Volume 47, Number 3 · February 24, 2000
Free Spirit
By James Fenton
Daumier, 1808-1879 1999; the Grand Palais, Paris, October 5, 1999-January 3, 2000; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., February 19-May 14, 2000.
by an exhibition at the National Gallery, Ottawa, June 11-September 6, Catalog of the exhibition by Henri Loyrette, by Michael Pantazzi
Yale University Press, 600 pp., $95.00
Daumier: Le Cabinet des dessins
by Judith Wechsler
Paris: Flammarion, 126 pp., FF195 (paper)
'Social and political caricature, as the present century has practised it, is only journalism made doubly vivid,' wrote Henry James in 1890, and he called journalism 'the criticism of the moment at the moment' and caricature 'that criticism at once simplified and intensified by a plastic form.'[1] He thought of caricature as an art in which irony, skepticism, and pessimism 'flower most aggressively,' and, rather surprisingly, for these thoughts introduce a friendly if cautious eulogy of Daumier, he states that 'it is evidently of the essence of caricature to be reactionary.' The Daumier that James described he had known but slightly from his childhood, when the artist 'still drove his coarse, formidable pencil.' His last, failing strokes, James tells us, 'used to impress me with their abnormal blackness as well as their grotesque, magnifying movement, and there was something in them that rather scared a very immature admirer.'
Review, 4320 words
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