The American Scene; #270

Good morning, this is Howard Vincent, building the arts for the American scene and for Illinois Institute of Technology. The art today is an art we all know from the daily newspaper, but the origins of the cartoons we see in the daily newspaper, the caricatures, we may not know so much about. The origins are really back to Honore Vittoran Domier, the man who's announced and whose picture you saw, the caricature of whom you saw, because one of his friends drew this caricature of him, is the originator of the modern political cartoon that you see in your daily newspaper. This man, Frenchman, born in 1808 in Southern France in Marseille, but when he was a young boy, his father moved up to Paris and at a very opportune moment for caricature, for satire, for us. Because at this time, when he moved to Paris in 1822, Paris was just becoming acquainted with the art of

lithography. Now the art of lithography is simply printing on stone. They draw directly on the stone and then prints are made from that stone in multiple copies and it was a cheap, inexpensive way of having illustrations in newspapers and magazines. And this cheap, inexpensive way of having newspapers was a tremendous advance in newspaper and magazine publication and a tremendous opportunity for artists everywhere, this cheap form of reproduction. And Domier came along a young man at this time and by a set of very fortunate circumstances, although he never regarded it as fortunate because he hated the medium after a while, he became a lithographer. Now he came under the clutches of a man named Philly Pond. I must give you a few of these teachers to tell you to get them out of the way before we get to the pretty pictures. And this man, Philly Pond was the editor of a new magazine which was going to use lithography and going to be satirical. The magazine was called

caricature, very appropriately, and then the later magazine that he founded a newspaper two years later called Charavari. And it's Charavari for which Domier worked as well as caricature all his life, doing something like 4 ,000 cartoons for that and one or two other journals. Philly Pond was angry at what had happened in France in 1830 in the Revolution when Louis Philippe had been made King of the French people and King Charles had been driven from the throne. He felt that Louis Philippe betrayed the hopes of the people. He had made various promises when he was King, he would do this and that. And like all politicians or like most politicians, he re -nigged on those promises. And Philly Pond didn't like it. So Philly Pond set to work to attack the power, the King and his ministers. And he had a stable of remarkable artists,

names perhaps you don't know about but they are in the history of caricature, remarkable people, Grandville, Travier, and so on. And he set these people to work, satirizing Louis Philippe in one way or another. And he set Domier to work. Domier was just a young man, but he set to Domier draw a picture of King Louis Philippe as Gagantua, you know, Gagantua, Rabelay's great character. So Domier willingly obliged by drawing a picture of Louis Philippe as Gagantua, sitting in a very undignified position. And it was a brutal and rather obscene kind of satire. What happened was the picture didn't get published because the King's ministers, the police swooped down upon the photographer's shop and seized the stone and arrested Domier. He was thrown in prison for six months. This made him famous. He had been completely unknown up to them, but he was now famous as a man who had satirized the King and been thrown into prison. So when he came out of prison, he came out of kind of hero.

So Philly Pond set to him, all right, you're a hero now. Let's go to work and satirize these people with a vengeance. You take, you draw a series of portraits of these people and we'll line them up one after the other in our magazine and show what they look like, yes, but show what they are through the art of character. Now, character is simply taking a person, showing him as he is, but taking one or two features of him and exaggerating slightly. And this first picture that we have of Perseille is a picture of a man who is responsible for his condemnation to prison for six months. The picture of Perseille, I think, you will see when looking at it, is a good revenge, is a good revenge by Domier, because after all, we don't care about Perseille. Now it's all a matter of forgotten history, but this man, if ever you study history and this is a picture by which he's remembered, and this gaunt, severe, aesthetic, fierce, mean person is captured for all time. This was just the beginning or just part of a long series of the

ministers of Louis Philippe that he showed. And the next picture is also a picture of another one of the ministers who came under, this man is the, was a brutal man and look at that face closely and you can see the brutality of it. He looks like in the end if all man or even like an ape. And by the way, curiously about this picture, the original, and before doing these pictures, Domier did some little busts of these man, little terracotta busts about this high. And most of them are preserved in Paris in a private collection there which will eventually go to the Louvre someday. But one of these busts turned up in Chicago two years ago and I was fortunate enough to buy it and it was the bust of this man and it is identical with that picture that you just saw. Domier used these busts as models for his portraits and all the staff of the newspaper used these busts as models when they drew the cartoons of the different characters in various undignified poses.

And this next picture too shows another one of the characters, a man named Prunel. Now he is a Prunel and he's a fierce, rough, tough character, at least he's made to look that way. And no other portrait of Prunel has ever printed in the history books. And this minor character, this character who would be forgotten is remembered solely because he aroused Domier and Philippeons Rath. Now the next picture I think is we really get to the heart of the attack. He was trying to attack Louis Philippe and Louis Philippe was the king of France and Louis Philippe as you will see in this picture had a kind of pear -shaped head. This is a picture of Louis Philippe on the left hand side. It's Louis Philippe before becoming king. Louis Philippe now with a sour face being attacked by Sharavari and the one on the face on the right is his fear about what's going to be and otherwise he's going to be overthrown is what Domier is trying to say. But you'll notice the head is like a pear, pear

-shaped head. And Philippeon told all his caricaturists draw Louis Philippe with that pear -shaped head and it was a masterful stroke because the pear became the symbol for Louis Philippe. Now you say what's a pear, a pear is only a pear. A pear is more than a pear. A pear in France means also a very, it's also a very rough word meaning fool. I'm stating it rather politely. So this image of the pear was scrawled all over Paris, all over France by people, by the Republican people who were offended at Louis Philippe's reneging on his promises. And Domier is very satisfyingly, also drew the pear. Well, this next picture is a good example of it. This is the next picture is a pure pear. You can see two men down below pulling on the rope. They're hoisting up the pear. An enormous pear, it's just a pear. But everybody saw that picture new instantly. Let's hang Louis Philippe. This is really a revolutionary, a very rebellious kind of cartoon.

Well, you can see why this sort of thing going on. Louis Philippe didn't like it and he kept sending the police around to the offices of the magazine, arresting them, arresting the editor, finding them until finally, no trouble came. But having drawn this picture of all the all the different ministers, Domier finally got himself together for a final print that you see here called the Legislative Belly. Now, those men all have big bellies. But the idea of this picture is the legislative, the belly said Philly Point is in his note that accompany this. The belly is the center of being. It's where the appetites are. And this is the most material and gross society in front, the history of France. Here is the Legislative Belly. This was the assembly that the Republicans were calling the prostituted assembly. And in this cartoon, which you just saw, it's more than a cartoon. If you have time, go to the Art Institute and see their magnificent copy of this print. It's one of the lithographic masterpieces of the world.

And it's hard to see on the camera here. But these people are portraits and yet they are which make it one collector's item and one of the prize things in the history of art, not just caricature, but art. Well, this was the summation of a, and I've really cut down a long story very briefly, this fight with Louis Philippe. Until finally, he kept burying away or grinding or shooting away at Louis Philippe. As in this next picture, Louis Philippe, he says, runs this assembly. Here he is, the Ringmaster. And his clowns, his animals go through their routines in the assembly that you see there in the parliament behind. And the Legislative Belly is behind him, and Louis Philippe is manipulating these puppets as he sometimes called them. And this print is just an example of his contempt for both for Louis Philippe and for the assembly. And the next one, too, in the

next picture, shows also his contempt for these people. It's the title underneath this is, go ahead and speak. You have the floor. Now, the point of this is, this is one of the Republican revolutionaries who had been arrested. There were a whole group, about 150 were arrested, and they were being tried in a completely illegal kind of trial on mass, 150 at one time. And every time they tried to speak, they were gagged. And not literally, but practically speak. They weren't allowed to freely have the floor. So here is this man gagged and yet the judge is saying to him, go ahead and speak. You have the floor. You're at liberty to speak. This is the way law was practiced under Louis Philippe. And then another instance of this brilliant attack is this one on the funeral of Lafayette. Now, Lafayette had been one of the men who had gotten Louis Philippe into power. You see the picture. Louis Philippe is in the front there. He's in mourning. In the back, you can barely see it, but there's a funeral curse

of Lafayette. And Louis Philippe is pretending to mourn. Actually, you can see there's a smile there. He's saying, ah, I got rid of you, you old fox. You can't do many more damage. But you say that's just a character. But look at the composition of it. The strong central figure, the relationship of the strong central figure, to the distance and the perspectives. And when you get over the being amused by the character, you realize you have a work of art. And this constantly happens with this caricatureist. I'm going to be making this point again later. Now, the final one of this series against Louis Philippe is the most famous cartoon that he ever drew. Now, this is not a cartoon to laugh at, be amused at. This is a horrible thing. The king's police broke into a house one day and during the riots in Paris and slaughtered all the inhabitants and slaughtered them. This is a word. 13 or 14 people were slaughtered in that house by the banits, children, babies, women,

and men. And the France was outraged. And Donnie drew this picture of a room. You can't see all, you see the dead man there and the child underneath him. But there's a woman in the distance and so on. But it's a terrible indictment of a political regime. And it is, in terms of visual art, a magnificent print. Again, the contrast of light and dark. And the thing is the work of beauty. And Donnie worked carefully and long on this. It is as terrible an indictment, perhaps, of a political act as, say Picasso's or of Goya's, the 13th of May, the shooting of the Spanish peasants by the French soldier. These three great works are examples of character rising to great art and art employing caricature at the same time. Well, naturally, Louis Philippe didn't like any of this. So he finally had laws passed which for bad caricature of himself and of his ministers and Donnie and Philippe Paul had to

stop this. Well, now what was he to do? He turned under Philippe Paul's direction to society in general. And so he satirized French society in a little detail. But before he did so, he had one parting shot at Louis Philippe in the form of, well, this next print, I think will indicate. He did 150 prints. Now, you get no sense of the powerful attack. But this is a picture on the right. You see Robert McCair, who is a famous stage scoundrel and his stooge Bernard. He is a completely unscriptural scoundrel who is out to cheat and gall everybody in terms of fiction and play. And Donnie took him over and Philippe Paul wrote the legends underneath and did 150 prints. But you will notice that Robert McCair looks a little bit like Louis Philippe. He has the Bernard standing there. It looks a little bit like Louis Philippe's prime minister, just a little bit because he had made it too close to resemblance. He would have gone back to prison. But

this, everybody knew that this series of satires was a satire not only upon society in general and the skull dugory that was going on in France at this time, but it was also a satire of Louis Philippe and his minister. And there's a very subtle and rather clever, a right way of carrying on a campaign with all innocence, the well -known stage character. But in general, he had to turn to daily affairs, what was going on in society in general. He went to the stage, but now there are lots of things happening. And what I'm saying in effect is that we have now a summation of French life of the 19th century. Now that's a complex subject, rich. And if we're going to study it, we need years, really, and to try to sum it up in a few words. It's a bit difficult, but we don't get samples of this attack. The stage is one, I mentioned. Now this next print has the picture of Ulysses and Agamemnon talking. Now these are two characters in the French theater, two actors. And what he's getting

at is there's a legend we can't read underneath there, but they're pomposity, two actors. Beneath every role is the actor. And Domien always pierced beneath the mask and saw the man behind the role. And the pretentiousness of the actors, they're parading, they're strutting, is the point of this. And he did a whole series attacking the pomposity of actors in the overheroic, overblown drama of France, which the bourgeois rulers of France loved so much. This next one, he attacked another idea. There was a big wave of interest in Greek myth and Greek statues and imitating Greek art. For instance, Ang, the great painter, painted and David had painted in the Greek style or in a pseudo -classical manner. And so Domien did a whole series called Ancient History. And here is, for instance, Hercules. This is the great Hercules mind, too. Cleaning the

Argentinian stables, one of his labors. And here you have simply a Norman peasant, as it were, with his big fat dolly and all his crudity. This is no heroic figure. This is a man, this is a kind of person that really cleans stables. All right, this is what Domien says. Let's not pretty fry and make marshmallow prettiness out of our past. The past was real, and not a series of images which have in the air. And that is what we've made out of our mythology. And he did a 50th of them, which I'm sorry, I'd like to show you the whole 50. You can see them at the art institute. They are simply marvelous comics, comedy pictures of Helen of Troy. Here's a beautiful Helen of Troy being after Paris and Troy has fallen. She's being hauled back home by Menolais. And here she has a fat, dumpy house frow, thumbing her nose at her husband. Well, now this, Helen of Troy, when we go into poems about the beautiful Helen of Troy. This, he says, is what Helen of Troy probably was like

after 10 years of Troy. And so France laughed at it at the same time he made them think. All let's take the daily life, this print here. Every French middle class had to serve in the National Guard in the 1830s and 40s. And you can see here a group of National Guardsmen prading around the city at night. But the poor man at the head is looking up at his home and seeing his wife up there being kissed by somebody. And the poor man is on duty, and he can't run into the house to see what's happening, but he's being betrayed. But when we say this, the comedy is there, but it's a lovely thing to look at. I assure you, I have this on my wall at home and it's a very caressing thing, the use of the lithographic crayon. It's a beautiful thing. And yet it is a funny tube. Or the next one, the, the bay there. This one, he did a whole series on the bay there. So people in Paris going to the baths and swimming pools, if you

wish. And this one of the, of the bay there shows the man dipping his toe in the water, apprehensive of what's going to happen. It's going to be cold there. But look at his body. I mean, that's a marvelous piece of drawing of the body. In fact, it's so remarkable that such a great painter's Delacroix used to copy, literally to copy Domien's caricatures of the bay. This in order to perfect his own hand in drawing the human body. And after you stop laughing at this, you look at that and just say, what a remarkable draftsman this Domien was. Although, you've got to get behind the comedy all the time. Or the next one, this, this grand old lady, I'm very fond of this one, the Fem de Manage. A Fem de Manage is the woman of all work in the house. And he says that somebody wrote beneath there. Here's a woman of all work. But she doesn't, a manager. But she doesn't know how to manage the house. She doesn't know how to manage the dishes. And she really doesn't know how to manage the wine, which she's stealing from her, from her mistress. And you

know, she drinks too much. She talks too much. But this, this character sneaking a drink of wine and with her dust mop under her is a love, I wouldn't say a lovely, but a very handsome portrait of a, of a female. And yet it is infinitely common. Or the two men looking at an eclipse as we have in the next one. Here is Domien's problem. He had to do this week after week after week, eight cartoons a month. Now, what do you do? You're desperate for subject. He draws two men. He has some arguing. Now, what are they arguing about? Domien didn't care. He sent the picture over to the newspaper office. And somebody paid, paid a few, a few dollars to Frank's. Went to work and wrote an inscription beneath. And these, these jokes, Domien had very little to do with. And, but the pictures themselves are very satisfying, just as pictures. And the comedy lies in the gesture, in the way the arm points, in the, in the relationship between the two. Or the next one of this, when the,

the picture of the man showing his apartment to a, to a group of people. And you'll notice in this print that they're peeking out the window. And the man is pointing out saying, you can see the Eiffel Tower over there. And besides saying that this is a beautiful print, let me point out that just, just a week ago, I was in Paris. And I was, this is no, this is not made up. I was visiting him and in his apartment. And he pointed out the window and said, see, you can see the Eiffel Tower. And you could. If you stuck your head way out of the window and looked around, you could just barely see it. And it was exactly the same situation 100 and over 100 years later as in that print. And one of the impression, if you know Domien well, you walk around Paris, you live in a Domien world because these people still exist. And if you look at Paris long enough and look at Domien long enough, pretty soon you walk around Chicago. And even though the American face is different from the French face and, and the way they walk, nevertheless they are still people, both the French and the Americans. And you see even Chicago as

Domien. And would the Domien had gone around Chicago with his pencil? All right. The, this next one is the example of the, of the comedy, which we've just been going through all of us with our children. Here's a father sending his son to school. He's kicking him, getting him out, sending him on the road to learning. And he sends him on with a kick. The boy didn't want to go back to school. And, but the father's going to have him. And yet in that picture, this great artist able to draw better than anybody in France is doing a daily cartoon, which everybody just looks at laughs and throws in the waste basket. And it was a tremendous loss of genius, Baudelaire complained about and said, what a tragedy. Well, we could go on on the next print, the proud father shows, shows the father exhibiting his child and saying, does he look just like me? Well, it's the same situation every father proudly shows his son. He looks just like me and preens himself on it. The ridiculously, look at the pose of the father. And that's any father, it's not just a

French father, it's any father in his, in his absurdity. As we are absurd people, and Domien makes his confront that absurdity, but he makes his confront it affectionately, or he is affectionate towards it, if it's not absurdity and power. If it's just the absurdity of the little guy in Paris, he is very affectionate and fond of this absurdity. Or the lawyers. Now, Domien, or this one, they've just had a bad outing and he's taking them to a show which the wife complains is not fit to take people to. And they're having a family quarrel. Not the first family quarrel in history, nor the last, the Domien has shown, but it's just a daily event. But he makes you aware of your dailyness. And this is one thing we do forget, we forget that we are creatures of, we little things, and little things make up our lives. When we become conscious of those little things, we get some control of them.

And the lawyers, the pictures of the lawyers, the here, this is one of his favorite series. I mean, people collect these, just two lawyers, but they are beautiful, I think, the robes and the white ties. And the next one, two lawyers putting on their robes in the next one, the is also quite effective. They were, he did dozens upon dozens of these. And the lawyers love them. Even though he's, he's cruel, he's making fun of here, they're cracking some joke about the poor client who's just been, who's just lost the case, they don't care, they get their fees. And I show this, the picture after this, for a good reason, in that I want to show you that Domien, I'm talking about Domien, the characterist, but nevertheless, Domien proceeded to draw and paint great paintings and drawings. And this next picture shows a serious, this is the watercolor of two lawyers. And it's a beautiful watercolor. It's a, and if you think these, these are minor little things, a watercolor like that, fetches in

the market, about $8 ,000, showing that Domien is an artist who is respected by collected. Or the next one, the next print I think is interesting to look at, because it is a picture of one of Domien's favorite subjects, the collectors. And it's in, it's the one I think it is, it's in color. And since this is a color show, you can get some sense of Domien the painter, although it's not my subject for today, Domien the painter, in this magnificent painting, which is in the National Gallery in Washington. Incidentally, we in America have more Domien's probably than any other country in the world, more than France has. And excellent Domien's, we're very fortunate, they are dispersed widely, but nevertheless we have them. Or the, we could, time presses, but I think I'll skip over the next seven or eight pictures and come down to the modern cartoon. And I have only a few minutes to talk about it, but let's go into about seven or eight below anywhere in there, how to go do,

and even farther if you want. And the, in about 1865, later in his life, Domien became alarmed about the situation in Europe. And he went to work, or even, even much later. This is a political cartoon of Radapol, who is a supposed to be Louis Napoleon. And he attacked Louis Louis Napoleon, just as he is either attacked Louis the leap. But he, and he carried on a campaign, which is itself a book, but you saw that figure. First, he made a little statue of it, and the statue is, you can be seen in various galleries and bronze copies. It's a wonderful example of making a symbol serve. This, then the example of his later, later period, when he went to work and began to think in terms of paint. That in terms of the handling of light and several others in terms of handling the light

is almost impressionist. And paint is like Manet and a gas, where greatly influenced by Domien, Domien's handling of paint, and also his handling of light in the cartoons, in ordinary cartoons and caricatures. Now, I was going to talk about Domien as a founder of the modern cartoon, but the time has passed. 4 ,000 cartoons you don't catch in a half an hour. But he did. He simplified his line. He simplified the subject. And with a draftsmanship, which no artist today, not even her block, or Fitzgerald can equal, he satirized the European situation in which cartoons are still printed in the New York Times and other magazines. And I hope that we'll have time later sometime to take up further facets of this great artist, who is also a painter, a sculptor, and a great man. Thank you very much.