you notice another kind of difference.

In some pictures, Daumier treats his humans as simple creatures, faceless, speechless, often weighed down, beings with a solely bodily life. The critic David Sylvester once offered this essential insight: "Daumier has not asked what his subjects look like when behaving in a given way, but what they feel like, within themselves." Look at the women burdened with laundry, the bathers tugging off their shirts, the wrestlers and acrobats and train passengers sitting hugger-mugger in the third-class carriage. All the attention in these figures is on sensation, feelings of weight, strain, pressure, tension and relaxation. They stretch, sag, swell, flex or spread. Here is the human animal being animal. Daumier treats it with sympathy.

But in other images the repertoire is changed. Bodies begin to speak. They gesture, gesticulate, strike poses, take up positions, attitudinise, express themselves - in short they become the bodies of rational and social beings. Now a sort of ridicule begins. The figures begin to look absurd or grotesque. It is a kind of chimps' tea-party joke, but applied to people. The human animal, attempting to be distinctively human, reveals itself as an animal with ideas above its station: "man, the sick animal" as Nietzsche put it, the animal gone wrong.

In this strange zoo you find Daumier's fantastic lawyers. These men are exemplary human beings, doing the human talking thing without equal. They are possessed by their communication skills, soaring in flights of oratory. Or there are Daumier's connoisseurs, appraising paintings and prints. They display the postures of pure mind - the head cocked or thrust, the body stooped, leaning back, squirming - looking, reflecting, judging. Exposing, yes; but you cannot call it satire exactly, for Daumier finds a pathos in this very exposure.

And in one group of images, the Saltimbanques, made in the late 1860s as Daumier's eyesight was starting to fail, he goes beyond that too. This is isn't tears-of-a-clown business. Or rather, that's there, but only to be resisted. In these scenes we enter a mode of feeling that's rather frightening: both pathetic and absolutely defiant pathos.

Here Daumier puts one of his distinctive techniques to powerful effect. The trick is to do tonally-modelled watercolour, and then go over it with emphatic ink lines, so that the information is (as it were) doubled - but also, because tone and line are slightly out of synch, expression is short-circuited, stuck. We see this in the sad, hard face of the drumming Pierrot. It will not allow the viewer's sympathy in. I suppose the clown in this image may be, as he often is, a substitute or symbol for the artist himself. It is an extreme of caricature, that won't let you laugh or pity, and no one ever took it further. It's desperate stuff.

Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris. To 3 January

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