The Shape of a Pocket

by John Berger

  Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.

  There is a second reason why the Fayum portraits speak today. This century, as has been pointed out many times, is the century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings.

  The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed, and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in the memory after separation.

  The Fayum portraits touch a similar wound in a similar way. The painted faces, too, are flawed, and more precious than the living one was, sitting there in the painter’s workshop, where there was a smell of melting beeswax. Flawed because very evidently handmade. More precious because the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.

  And so they gaze on us, the Fayum portraits, like the missing of our own century.

  * A truly remarkable essay by Jean-Christoph Bailly on the Fayum portraits has just been published (1999) by Hazan, Paris, with the title: L’Apostrophe Muette.

  7

  Degas

  There is love, he once said, and there is a life’s work and one only has one heart. So he chose. He put his heart into his life’s work. I hope to show to what effect.

  His mother, a French American from New Orleans, died when he, her first-born, was only thirteen years old. Apparently, no other woman ever entered into his emotional life. He became a bachelor, looked after by housekeepers. Due to the family banking business he had few material worries. He collected paintings. He was cantankerous. Was called ‘a terrible man’. Lived in Montmartre. During the Dreyfus Affair he assumed the conventional anti-Semitism of the average bourgeois. The later photos show a frail old man, kippered by solitude. Edgar Degas.

  What makes the story strange is that Degas’ art was supremely concerned with women and their bodies. This concern has been misunderstood. Commentators have appropriated the drawings and statues to underwrite their own prejudices, either misogynist or feminist. Now, eighty years after Degas stopped working, it may be time to look again at what the artist left behind. Not as insured masterpieces – the market value of his work has long been established – but as an aid to living.

  Pragmatically. Between 1866 and 1890 he made a number of small bronzes of horses. All of them reveal an intense and lucid observation. Nobody before – not even Géricault – had rendered horses with such a masterly naturalism and fluency. But around 1888 a qualitative change takes place. The style remains exactly the same, but the energy is different. And the difference is flagrant. Any child would spot it immediately. Only some art moralists might miss it. The early bronzes are of horses seen, marvellously seen, out there in the passing, observable world. The later ones are of horses, not only observed but quiveringly perceived from within. Their energy has not just been noted, but submitted to, undergone, borne, as though the sculptor’s hands had felt the terrible nervous energy of the horse in the clay he was handling.

  The date of this change coincides with Degas’ discovery of Muybridge’s photographs, which showed for the first time how the legs of horses actually moved when cantering and galloping. And Degas’ use of these photographs accords perfectly with the positivist spirit of the epoch. What brought about the intrinsic change, however, defies any positivism. Nature, instead of being an object of investigation, becomes a subject. The later works all seem to obey the demands of the model rather than the will of the artist!

  Yet perhaps we may be mistaken about the will of this particular artist For instance, he never expected his statues to be exhibited: they were not made to be finished and presented. His interest in them lay elsewhere.

  When Ambrose Vollard, the Impressionists’ dealer, asked Degas why he didn’t have his statuettes cast in bronze, he replied that the tin and copper alloy known as bronze was said to be eternal, and he hated nothing more than what was fixed!

  Of the seventy-four Degas sculptures that exist in bronze today, all but one were cast after his death. In many cases the original figures, modelled in clay or wax, had deteriorated and crumbled. Seventy others were too far gone to be redeemed.

  What can we deduce from this? The statuettes had already served their purpose. (Towards the end of his life Degas stopped exhibiting anything.) The statuettes were not made as sketches or preparatory studies for some other work. They were made for their own sake, yet they had served their purpose: they had reached their point of apogee and so could be abandoned.

  The apogee point for him was when the drawn entered the drawing, when the sculpted passed into the sculpture. This was the only rendezvous and transfer that interested him.

  I can’t explain how the drawn enters a drawing. I only know that it does. One gets closest to understanding this when actually drawing. On Degas’ tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre the only words written are: ‘Il aimait beaucoup le dessin.’ (‘He liked drawing very much.’)

  Let us now think of the charcoal drawings, pastels, monotypes and bronzes of women. Sometimes they are presented as ballet dancers, sometimes as women at their toilette, sometimes (particularly in the monotypes) as prostitutes. Their presentation is unimportant: the ballet, the bathtub or the bordel were, for Degas, only pretexts. This is why any critical discussion about a pictorial ‘scenario’ usually misses the point. Why was Degas so fascinated by women washing themselves? Was he a keyhole voyeur? Did he consider all women tarts? (There is an excellent essay by Wendy Lesser in her book His Other Half in which she dismantles such questions.)

  The truth is that Degas simply invented or used any occasion to pursue his study of the human body. It was usually women’s bodies because he was heterosexual and so women amazed him more than men, and amazement is what prompted his kind of drawing.

  Straightaway there were people who complained that the bodies he depicted were deformed, ugly, bestial, contorted. They even went so far as to assert that he hated those he drew!

  This misunderstanding arose because he disregarded the conventions of physical beauty as conventionally transmitted by art or literature. And, for many viewers, the more a body is naked, the more it should be clothed in convention, the more it should fit a norm, either a perverse or an idealised one; the naked have to wear the uniform of a regiment! Whereas Degas, starting from his amazement, wanted each profile of the particular body he was remembering, or watching, to surprise, to be improbable, for only then would its uniqueness become palpable.

  Degas’ most beautiful works are indeed shocking, for they begin and end with the commonplace – with what Wendy Lesser calls ‘the dailiness’ of life – and always they find there something unpredictable and stark. And in this starkness is a memory of pain or of need.

  There is a statuette of a masseuse massaging the leg of a reclining woman which I read, in part, as a confession. A confession, not of his failing eyesight, nor of any suppressed need to paw women, but of his fantasy, as an artist, of alleviating by touching – even if the touch was that of a stick of charcoal on tracing paper. Alleviating what? The fatigue to which all flesh is heir …

  Many times he stuck additional strips of paper on to his drawings because, master that he was, he lost control of them. The image led him further than he calculated going, led him to the brink, where he momentarily gave way to the other. All his late works of women appear unfinished, abandoned. And, as with the bronze horses,
we can see why: at a certain instant the artist disappeared and the model entered. Then he desired no more, and he stopped.

  When the model ‘entered’, the hidden became as present on the paper as the visible. A woman, seen from the back, dries her foot which is posed on the edge of a bath. Meanwhile the invisible front of her body is also there, known, recognised, by the drawing.

  A feature of Degas’ late works is how the outlines of bodies and limbs are repeatedly and heavily worked. And the reason is simple: on the edge (at the brink), everything on the other, invisible, side is crying out to be recognised and the line searches … until the invisible comes in.

  Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognised and admitted. We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance.

  So what did he leave behind, if it wasn’t finished masterpieces?

  Do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, legs, buttocks, shoulders, elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother.

  One might put it like this. Degas left behind something very strange. His name. His name, which, thanks to the example of his drawings, can now be used as a verb. ‘Degas me. Know me like that! Recognise me, dear God! Degas me.’

  8

  Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff

  Dear Leon,

  I still remember clearly the first time I visited you in your studio, or the room you were then using as a studio. It was some 40 years ago. I remember the debris and the omnipresent hope. The hope was strange because its nature was that of a bone, buried in the earth by a dog.

  Now the bone is unburied and the hope has become an impressive, achievement. Except that the last word is wrong, don’t you think? To hell with achievement and its recognition, which always comes too late. But a hope of redemption has been realised. You have saved much of what you love.

  All this is best not said in words. It’s like trying to describe the flavour of garlic or the smell of mussels. What I want to ask you about is the studio.

  The first thing painters ask about a studio-space usually concerns the light. And so one might think of a studio as a kind of conservatory or observatory or even lighthouse. And of course light is important. But it seems to me that a studio, when being used, is much more like a stomach. A place of digestion, transformation and excretion. Where images change form. Where everything is both regular and unpredictable. Where there’s no apparent order and from where a well-being comes. A full stomach is, unhappily, one of the oldest dreams in the world. No?

  Perhaps I say this to provoke you, because I’d like to know what images a studio (where images are made) suggests to you – you who have spent many years alone in one. Tell me …

  John

  Dear John,

  Thank you for your letter. Almost 40 years ago you wrote a very generous piece on my work, The Weight. It was the first and, for many years, the only constructive and positive response to the work, and I never thanked you. But I have never forgotten it, and, in the strange time I am living through, now, of having to gather my work (and my life I suppose) together for a first retrospective, I am frequently reminded of it.

  All the things you say about the studio are true and the place I work in is much the same as it has always been. A room in a house – a much larger house. There is mess and paint everywhere on the walls – on the floor.

  Brushes are drying by the radiator, unfinished paintings are on the walls with drawings of current subjects. There is a place for the model to sit in a corner and a few reproductions on the wall that I’ve had most of my painting life. I don’t worry much about the light, sometimes it can be awkward as the room faces due south, then I turn the painting round or start a new version. I seem engaged in an endless cycle of activities. For the best part of 40 years I have been left alone but recently, owing to extra exposure and studio visits, the place has become like a deserted ship.

  Do you remember when we first saw the revealing and moving photographs of Brancusi’s and Giacometti’s studios in the 1950s? It was a special time. Now every book on every artist includes a photograph of the studio. It has become a familiar stage-set for the artist’s work. Has the activity become more important than the resulting image, or does the image need the confirmation of the studio and the myth of the artist because it’s not strong enough to be on its own?

  I don’t know what the work will look like when it finally appears on the walls of the Tate. The main thing that has kept me going all these years is my obsession that I need to teach myself to draw. I have never felt that I can draw and as time has passed this feeling has not changed. So my work has been an experiment in self-education.

  Now, after all this drawing, if I stand before a vast Veronese I experience the painting as an exciting exploratory drawing in paint. Or, looking at Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X, at present in the National Gallery, I wonder, after moving to the nearby early Christ after Flagellation, at the transformation of his capacity to draw with paint. Recently I saw a book of Fayum portraits [the Egyptian mummy paintings] and, thinking about their closeness to Cezanne and the best Picasso, I am reminded of the importance of drawing to all art since the beginning of time. I know this is all familiar to you – even simplistic – but it’s where I begin and end.

  The exhibition will commence with the thick painting you wrote about. Will the later, relatively lighter and thinner work be seen to have emerged out of my need to relate to the outside world by teaching myself to draw?

  Yours, Leon

  Dear Leon,

  I don’t, of course, find your thought about drawing ‘simplistic’. I too have been looking at that extraordinary book of Fayum portraits. And what first strikes me, as it must strike everybody, is their thereness. They are there in front of us, here and now. And that’s why they were painted – to remain here, after their departure.

  This quality depends on the drawing and the complicity, the inter-penetrations, between the head and the space immediately around it. (Perhaps this is partly why we think of Cezanne.) But isn’t it also to do with something else – which perhaps approaches the secret of this so mysterious process which we call drawing – isn’t it also to do with the collaboration of the sitter? Sometimes the sitter was alive, sometimes dead, but one always senses a participation, a will to be seen, or, maybe, a waiting-to-be-seen.

  It seems to me that even in the work of a great master, the difference between his astounding works and the rest, always comes down to this question of a collaboration with the painted, or its absence.

  The romantic notion of the artist as creator eclipsed – and today the notion of the artist as a star still eclipses – the role of receptivity, of openness in the artist. This is the pre-condition for any such collaboration.

  So-called ‘good’ draughtsmanship always supplies an answer. It may be a brilliant answer (Picasso sometimes), or it may be a dull one (any number of academics). Real drawing is a constant question, is a clumsiness, which is a form of hospitality towards what is being drawn. And, such hospitality once offered, the collaboration may sometimes begin.

  When you say: ‘I need to teach myself to draw,’ I think I can recognise the obstinacy and the doubt from which that comes. But the only reply I can give is: I hope you never learn to draw! (There would be no more collaboration. There would only be an answer.)

  Your brother Chaim (in the larger 1993 portrait) is there like one of the ancient Egyptians. His spirit is different, he has lived a different life, he is awaiting something different. (No! that’s wrong, he’s awaiting the same thing but in a different way.) But he is equally there. When somebody or something is there, the painting method seems to be a detail. It is like the self-efface
ment of a good host.

  Pilar (1994) is there to a degree that makes us forget every detail. Through her body, her life was waiting to be seen, and it collaborated with you, and your drawing in paint allowed that life to enter.

  You don’t draw in paint in the same way as Velazquez – not only because times have changed, but also because time has changed, your openness is not the same either (he with his open scepticism, you with your fervent need for closeness), but the riddle of collaboration is still similar.

  Maybe when I say your ‘openness’, I’m simplifying and being too personal. Yes, it comes from you, but it passes into other things. In your painting of Pilar, the surface of pigment, those gestures one upon another like the household gestures of a mother during a life-time, the space of the room – all these are open to Pilar and her body waiting-to-be-seen. Or is it, rather, waiting-to-be-recognised?

  In your landscapes the receptivity of the air to what it surrounds is even more evident. The sky opens to what is under it and in Christchurch Spitalfields, Morning 1990, it bends down to surround it. In Christchurch Stormy Day, Summer 1994, the church is equally open to the sky. The fact that you go on painting the same motif allows these collaborations to become closer and closer. Perhaps in painting this is what intimacy means? And you push it very far, in your own unmistakable way. For the sky to ‘receive’ a steeple or a column is not simple, but it’s something clear. (It’s what, during centuries, steeples and columns were made for.) And you succeed in making an early summer suburban landscape ‘receive’, be open to, a diesel engine!

  And there I don’t know how you do it! I can only see that you’ve done it. The afternoon heat has something to do with it? But how does that heat become drawing? How does such heat draw in paint? It does, but I don’t know how. What I’m saying sounds complex. In fact all I’m saying is already there in your marvellous and very simple tide: Here Comes the Diesel.