This summer the National Gallery of Canada presents, after 11 years of planning, the first major retrospective exhibition of the works of Honore Daumier assembled since the artist's death in 1879. The show comprises more than 300 works selected from Daumier's prodigious output of lithographs, drawings, woodcuts, paintings and sculptures produced over a span of 50 years. Daumier's nearly 5000 satirical prints on the political and social issues of his time exert a presence even today, and physicians who enjoy contemplating their profession in the mirror of history might be disappointed that the exhibition does not include Daumier's critique on the practice of medicine. On the other hand, there is plenty to consider with respect to the social conditions of nineteenth-century urban France. Daumier provides an encyclopedic proto-documentary ranging over topics as varied as educational reform, women's emancipation (which he reviled), the professions, urban planning, public transport, the arts and the aftermath of war.
One of Daumier's first political caricatures earned him six months in jail: this was his Gargantua (1831), which depicts King Louis-Philippe devouring baskets of money offered up by the starving masses while he excretes political favours on the sycophants clustered below. In this lithograph an emaciated women with an infant at her breast is placed in visual and moral apposition in the bottom right-hand corner; it is tempting to read the recurring motif of breastfeeding in Daumier's work as a symbolic counterweight to the political nastiness of his time.
When in 1835 the French government suppressed political caricature Daumier confined his efforts to social satire. The lithograph The Crinoline in Winter (1858) obviously pokes fun at vanity, but it is not for nothing that the fashionable woman is contrasted by another who is elderly, working the poor. Elsewhere Daumier depicts a citizenry beleaguered by "progress." In the 1850s Emperor Louis-Napoleon commissioned Baron George-Eugene Haussmann to remodel Paris. This urban renewal posed problems familiar today: the displacement of the lower classes from the newly gentrified inner city and the eradication of a tangible history. In Behold our Nuptial Chamber (1853) an elderly bourgeois couple regards the ruins of their matrimonial home, now undergoing demolition. In the meantime, housing conditions left much to be desired; a lithograph entitled One of the Disadvantages of Basements (1856) depicts a married couple lying in bed in an apartment so damp that mushrooms have sprouted on the bedstead; all that is visible through their window is the feet of passers-by. Figure 2
Running parallel to Daumier's trenchant satire is a sense of the dignity of family life and of work. In The Soup (c. 1862-1865) a working-class couple hastily eat their supper; the woman appears old and careworn but by no means frail, and her ample breast is well able to sustain the next generation. The laundress who climbs with her child from the bank of the Seine is rendered in a manner that makes her appear both monumental and tender: her heavy frame is bent with solicitude toward the child, whose safety in climbing the stairs she ensures. The family group crowded into the Third-Class Carriage (c. 1862-1865) maintains a rather tragic dignity; even in this very secular context Daumier invokes universal themes of youth and experience, loss (where are the men?) and nurture. Figure 1, Figure 3
Knowing Daumier mainly as a caricaturist, I went to the media preview expecting to be taxed by the exercise of appreciating satire for which the topical references are now obscure. But it is impossible to encounter such a superbly gestural drawing style (one much admired by the Impressionists) and feel it as an academic exercise. Standing in the empty gallery after the tour had ended, I was surprised to realize how strongly I had been affected by Daumier's sentimental side. But I still doubted that I could forgive him the joke in one of his Bluestocking lithographs, which shows a woman "in a fever of composition" at her writing desk while her baby drowns in the bath.
The Daumier exhibition continues in Ottawa until September 6, 1999. It will then travel to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris from October 5, 1999, to January 3, 2000, and to The Phillips Collection in Washington DC from February 19 to May 14, 2000. Figure 4
Anne Marie Todkill
Editor, The Left Atrium
References
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