by John Berger
You say that on the walls of your painting rooms there are some reproductions which have been pinned there for years. I wonder what? Last night I dreamt I saw at least one. But this morning I’ve forgotten it.
I suppose that soon you’ll be hanging the paintings at the Tate. I’ve never done it but I guess it’s a very hard moment. It’s difficult to hang paintings well because their therenesses compete. But apart from this difficulty, what I guess is hard is being forced to see them as exhibits. For Beuys it was OK because his collaboration was with the spectator. But for iconic works like yours it may seem, I imagine, like a dislocation, and therefore a violence. Yet don’t worry – they will hold their own. They are coming from their own place, like the train between Kilburn and Willesden Green.
With affection and respect
John
Dear John,
No one has written about the work of drawing and painting with such directness and selfless insight as you have in your last letter to me. That it’s ‘my’ work you are writing about is less important than the fact that, through your words, you acknowledge the separateness and independence of the images.
‘Thereness’ follows nothingness. It is impossible to premeditate. It is to do with the collaboration of the sitter, as you say, but also to do with the disappearance of the sitter the moment the image emerges. Is this what you mean by ‘the self-effacement of the good host’? The Fayum portraits of course emerge out of an attitude to life and death quite different from our own. In the pyramids there was life after death and the life was in the ‘thereness’ of the portraits. If there is something of this quality in the painting of Pilar it has more to do with the processes I am involved with than trying to paint a certain picture.
Pilar came to sit for me some years ago. She comes two mornings a week. For the first two or three years I drew from her. Then I started to paint her. Painting consists of working over the whole board quickly, trying to relate what was happening on the board to what I thought I was seeing. The paint is mixed before starting – there is always more than one board around to start another version. The process goes on a long time, sometimes a year or two. Though other things are happening in my life which affect me, the image that I might leave appears moments after scraping, as a response to a slight change of movement or light. Similarly with the landscape paintings. The subject is visited many times and lots of drawings are made, mostly very quickly. The work is begun in the studio where each new drawing means a new start until, one day, a drawing appears which opens up the subject in a new way, so I work from the drawing as I do from the sitter. It’s the process I am engaged in that is important.
I’m not too worried about the hanging of the paintings. The Tate are very good at this. The experience will be very strange. I haven’t seen many of the pictures for a very long time and as the event draws closer I become more aware that the work will represent an experiment in living which has been exciting, interesting and extending so I’m not so concerned about success or failure as I am about holding myself together to keep the experiment going. This is rather difficult.
The reproductions I have had on my wall since my student days are the Rembrandt Bathsheba, a late Michelangelo drawing, the Philadelphia Cezanne, Achille Empaire by Cezanne, and a photograph of some early works by Frank Auerbach. About 20 years ago I added a head by Velazquez (Aesop) and a portrait by Delacroix. I don’t look at them much but they are there.
Yours Leon
The portrait by Delacroix is of Apasie. I almost forgot the Judgement of Solomon by Poussin.
Dear Leon,
Yes, the disappearance of the sitter at a certain moment. And you’re right, I left that out. The image takes over. And in your case the image comes through all the vicissitudes of paint, board, plastering on, drawing, and scraping off: vicissitudes which produce something so movingly close to the wear and tear of life. So the image unpremeditatedly, as you say, takes over. And the slow process of discovering what is there without disturbing it, begins. Sometimes of destroying what’s there without disturbing it. (Eavesdroppers may consider us mad, but it’s true.) Then after all that, or during all that, isn’t there something else happening? The sitter – who may be a train, a church, a swimming pool – comes back through the canvas! It’s as if she disappears, vanishes, merges with everything else – takes a long journey on a kind of Inner Circle (which may last months or a year) and then re-emerges in the stuff with which all this time you’ve been struggling. Or am I again being too simple?
The ‘sitter’ is at first here and now. Then she disappears and (sometimes) comes back there, inseparable from every mark on the painting.
After she has ‘disappeared’ a drawing or two are the only clues about where she may have gone. And of course sometimes they’re not enough, and she never comes back …
Yes, at our age the most important thing is to ‘hold things together’ to ‘keep the experiment going’. And it’s (most of the time) rather difficult.
I guess the Bathsheba is the one where she’s holding a letter? And on her forearm she’s wearing a bracelet which, in a way I can’t understand but probably you can, is the keystone of the whole painting? And that marvellous rear leg in shadow, and everything tentative except her body.
My friend the Spanish painter, Barceló, has made a whole book of reliefs with a text in Braille to be felt with the fingers by those who are blind. And this makes me see that if a blind person felt Bathsheba’s body and then felt Pilar’s or Cathy’s, they would have the sensation of touching similar flesh. And this similarity is not to do with a similar way of painting but with a comparable respect for flesh, paint and their vicissitudes, their endless vicissitudes. The Aesop of Velazquez I too have lived with for years. A strange coincidence, Leon, no?
And again, at a level which has nothing to do with method, I see something in common between Aesop and your brother Chaim (1993). Something said by their presence. ‘He observes, watches, recognises, listens to what surrounds him and is exterior to him, and at the same time he ponders within, ceaselessly arranging what he has perceived, trying to find a sense which goes beyond the five senses with which he was born. The sense found in what he sees, however precarious and ambiguous it may be, is his only real possession.’
Last week I was looking at Aesop in Madrid, in the same room as the head of a deer, in the same life as Willesden and a children’s swimming pool.
Tell me how you are.
I salute you! (Incorrigible Latin that I am in my exuberance, blackness notwithstanding.) John.
PS: What sort of music do you like?
Dear John,
Thank you for your letter. I am still thinking about ‘thereness’ and the Velazquez portrait of Aesop. Referring to a book on the artist I noticed that the author writes ‘the picture is by no means a portrait but rather an amalgam of literary and visual sources successfully disguised under a veneer of realism’. Art historians can get away with anything! So I went back to Pacheco, the painter and father-in-law of Velazquez – who wrote – ‘I keep to nature for everything and in the case of my son-in-law who follows this course one can see how he differs from all the rest because he always works from life’, and later ‘those who have excelled as draughtsmen will excel in this field’ (portraits).
Reading Pacheco, one realises that Velazquez must have been drawing continuously and it becomes possible to begin to understand how the image of Aesop might have emerged in a few moments at the end of a long day’s painting, as the artist turned away from the work he was engaged upon, to encounter this extraordinary person who had entered the studio. Velazquez was the ultimate example of the artist working at speed turning drawing into painting like Degas and Manet after him. Drawing from life in paint becomes ‘thereness’.
And there’s something else – the effort of your friend Barceló on behalf of the blind reminds me that recently I heard a blind man talking on the radio about his experience of light. He said: ‘Reassuring, encouraging peop
le makes a kind of light.’ (I know this is not what you are saying but doesn’t ‘touch’ produce a kind of light also?) This blind man knew somehow that light would occur through the deepening of his relationship with the outside world. And so it is with painting. It is impossible to set out to paint light. Light in a painting makes its own appearance. It occurs as a result of a resolution of the relationships within the work. The painter might be driven by anxiety but the light in the final work (I’m thinking of Cezanne) is as much a surprise to him as it is a delight to us. In a sense, before the work is resolved, the painter is, in a certain way, blind.
It is possible we become more ‘Latin’ as we grow older. In my case I wish it was the other way round. Perhaps not. These days I feel I should have been born nearer the Mediterranean in the first place.
Yours, Leon
9
Vincent
Is it still possible to write more words about him? I think of those already written, mine included, and the answer is ‘No’. If I look at his paintings, the answer is again – for a different reason – ‘No’; the canvases command silence. I almost said plead for, and that would have been false, for there is nothing pathetic about a single image he made – not even the old man with his head in his hands at the gates of eternity. All his life he hated blackmail and pathos.
Only when I look at his drawings does it seem worthwhile to add to the words. Maybe because his drawings resemble a kind of writing, and he often drew on his own letters. The ideal project would be to draw the process of his drawing, to borrow his drawing hand. Nevertheless I will try with words.
In front of a drawing, drawn in July 1888, of a landscape around the ruined abbey of Montmajour near Aries, I think I see the answer to the obvious question: Why did this man become the most popular painter in the world?
The myth, the films, the prices, the so-called martyrdom, the bright colours, have all played their part and amplified the global appeal of his work, but they are not at its origin. He is loved, I said to myself in front of the drawing of olive trees, because for him the act of drawing or painting was a way of discovering and demonstrating why he loved so intensely what he was looking at, and what he looked at during the eight years of his life as a painter (yes, only eight) belonged to everyday life.
I can think of no other European painter whose work expresses such a stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them, in some way, without referring to salvation by way of an ideal which the things embody or serve. Chardin, de la Tour, Courbet, Monet, de Staël, Miro, Jasper Johns – to name but a few – were all magisterially sustained by pictorial ideologies, whereas he, as soon as he abandoned his first vocation as a preacher, abandoned all ideology. He became strictly existential, ideologically naked. The chair is a chair, not a throne. The boots have been worn by walking. The sunflowers are plants, not constellations. The postman delivers letters. The irises will die. And from this nakedness of his, which his contemporaries saw as naivety or madness, came his capacity to love, suddenly and at any moment, what he saw in front of him. Picking up pen or brush, he then strove to realise, to achieve that love. Lover-painter affirming the toughness of an everyday tenderness we all dream of in our better moments and instantly recognise when it is framed …
Words, words. How is it visible in his practice? Return to the drawing. It’s in ink, drawn with a reed-pen. He made many such drawings in a single day. Sometimes, like this one, direct from nature, sometimes from one of his own paintings, which he had hung on the wall of his room whilst the paint was drying.
Drawings like these were not so much preparatory studies as graphic hopes; they showed in a simpler way – without the complication of handling pigment – where the act of painting could hopefully lead him. They were maps of his love.
What do we see? Thyme, other shrubs, limestone rocks, olive trees on a hillside, in the distance a plain, in the sky birds. He dips the pen into brown ink, watches, and marks the paper. The gestures come from his hand, his wrist, arm, shoulder, perhaps even the muscles in his neck, yet the strokes he makes on the paper are following currents of energy which are not physically his and which only become visible when he draws them. Currents of energy? The energy of a tree’s growth, of a plant’s search for light, of a branch’s need for accommodation with its neighbouring branches, of the roots of thistles and shrubs, of the weight of rocks lodged on a slope, of the sunlight, of the attraction of the shade for whatever is alive and suffers from the heat, of the Mistral from the north which has fashioned the rock strata. My list is arbitrary; what is not arbitrary is the pattern his strokes make on the paper. The pattern is like a fingerprint. Whose?
It is a drawing which values precision – every stroke is explicit and unambiguous – yet it has totally forgotten itself in its openness to what it has met. And the meeting is so close you can’t tell whose trace is whose. A map of love indeed.
Two years later, three months before his death, he painted a small canvas of two peasants digging the earth. He did it from memory because it refers back to the peasants he painted five years earlier in Holland and to the many homages he paid throughout his life to Millet. It is also, however, a painting whose theme is the kind of fusion we find in the drawing.
The two men digging are painted in the same colours – potato brown, spade grey and the faded blue of French work clothes – as the field, the sky and the distant hills. The brush strokes describing their limbs are identical to those which follow the dips and mounds of the field. The two men’s raised elbows become two more crests, two more hillocks, against the horizon.
The painting is not of course declaring these men to be ‘clods of earth’, the term used by many citizens at that epoch to insult peasants. The fusion of the figures with the ground refers fiercely to the reciprocal exchange of energy that constitutes agriculture, and which explains, in the long term, why agricultural production cannot be submitted to purely economic law. It may also refer – by way of his own love and respect for peasants – to his own practice as a painter.
During his whole short life he had to live and gamble with the risk of self-loss. The wager is visible in all the self-portraits. He looks at himself as a stranger, or as something he has stumbled upon. His portraits of others are more personal, their focus more close-up. When things went too far, and he lost himself utterly, the consequences, as the legend reminds us, were catastrophic. And this is evident too in the paintings and drawings he made at such moments. Fusion became fission. Everything crossed everything else out.
When he won his wager – which was most of the time – the lack of contours around his identity allowed him to be extraordinarily open, allowed him to become permeated by what he was looking at. Or is that wrong? Maybe the lack of contours allowed him to lend himself, to leave and enter and permeate the other. Perhaps both processes occurred – once again as in love.
Words. Words. Return to the drawing by the olive trees. The ruined abbey is, I think, behind us. It is a sinister place – or would be if it were not in ruins. The sun, the Mistral, lizards, cicadas, the occasional hoopoe bird, are still cleaning its walls (it was dismantled during the French Revolution), still obliterating the trivia of its one-time power and insisting upon the immediate.
As he sits with his back to the monastery looking at the trees, the olive grove seems to close the gap and to press itself against him. He recognises the sensation – he has often experienced it, indoors, outdoors, in the Borinage, in Paris or here in Provence. To this pressing – which was perhaps the only sustained intimate love he knew in his lifetime – he responds with incredible speed and the utmost attention. Everything his eye sees, he fingers. And the light falls on the touches on the vellum paper just as it falls on the pebbles at his feet – on one of which (on the paper) he will write Vincent.
Within the drawing today there seems to be what I have to call a gratitude, which is hard to name. Is it the place’s, his or ours?
10
Michelangelo
The four kinds of space Michelangelo played with on the ceiling – the space of bas-relief, the space of high-relief, the corporeal space of the twenty nudes whom he dreamt as a beatitude as he lay painting on his back, and the infinite space of the heavens – these distinct spaces are now clearer and more astonishingly articulated than they were before. Articulated, Marisa, with the aplomb of a master snooker player! And if the ceiling had been badly cleaned, this would have been the first thing lost.
I’ve discovered something else too: it leaps to the eye but no one quite faces up to it. Perhaps because the Vatican is so formally imposing. Between its worldly wealth on one hand, and its list of eternal punishments on the other, the visitor is made to feel exceedingly small. The excessive riches of the Church and the excessive punishments the Church prescribed were really complementary. Without Hell, the wealth would have appeared as Theft! Anyway, visitors today from all over the world are so awed they forget about their little things.
But not Michelangelo. He painted them, and he painted them with such love they became focal points, so that for centuries after his death, the Papal authorities had one male sex after another in the Sistine Chapel covertly scratched out or painted over. Happily there are still quite a few that remain.
During his lifetime he was referred to as ‘the sublime genius’. Even more than Titian he assumed – at the very last possible historical moment – the Renaissance role of the artist as supreme creator. His exclusive subject was the human body, and for him that body’s sublimity lay revealed in the male sexual organ.
