Daumier: 1808-1879 (review)

Daumier: 1808-1879, ex. cat. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 11 June-6 Sept. 1999; Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 5 Oct. 1999-3 Jan. 2000; The Phillips Collection, Washington, 19 Feb.-14 May 2000. Pp. 600. ISBN 0-8884-709-2

The very first retrospective exhibition of Daumier's work was held in 1878, just months before his death. As Édouard Papet points out in his essay introducing Daumier's sculpture ("He also does sculpture"), that exhibition aimed "to show the artist in his multiple aspirations as a satirist, painter, and sculptor" (47). By then, Daumier was no longer a contributor to Le Charivari, and his irregular participation in the salon was finished, but the work of understanding his œuvre was just beginning. In the meantime, Daumier's painting, in oils as well as watercolor, has received a great deal of attention, along with his universally admired lithography. Even his sculpture has made strides in gaining recognition since the 1878 show. Although the essays in the catalogue accompanying the recent retrospective serve more to describe the problems Daumier poses art history than to propose solutions to them, the catalogue offers students of Daumier's varied enterprise an outstanding resource.

Particular hindrances face the Daumier student: he left little in the way of spoken or written commentary on his work and ambitions. From late 1837 onward, several notebooks record details of Daumier's production, but they reveal little of further evident value to interpretation. As Michael Pantazzi points out in his contribution to the catalogue, "Son rêve, en effet, a été la peinture," we don't even know where or from whom Daumier learned to paint in oils. Pantazzi also brings to the reader's attention some features of Daumier's practice as a painter that call for explanation: his use of reversed compositions, such as one might use to develop a lithograph, in drawings related specifically to paintings; his curious multiple essays at various subjects and compositions (sometimes in more than one medium), which one is tempted to see as harbingers of Impressionist painting's later turn to series or as markers of his discomfort with painting. Pantazzi closes with an account of the mysterious pillage of Daumier's studio after his death by an unnamed predator who took advantage of the artist's widow - as a result of which it is more difficult than it might have been to be sure what works really were in Daumier's inventory when he died.

Although Daumier's printed work is much more easily authenticated and dated - and far more often finished - than his paintings, its study is not without its own challenges. As Ségolène Le Men explains in "Daumier and Printmaking," the sheer volume and pace of Daumier's printed output make discussing it difficult. Moreover, its place in his ambition as an artist remains ambiguous. He was one of the greatest draftsmen of his time, acknowledged by Baudelaire as well as Delacroix for his achievement, but Daumier regarded his printmaking to a certain extent as an impediment to pursuing his ambition. (In this respect, Baudelaire appears to have echoed the artist's feelings.)

Papet, addressing Daumier's engagement with sculpture, reveals another complicated face of the artist. A significant proportion of Daumier's closest friends were sculptors - which is striking for at least two reasons. First, Daumier practiced sculpture at an early date, but it is far from clear that he took it seriously as a vehicle for his own artistic ambition until rather well into his career. Second, in a century so mean in its treatment of sculpture as an art, it is noteworthy that Daumier found himself so drawn to the art's practitioners. Indeed, as Papet explains, Daumier's work in the medium is so revolutionary (in its use of polychromy, modern dress, caricature, and lack of finish) that he offers himself as a precursor of Degas and Rodin. (True as Papet's observation about Daumier's...