Notes towards the
second installment of my Daumier Project.
Dear Andrew, I have
had so many family visitors in the last few months it has
not been possible to work consistently. However I have made some notes of the
various random thoughts that have been floating through my head to be considered
before I commit myself to start on a final piece, a physical piece.
Religion abandoned,
the Religious sense, buried deep. Is it only
a residue of my Catholic upbringing, or an inevitable, universal human response
to the magical mystery tour that is life? Why is there anything rather than
nothing? Why is it as it is? Could it be otherwise?
If things are as
they are because of some inevitable constitutional or developmental part of
nature then who are we to protest? Yet the child's protest, "But it’s NOT
FAIR." is that not just as inevitable, an inevitable universal human
response? And therefore just as
legitimate?
The religious
sense, the impulse to worship, seems to be a response to the big picture and is
an acceptance of the way things are. (Shouldn’t we even be grateful?) Protest is a response to the deplorable
detail. And does the detail have to be as it is for the big picture to function?
And does that mean that in the end I should approve rather than protest? Approve
all the shitty detail, all the poverty and dirt, all the torture and suffering,
all the frustration? Of course I don’t have to approve, but I may
have to put up with, and not really disapprove. I don’t profess to be a
philosopher so I don’t have to reject a paradoxical proposition. Good!
Frustration? Does it rate as a torture? Yes. And a big
unrecognised component of many people's character. Even In the best imaginable
world I believe frustration would still torment some people. Isn’t that why we
do Art? Actually in the best imaginable
world everybody would do Art, some sort of Art. Crime is some people’s Art.
ROTHKO’S RECIPE FOR A PICTURE.
ART? ETHICS? RELIGIOUS
FAITH?
Searching among my
chaotic papers for a half remembered quote from George Orwell about the need to
restore the religious sense but without the formal doctrinal bit, I failed to
find it but came across an old letter, I quote “Also like you I feel such
sorrow and despair at all that’s going on in the world.” I looked at the date
on the letter, Jan 2004. But it could as well have been any day before or since.
I also came across a poem I had copied out from Evgenia Ginzburg’s book about
her time in a Soviet Gulag, “Into the Whirlwind.”
Good to sleep,
Better to be a stone,
Best, in our age of shame and
terror
Not to live or feel.
Don’t touch me,
Don’t dare wake me up. The author was Michaelangelo.
I must remember
that every era has its age or ages of terror, some more spectacularly than
others.
Daumier lived
through a period of political chaos. He deals with the large news-worthy events
in his newspaper cartoons. But he doesn’t only attack the powerful, one of his
many drawings, set in a courtroom, shows a lawyer who has just succeeded in getting his client acquitted. He is having his
pocket picked by his incorrigible client. He, Daumier also did a great little
series of spoof illustrations of the story of Ulysses and his return home to Penelope;
reducing the glory, giving the hero and heroine ordinary timeworn bodies and
wrinkled faces. Its nice to think he did manage to amuse himself sometimes despite
the daily grind of the job. (It is a relentless grind, sometimes six drawings a
week to order, somebody else’s order that you may not quite agree with.)
OTHER PROTESTERS
WHO WERE PAINTERS OR SCULPTURS, NOT JOURNALISTS.
Well there’s
Picasso with Guernica of course. In some ways it is very like a cartoon, very
graphic, and he doesn’t use colour.
Then there are the
German expressionists, post W.W.1. They cry out with colour, as does Munch.
Michaelangelo and
Donatello, (The Slave, and Donatello’s Weeping Women, a bas relief which can be
seen in the V. & A.)
Our own W.W.2.
painters of course, bleak and bitter rather than terrifying. Still accepting to
some extent, still finding beauty in the scene. I did see a W.W.2. picture once
which made me shudder, it was by a little known artist, French. You could tell
he had actually been there, in the trenches ,suffered the un-speakable multiple
fears, pains, agonies of mind and body that went on for years all expressed and
personified in the painting of a huge rat, nailed out, crucified on the canvas.
But there is no-one
to equal Goya. Even his picnics and festivals are frightening any way.
His horrors of war
etchings like “I Saw This” or “What More Can One DO?” are of course famous.
But there is a
little pinkish painting in the National Gallery in London which is both
beautiful and terrifying; a man pegged out in the sun in the town square in
what is politely called a “stress” position. Even when he is not
dealing with terrors there is a frightening presence about his work.
I think the Chapman
brothers have faced the possible horrors of life at its sad and dirty worst,
but nowthey are part of the establishment which is what happens to punks and
other protesters in a prosperous and securely established democracy. I attach
some illustrations to my text, the last oneby Silvio Marchand, a young French
artist, is an eloquent contemporary protest against that very problem; a
sculpture of the thrown brick that does not break the window of the
establishment building, because the establishment has learnt to be flexible.
It seems my ‘Notes
Towards...’ have turned into a bit of writing which really says most of what I
want to say, can I leave the writing as it is now and try to get on to the
making part? One more topic I want to tackle in writing; my own difficulties
with conceptual art, more of that another day
Nov. 14th.
I was brought up in a very Roman Catholic way, house decorated with copies of
Renaissance paintings and large gloomy prints of ‘la Divina Comedia’. Fish on
Friday, confession on Saturday, mass and communion on Sunday. Outings to
castles, churches and cathedrals as entertainment, plus the occasional visit to
the local county town gallery when there was something special on. Then at
convent boarding school a diet of Ruskin both in English and Art History
lessons. Aesthetics, morality and faith all bundled together. Luckily there
were chinks in the armour and not much money so escape was possible. Escape to
the armed services, leave in London, fun, night clubs and the National Gallery
where they showed a run-of the-mill collection and just one major master piece
at a time. I went with my sister who left me standing in front of
Michaelangelo’s unfinished painting of Madonna and Child with St. John and Angels
and found me still standing mesmerised in front of it an hour and a half later.
The sensuality of the paint and of the skin, of the line and of the leg and the
fold and fall of drapery. And of course the limited tonal changes expressing so
much. It was the formal qualities that seduced and entranced me. The meaning of
a picture did not especially interest me, perhaps because I knew most of the
stories whether Christian or Classical my curiosity was not aroused. Whatever
the cause, the idea of calling something Art because it expressed an idea or a
life experience when displayed alongside a verbal explanation; that repelled
me. I have worked on my ignorance since and know now that it is better not to
try to estimate any work of art without seeing the original ‘ in the flesh’. Like
trying to test a jam without tasting it. The verbal explanations offered are
often esoteric and just infuriating or pretentious. The best pieces work
without explanation, Wei wei’s ‘Sunflower Seeds’ (Tate Modern, two or three
years ago) spoke to me without any words.
The point is:
‘Le Fardeau,’ doesn’t need any words in any language and if I want to remake it
I want to do it with the same means as he used and that I normally try to use, that
is to portray in the flesh, in the material aspect a fellow human being or
other piece of nature. I tend to avoid idealistic subject matter having failed
spectacularly in the past. So I must either paint something I have actually
seen or put together out of different elements that I have seen at various times.
Of course if I do it in a different medium, 3D, plaque or possibly a rag doll
figure I could be more straight forward. We’ll see. Ow, I feel terribly exposed now.
 |
|
Honoré Daumier. “Le Faudeau.” The Heavy Burden. 1850–1860. Oil
on panel. 39.7 x 32.2 cm
Collection: Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
|
Post May 2015:
Honoré Daumier.
“Le Faudeau.” The Heavy Burden. 1850–1860. Oil on panel. 39.7 x 32.2 cm
Collection:
Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
DAUMIER NOTEBOOK
, Dec.2014-----------------------------------------
I can’t now
remember why I knew the Daumier painting, “Le Faudeau.” was in the national
collection at Cardiff. I was not aware
of having seen it there but the moment I read the proposal for our present
project it leapt to mind as the work I would like to re-interpret and re-make. That’s
not very interesting, what is interesting is that I had remembered it wrongly. Vividly but wrongly. I was sure the woman in
the picture had a child tucked under her arm and was hurrying away from some scene
of danger.
I have often
wished that I was a political cartoonist or that I could at least sometimes do
a work that was politically committed. I
feel full of protest at all the usual injustices of life . ”The insolence of office, the
oppressor’s wrong...etc” and yet I never do anything to oppose those wrongs. Painting is not a good vehicle for
protest, it is most glorious when it is celebrating something beautiful. It is
very out of fashion to aim for something beautiful these days, perhaps that is
because it seems almost frivolous in the face of the horrors we know exist
around us, every day and nearly everywhere.
I understand how
compromised I am, a tube of good cadmium red or yellow costs enough to feed a
family for a week in a refugee camp. With thoughts like that in my mental baggage
it’s easy to see how attractive Daumier’s basic use of paint would be to me. Earth colours, large simplified areas of
light and dark with few tonal variations deliver the emotional content economically
and with a sense of urgency.
Yet in the end it
is because of the aesthetic qualities in his work that Daumier stands out as of
lasting value among cartoonists.
The other aspect
of Daumier’s work that I would happily be influenced by is his modelling
technique. There are two small relief plaques in the “D’Orsey” . The figures, a line of refugees, emerge from the clay in a
wonderfully organic way. I always intended to do a piece of work of that sort,
in his footsteps.
His relief style is
modern, almost cubist. Compare the plaques with the baptistry doors in Florence
by Ghiberti; there the background is very low relief almost like a drawing on a
flat ground and the figures are like little dolls stuck on top.
Daumier welds the
figures with the background, the figures EMERGE
from the background. As they do
indeed in many of his paintings. In fact many of the paintings might have been
done with sloppy clay, smeared and dragged into an image. Painting with mud,
the poor man’s paint. The cave man’s paint.
The little laundress
hurrying home with her heavy burden is more fully emerged than most. There are
six or seven versions of this painting, I prefer the Cardiff one. The others
seem to show the signs of the difficulties Daumier had with painting, for three
years he struggled to make his living as a painter rather than as a
journalist-cartoonist. He failed and had to go back to journalism.
Whether it was
done first or last our Cardiff one seems spontaneous and easy, a quick little
sketch of something he has seen. It is the innocent vision of someone in love
with life, not using his images to portray what he hates but to express what he
loves, what makes him happy. But also someone who has seen a fellow human being
one day and understood her problems with his experienced compassion. He admires her. His empathy shows, the way she
is using her hip to help support the weight of the basket, that basket is very
heavy. She is brave with the commonplace bravery of the millions who have to
get up every morning and go to work, and determined, she does what she has to
do to live, and she’s a good mother, she trusts her child to keep up with her.
The child is intent on doing so. Neither of them is critical.
Daumier was
critical as well as compassionate, he was imprisoned at the age of 24 for being
on the wrong side in one of that era’s endless twists of political chance. He can be savage and ugly, where he hates.
That’s fine when his villains are the epitome of callous and corrupt power, lawyers
and their political and military masters. (When they are liberated women,
bluestockings and suffragettes the drawings make him seem to be a typical male
chauvinist pig, part of the problem. Oh dear!)
Well my laundress
is fleeing from poverty, her enemy is faceless. Her background looms over her,
thick and threatening; she has to get the washing done and dried before she and
her child will eat again.
I want to do a
piece of work that protests but does not add to the squalor. I hope I will get the backup I need to do it
partly from my chosen painting and partly from the fact of being engaged in this project.
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