Word: daumiers
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...