Knife-Thrower

Honore Daumier spent his days wandering about Paris like a man with nothing to do. He rode the horsecars, peeked into Parliament and sat twirling his thumbs through the drone and drama of courtroom trials. He was looking for pictures. But he never brought paper or pencil, because Daumier found it impossible to draw what he saw. Like a photographic film, his mind absorbed pictures, and at night he would develop those mental images in furious and funny lithographs composed with an actor's flair for gesture and a sculptor's knowledge of form.

The 4,000 cartoons that Daumier produced for the republican papers La Caricature and Charivari were like so many knives hurled at his enemies, the Bona-partists and the bourgeoisie. Time has dulled their politics but not their bite. The French government's selection of them on view in Manhattan last week looked at first glance like enormously artful propaganda, but an onlooker circling the gallery could forget that they were propaganda, forget that they were art, and accept them as pictures of the real thing--life in Paris a century ago.

Ministerial Washerwomen. Daumier's perspective on Paris was that of a fiercely republican poor boy. When the July revolution of 1830 toppled Charles X from the throne, Daumier was a hopeful 22; Louis-Philippe, the compromise "Pear-King," soon blasted his hopes. He caricatured the umbrella-toting King as a Gargantua being stuffed with gold by dutiful midgets. Gargantua was displeased, but Daumier got off with a suspended sentence. In 1832 he tried his hand at a cartoon in which the King's ministers appeared as washerwomen. That one cost him six months in jail.

Unrepentant, he emerged to pull the noses of most of the important little men of the age, in cartoons which showed up their littleness and made them look funny besides. Sometimes, when he was deeply angry, he would strike straight out, as in his camera-strict drawing of a worker's family which had been murdered by the King's police.

A Dozen Don Quixotes. Except for a brief respite after the revolution of 1848, Daumier waged a running battle with the censors. When they bore down too hard, he turned from political to social satire, illustrated his favorite novel Don Quixote a dozen times, and ultimately got around to the easel-paintings--the blacksmiths and laundresses, as dignified as Rembrandt's illustrations of the Bible--on which his reputation as a 19th Century master largely rests.

Because he had little chance to paint in oils, Daumier has been called one of the most frustrated of artists, but cartooning was his chosen art. He never expressed any yearning for the ivory tower; the struggles of the marketplace were meat & drink to him.

A contemporary newsman reported that Daumier looked like one of his own cruelest caricatures, "but if one . . . tries to penetrate this bourgeois shell, the features soon brighten into life. That little eye with its heavy lid, half-closed in perpetual winking, thrusts at you its clear sharp look . . . even his nose seems to enjoy the observations he has just made."

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