DAUMIER, the caricaturist, PAINTED?!

Yes, he did and why you didn't know - a short video

TRANSCRIPT:

When I first came across this painting at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, I was floored. That face, it gave me chills. I felt like a voyeur, that just by looking I was party to a crime. Should I be helping these terrified women? Had they just been violated? Were they about to be? I looked to see who the painter was. Daumier? The social and political caricaturist/satirist? Lithographer extraordinaire? He painted? What?! Why didn’t I know this?

Because, according to a catalog put out for a 1930 Daumier and Corot exhibit by the Museum of Modern Art, New York almost no one did. While greatly admired, Daumier suffered from the popularity of a phase of his work he despised, namely, his lithographs. By age 27 he was one of the most feared and admired political cartoonists in France and by age 62, about ten years before his death, he had ground out nearly five-thousand comic and satirical lithographs and wood engravings. Almost his only source of income—not only grossly undervalued this focus kept him from the only work which deeply interested him: his painting.

Prolific 19th c. French illustrator, sculptor, lithographer and painter Honoré Daumier produced a very substantial body of work. The public neglect of his painting during his lifetime is easily understood—his name had become inseparable from his caricatures so that even the one-man show held in 1878, one year before his death, was a popular failure. According to the MoMA catalog, “Given that he’s considered one of the half-dozen greatest painters of the 19th c. and a bold forerunner of expressionist draftsmanship, the neglect and ignorance of his painting is almost unbelievable.”

Young Daumier, born into a poor family, he was working by the age of 12, showed a prodigious talent for drawing and possessed an amazing visual memory which, with an acute sense of character and stalwart moral compass, permitted him to, “…bring out all that was sly, mean, bestial and stupid with an unfailing sense of comedy.”

Daumier associated with writers, poets, sculptors and painters. Around age 40, he began to paint in earnest. Delacroix wrote to Daumier, “There is not a man I value and admire more than you.” Encouraged by his friends, Daumier exhibited in myriad Salons.

Back to Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts which acquired this magnificent work in 1945. One of the largest Daumier ever painted, a little over 4’ high by 3’ wide, its title, “Two Nymphs Pursued by Satyrs,” who we can see here in the background, serves more as a pretext to showcase these beautiful women’s bodies.

Hoping to leave his career as a caricaturist behind and be taken seriously as a painter, he showed this work at the 1850 Paris Salon. Reviled by the critics, he left humiliated. Xray analysis reveals this is really two paintings in one. The first exhibited version, more realistic, probably more somber was reworked years later when he added neo-impressionist hatched brushwork and riotous color, that bursting orange next to the nearly fluorescent green lends a palpable vibrancy to this extraordinary work.

Unfortunately, Daumier’s final years were darkened by poverty, illness, and growing blindness. In 1879 at age 71, he died of a stroke and, for twelve francs, was buried at public expense. A year later his body was moved to the Parisian Cemetery of Père Lachaise and placed beside the grave of his friend, Corot.

Today, Daumier’s paintings can be found in many of the world’s leading art museums including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Met in New York and the Netherland’s Rijksmuseum.

A supreme draughtsman and master of movement, color and chiaroscuro, Daumier’s work presents an unfailing sense of composition and passionate consideration for his subject matter. To quote Daumier, “Freedom and justice for all are more infinitely to be desired than pedestals for a few.”

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YouTube and Medium: @LauriebFrankel