What’s in a face?

This post is inspired by a recent entry on one of my favourite blogs - the Wellcome Collection - which endlessly fascinates and educates me. Last week's entry 'What is a body?' came out of the Foreign Bodies show they've recently staged. Natalie Coe described a session they had considered what it is that makes a body, from the perspectives of anthropology and dance. How can you 'replace' a person leaving a community? How can technology simulate and inspire the movements of a dancer?

Reading it I was reminded, perhaps slightly surprisingly, of my visit to the Royal Academy's Daumier show the week before. It's a wonderful display, evoking the nineteenth-century Parisian life portrayed by Daumier beautifully, and with a sophisticated and simple exhibition design that touches on the important print side to his work. You really get a sense of Daumier the man and the artist that I have to say I haven't always got from similar RA shows. 

But, my erstwhile exhibition companion and I both commented, after our visit, on Daumier's seemingly odd relationship with the faces of his subjects. The paintings capture his subject's bodies with a simple clarity of form but the faces are almost formless, shadowed, or turned away from the viewer. I don't remember a single recognisable painted face. Daumier's printed caricatures, by contrast, almost prioritise the faces, with minutely observed, and prominent, noses or lively eyes.

What does the face do? Of course, the face of a caricature is key to representing a recognisable character, and allows for attention to be directed towards expressions. It creates personality. Daumier's painted characters are instead more anonymous, representing types or moods of people, the everyman and woman trying to live in working-class Paris. Daumier's skill is in showing their emotions without their faces.