Temporal but timeless: Daumier at the Met.

Revolutions, whether in politics or in taste, never begin in the countryside. Fraught with revolution, the history of modern times is largely the history of the modern city. The greatest visual urban poet is Honore Daumier (1808-79) whose career in Paris, the crucible of politics and taste in the nineteenth century, spanned several upheavals in government and in fashion. Of course, Daumier is mostly renowned for the nearly 4,000, largely political, lithographic caricatures he made for two weekly newspapers on and off to the end of his life, starting in 1832. However, he also created numerous drawings in chalk, charcoal, conte crayon, and watercolor that captured the small motions of dally Parisian existence as they continued to revolve through the whirl of momentous events. The current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on through May 2, contains over 100 of these rarely seen works, along with a handful of Daumier's finest political caricatures and several beautiful paintings in oil.

Some of the most moving and enigmatic works in the show are the series of drawings Daumier made on the subject of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. To sort out their perplexing quality is to get a deeper understanding of what Daumier's art is all about. The theme was a popular one among romantics like Gustave Dore (1833-83), whose famous series of illustrations for Cervantes's novel are probably the best known images of the attenuated knight and his pudgy squire. Unlike writers and artists in the eighteenth century, who saw the Don as an example of madness at war with reason, nineteenth-century figures like Dore imagined a marginalized idealist heroically set against the dull recalcitrance of practical life. The curators of this show follow that romantic lead in the wall texts and the catalogue, writing that for Daumier, the Don symbolizes "the search for an ennobling existence." Daumier identified his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist, they go on to say, with Quixote's quest to fulfill the chivalric ideal.

No doubt Daumier identified with Quixote on some level, as he did with the street performers who populate his work beginning in the 1850s. In some pictures Quixote's lance resembles a pen and his shield a palette; a newspaper caricature from 1867 makes the connection between the artist and the eccentric outsider explicit. It's true, too, that Daumier wished ardently to be considered a painter as well as a caricaturist but that he never attained that kind of esteem. Artists, though, have a way of drawing from their lives without being personal. The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun called creatively engaged detachment an "unselfish inwardness." We are accustomed to thinking of art works--as well as people's opinions, insights, and observations--as "projections" of a person's particular condition. When the curators explain Daumier's depictions of Quixote as reflections of his psychology, they reflect a very contemporary notion of projection. Alongside that idea, their interpretation of the Quixote pictures as expressing "the search for an ennobling existence" seems like a mechanical nod in the direction of an artistic distance the curators don't really believe in.

In 1863, several years before Daumier began his Quixote series, Baudelaire published his famous essay, "The Painter of Modem Life." In it the poet gave the definition of beauty a modem cast, a dual Cartesian nature. "Beauty," he wrote, "is made up of an eternal, invariable element...and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions." The circumstantial element, thought Baudelaire, was what made each age modern in its own moment--"every old master has had his own moderniry." To be modern and true, artists had to seize the flotsam and jetsam of present appearance; to be remembered, they had to "distill the eternal from the transitory."

A fixed sense of the eternal and a tenacious grasp of the transitory are the fundamental conditions of satire, and of Daumier's art especially. Whether he was thinking of Baudelaire's essay or not, Daumier transposed his friend's aesthetic formulation into moral terms in his Quixote series. Dogged and vigilant, riding a white steed, the gaunt, lance-bearing Quixote leads his corpulent sidekick, slouched forward on his donkey, through interminable space. In two drawings, there is a single tree, as in the set Giacommetti--his wiry figures influenced by Daumier---designed for the first performance of Waiting for Godot. In one painting in oil, the pair descend into a pale gold valley from shadowed heights, the sky stretched out beyond them in layers of gray, azure, and mauve. In the exhibition's final work, Daumier has rendered the pair in oil on wood as almost a complete abstraction. They struggle upward in essential toil, the twin elements of a primordial labor that is both spiritual and fleshly. Avid for an eternal dignity, the knight charges forward into emptiness; his squire follows behind, courageously bearing the transitory weight of stomach and bowels.

The two figures are the rudiments of Daumier's art, both his political satire and his social caricature. The wizened knight, far from symbolizing the artist's ambition, represents his ethical nature. A vivid idea of what human life should be, how human beings should live and be allowed to live, gives satire its meaning in a specific context. The ethical point of view is to the satirist's works what developing fluid is to a photographic print. Without it, the depredations of power--the gauntlet stomach and bowels run through history--are never exposed. Yet a satirist's ethics have to be as broad as the landscape Quixote journeys through. He or she is driven to excoriate a particular abuse only for the sake of accommodating the entire condition of being human. That general condition is what the social caricaturist "distills" into the culture-bound moments he or she captures to make them familiar to later times.

This exhibition contains powerful drawings of passengers on a train and travelers waiting on a bench, of lawyers and judges noble and corrupt, of emigrants in flight, of lovers kissing and children running, of the faces of ordinary people, of mythological, religions, and historical scenes. The timeless perspective of how people strive to live and the temporal perspective of how they do live--the Don and Sancho--radiates through all of them. It's tempting to say that Daumier was a great caricaturist because he lived through great events. If, as Baudelaire said, Daumier was like Moliere in the way he rapidly cut to the core of a person's individuality, then French history at the time was the Comedie Francaise. Circumstance provided everyone with a role to play, and their parts and the various sets they played their parts against illuminated one another.

Daumier's career began roughly around the time of the July Revolution in 1830 when the last Bourbon ruler of France, Charles X, fled to England and Louis Philippe, the Duc d'Orleans, ascended to the throne. Placed in power by the Liberals, Louis Philippe administered the rule of the middle class. His venal minister, Guizot, believed poverty was the result of a moral deficiency in the poor, and by 1847 nearly a third of Parisian workers were either starving or subsisting on charity. Revolutionary Socialists drew up plans for utopian societies; liberal Socialists made a coalition with Republicans and elbowed out moderate, middle-class reformers; Bonapartists plotted to put Louis Napoleon, Napoleon's nephew, back on the throne. As they had since 1789, Parisians threw up barricades in the streets in 1848 and the Repnblicans and Socialists established the Second Repnblic. In 1852, however, Louis Napoleon executed a series of deft political maneuvers, returned to power, and had himself proclaimed Napoleon III. At first he curbed civil liberties, but at the same time he made his regime the most socially progressive France had known. Between 1867 and 1869 he restored freedom of the press and of assembly and the liberalization of the empire was complete. Just as important as these political metamorphoses, throughout Napoleon III's regime his prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, destroyed the narrow, winding streets that had existed since the Middle Ages and replaced them with wide boulevards, partly to make it impossible for insurrectionists to throw up barricades. In terms of class formation, political structure, and physical appearance, Paris was in a state of perpetual transformation during all of Daumier's life.

All this is by way of a final remark on Daumier's studies of ordinary people. History and politics tremble in the air around them, yet though they are surrounded they are not engulfed. Friends drink together, fathers gently bathe their children in the Seine, workers look the viewer proudly in the eye. In one drawing a woman leads a child across a bridge, the two of them struggling against the wind. It is one of Daumier's finest political caricatures. The artist responsible for representing Louis Philippe--who thought of himself as a romantic adventurer--as a pear, caricatures history in this work as a windmill, not a giant. Though the strongest wind may send events spinning, it cannot stop the streaming generations of ordinary lives, quietly and decently lived. The most powerful political statement an artist can make is that private life extends beyond the reach of politics. For Daumier to have made it again and again is especially quixotic today.

Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a freelance writer living in New York.