by John Berger
The man in Munich holds the same glove in his hand as the Man with a Glove in the Louvre. But tell me, what is that snake-hat in the background? Isn’t it a Serpent?
In the Nymph and Shepherd, the nymph is lying on a fur – just as I dreamed of doing, just as I still dream of doing! Not only on a fur: on a whole animal specially stripped for me, Katya, on a just-skinned Marsyas.
Inside herself, she then becomes an animal, rejoins nature and is welcome there. Maybe William’s hand belongs to the animal, to nature, to Creation?
Anyway, I envy her, how I envy her! Lying half turned away, facing the other world – the world of the peach stone. There for ever on a canvas, at peace, still, placid in the music of nothing. Already immortal without even having had to live! Existing to be seen, yes, but only as her Creator decides – exhibited and protected at the same time! Focus of the craziest phantasms and interpretations, lending herself to other minds yet, at the same time, unalterable, immutable.
Supposing when we are dead we are able to reincarnate in paintings or music, and not only in other human beings. Wouldn’t it be better? Come to think of it, you don’t have to die to do this. It’s enough to make the effort now of joining the universe of objects! And what could be more peaceful?
It seems that on Mount Athos, where no woman is allowed to set foot, there’s an inscription on one of the monasteries:
‘If you die before dying, you do not die at the moment of death.’
Take care. All my love, Kut
PARIS
Kut,
With the rendezvous which you suggest – half turned away, resting on your arm, facing another world (the world of the peach stones), lying on Marsyas, peaceful, still, without a sound in the music of nothing, a rendezvous on the far side of waking up, with this rendezvous you’d seduce any man! And maybe that’s why it’s so much a painting about seduction. Not the shepherd seducing the nymph, or the nymph the shepherd. It’s the two of them with the old man seducing anyone who passes. Seducing with the promise of seduction.
Today I’m sending you two postcards which are also about seduction. The portrait of the young Isabella d’Este. The old man painted her from imagination and from other portraits of her, when she was in fact sixty! And the Girl in a Fur, a portrait of a ‘Venetian Courtesan’. The model was one of Titian’s favourites at the time. When he painted it, he was forty-seven years old.
All my love, John
ATHENS
John,
The painting of Isabella d’Este is to me more like a floral arrangement, a composition of textures, than a portrait of a real noblewoman, closer to Arcimboldo than to Velasquez. Is this the result of painting a portrait from imagination instead of from a model?
What makes it strange, however, is that its thrust is neither metaphysical (as with Arcimboldo) nor decorative. Once again, he wants us to touch the stuff, to put our hand inside – like Saint Thomas into the wound of Christ. He wants to make us feel it as palpable. And this is why dressed figures are sometimes nearer to nakedness than certain undressed ones. The more palpable, the more naked.
The epitome of such ‘palpability’ is reached when he combines naked flesh with thick fur, as on the second postcard. Here we’re at the height of pictorial eroticism. We drown in it.
The paleness of flesh against the darkness of fur, hair married to the pearls within it, the breast with its scarcely visible transparency and its discretion, which is nothing else but invitation, the eyes darker than jewels, and, finally, the slash in the sleeve, whose opening, pointed at by her fingers, is luminous and curly, artless and affected. Everything here implies pleasure – including the ring on the finger and the metal bracelet round the plump wrist.
Jewels remind us, don’t they, of the pleasure we’ll lose when we’re dead, and how they and their precious stones will still be here? They console a body for its vulnerability. Come on, say the jewels, wear us and we’ll lend you some of our immutability.
(The way she holds her waist is consoling, too – as if she were very gently rocking herself. I do exactly this after suffering some humiliation or slight abuse.)
Jewels function a little like the old man’s art. They make flesh more flesh, they defy the raw perfection of nature, they mock mortality and they almost – but not quite alas! – reach eternity, from which everything comes and to which everything returns. Both his art and jewels are a human response to the arrogance of God, to God’s monopoly in Creation, to his implacable running of our destinies.
Love, K.
TRAIN: GENEVA – PARIS
Kut,
Might it be that all flesh is feminine – even the flesh of men? Maybe what is specifically male are men’s fantasies, ambitions, ideas, obsessions. Could their flesh be female?
Love, John
ATHENS
John,
Titian, painter of flesh and guts, their rumblings and liquids. Painter of hair and the tamed beast in man. Painter of the skin as an entry or exit – like the shining surface of water for the diver, the surface to which he comes back after his dive to the depths of the body and its hidden organs, comes back with the secret of a personality. (Just look how much his portraits of men say about their inner life!)
So, you have come to think that all flesh is feminine! The idea is, God knows, merely the result of a vast and ancient plot! Of course flesh is not only feminine! Maybe if women throughout the centuries have remained desirable – and you haven’t grown tired of it! – this is partly due to this persistent lie, as old as the world, which proposes that flesh is a feminine attribute. But it’s a pure convention, whereby men use the bodies of women to speak of their own passive desires, their desire to behave with abandon, to lie suppliant on a bed. Men have delegated to women this aspect of lust. The woman’s body has become, not only the object but also the ambassador of masculine desire. Or, rather, simply of desire, regardless of gender. (The skin of men, where it is soft – have you noticed? – is softer than the skin of women …)
Everywhere, female figures arch and wiggle themselves to embody something that transcends the sexes. Danaë, the nymphs, Venus, and even Mary, who poses piously as she receives Gabriel’s message, but who expresses exactly the same thing in each and every Annunciation: the desire that calls out, that begs, that offers its own vulnerability, its neck, its veins, its health (as in Dracula), its ‘virtue’ as the prudes would call it. Marsyas is a violent and extreme expression of the same passion. Of a wild fantasy for fusion. Apollo couldn’t bear his desire for the satyr any longer! Both were male, both musicians. They had to meet under the skin, if not under the sheets. There you are: that is my version of the story! In other words, what Marsyas’ torturers are waiting to look at is what you call feminine flesh!
In other words, if flesh became synonymous with femininity it was, I guess, less because of its texture than because man needed its qualities to express a hidden side of his own desire. The reason men have painted so many nudes is not only to enjoy being voyeurs, but to confess the unconfessable about themselves!
I believe that women became more attractive, more sexy when they were made to reveal indirectly this unavowed desire that both male and female share. They became beautiful when this prescription of universal sexuality was tattooed upon their white and flabby flesh!
Titian was the painter of flesh which commands rather than invites. ‘Take me.’ ‘Drink me,’ it orders. He may have disguised himself for me as an old man or as a dog, but he also disguised himself in women. Titian as Mary Magdalene, as Aphrodite!
And here I think we come close to something concerning his power: he wore the disguise of everything he painted. He was trying to be everywhere. Competing with God. He wanted to create from his palette nothing less than life, and to rule over the universe. And his despair (the doubt you asked about) was that he couldn’t, like Pan, be everything. He could only create pictorially and wear disguises. His fear was of being only a man, not a god as well, not a woman as well, not a forest
as well, not a mist, not a lump of earth. Of being only a man!
Danaë’s breast – so marvellous, so suggestive, and so impalpable – reveals, at one and the same time, all the limits and the triumph of his pictorial creation when compared with God’s.
I love you, Katya
PARIS
Kut,
Do you remember me telling you about La Polonaise? Bogena, she’s called. She comes from a farm in eastern Poland. She came to Paris to work as a cleaner in people’s flats – often the flats of well-off Russian émigrés. Now she lives with Robert, who is an engineer, also from eastern Poland. Here in Paris, he works as a builder. Black labour. They live together in a studio flat in a suburb. Fifth floor – no lift. The flat, which is no bigger than a caravan, has seventy, eighty paraffin lamps arranged like ikons along the walls. All of them were bought in flea markets, then repaired, cleaned, polished and given new wicks. When he comes home in the evening, Robert lights four or five of them, and they sit for a moment to watch the flames.
Two evenings ago, Bogena and Robert came to spend the evening because it was the Russian New Year. They brought red, crystal glasses as a present. And sausages and wine. Sitting at the table whilst they spoke Russian, I tried to draw Bogena. Not for the first time. I always fail, because her face is very mobile and I can’t forget her beauty. And to draw well, you have to forget that.
It was long past midnight when they left. As I was doing my last drawing, Robert said ‘This is your last chance tonight, just draw her, John, draw her like a man!’ When they had gone, I took the least bad drawing and started working on it with colours – acrylic. With four tubes, water, and my fingers. Suddenly, like a weather-vane swinging round because the wind has changed, the portrait began to look like something. Her ‘likeness’ now was in my head – and all I had to do was to draw it out, not look for it. The paper tore. I rubbed on paint sometimes as thick as ointment. Her face began to lend itself to, to smile at, its own representation. At four in the morning, it smiled back at me.
Next day, the frail piece of paper, heavy with paint, still looked good. In the daylight, there were a few nuances of tone to change. Colours applied at night sometimes tend to be too desperate – like shoes pulled off without being untied. Now it was finished.
From time to time during the day, I’d go and look at it: Bogena’s face had made a present of what it could leave behind of itself.
But if my drawing had been a great one, it would have been even closer to the energy of Bogena’s face. When I say closer, I don’t mean more naturalistic or more faithful. All great works, the works that can hold us in their thrall indefinitely, are similarly close to what they are after. The old man’s painting of dogs, one of Rothko’s late, large paintings of a coloured glow, or a Hokusai drawing of a couple fucking, are all equally close to their aim. They are as close as one can get.
In theory, something could be closer (the distance is still considerable), but then there would be, could be, no image – because at a closer distance, you can no longer separate, no longer resist the colossal gravitational pull of the ‘model’ – whatever that model is, a pup, transcendent light, or the act of fucking. When you are so close that you are touching all the time, there can be no art. And when you are really far away, there’s no energy in what is made, it’s merely a ritual object, because there’s no touching at all.
Having said all this about the intimacy from which images may be born, I come to your point about TOUCH, about which the old man knew everything. In the Entombment, Christ’s body palpitates from within in the same way as Danaë’s. But the painting evokes Pity instead of Desire. Desire and Pity. Strangely, both provoke a similar kind of touching! The old man knew this, too.
Je t’embrasse, John
ATHENS
John
What makes a body seduce you, or a written page absorb you till you drown in it, or a canvas live, move, speak, and radiate until it draws you into its own space is, in each case, their special way of being themselves, of being inseparable from themselves. Of not giving a damn about the onlooker. Of not waiting on anyone else. Of being themselves as if they were alone in the world.
Such a power to seduce has a stance which is practically that of scorn towards the spectator and towards all codes, manners, and measures. Every onlooker, in face of such a power, is, by definition, an intruder, somebody who has surprised something in a state of total intimacy with itself, in a state of both truth and transparency.
What delights a man about the sensuality of a woman – whether or not it involves the act of love – is the way her gestures, her intonations, her prescience, derive from the depths of her being, from her childhood perhaps, from what she is in her own dreams, from how she may be when she is asleep alone! The man is overjoyed to have witnessed this. (What I say about men may be true about women, too, but I’ve more often asked myself what it is that has delighted the man lying beside me than the other way around, to the point where it sometimes seems I know men better than I know myself.) He has received a gift, or, let’s say, he has had the nous to have taken in something which was private, buried, virgin.
Each gesture of a woman is the sum of all her secret gestures, and a man’s pleasure is being in on the secret. And the opposite? It seems to me that the woman’s pleasure has more to do with her secret being discovered, with something in her which was buried and asleep being awakened. Maybe this is where ‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, and other stories begin.
Far more than a man, she is like the page which invites, the canvas which appeals. This is maybe why her body has so often been represented in art. Not just because most of the artists were men, but because here there is something essential in the relation between the sexes: the woman inseparable from herself, and the man looking over her, finding pleasure in her immediacy!
Pictures by Rothko and Titian, but also by Courbet, possess this quality. They are so completely themselves that they contain all the vertical depth of their being. They exclude any reference to rule or obedience. Snapping their fingers at others, they simply exist with us or without us. We have an interest in discovering their secret and their inner truth, but they, they don’t give a fuck, tyrannical as they are, faithful only to themselves, inevitable. They owe their existence only to themselves, tautologically! A little like God. (Hence perhaps the ‘fatality’ of femmes fatales?)
Titian here is the god behind God; his painting, like nature, has its own laws, delivers – or doesn’t deliver – its own unsharable secrets, so true to itself that it needs no justification, no explanation, no story! It’s there in front of us, clear, enigmatic, as solid as a mass of irrefutable matter, a pure product of itself – in all its verticality!
Does this make any sense to you?
I believe the success of a painting depends far less on any closeness to its model, to what it aims at and represents, than on its closeness to a self, to the self’s memory and gaze and truth. A painter painting is like a canvas which radiates, a page which invites, a woman who glows: he’s faithful to himself: he filters nothing, he must stick to his own perception and imagination and his own five senses. If he dams up nothing, his secret will open on the surface of the canvas, and it’s this, in all its nakedness, which will entice. If an artist is true to what lies deepest in him, like the coal at the bottom of a mine, his work invites.
I’m not preaching some magic, occult theory whereby artists should ignore technique and everyone is really a potential Picasso. Far from it. Simply, we are all capable of sensuality, aren’t we, and a kind of inner transparency might make each of us more desirable.
Here, and certainly in art, a certain savoir-faire is indispensable. The thing is to play with the techniques one has acquired to re-become naive, to unlearn as well as learn. A cat is spell-binding by virtue of her natural grace alone. A ham actor turns you off with his tricks.
Art attracts and sweeps away with its mastery, but it’s mastery put to the service of something naked,
secret, true, virgin, never-before-seen – something which almost comes from a violation. And art does this involuntarily; it can’t do otherwise. It makes a hole in the paper – like you with your drawing of Bogena.
There are people who know how to live like that, too. They learn, they quote, they consult, and all the while they stay in touch with their own essence. There remains something untreated and unconscious about them. When they listen, they are like wells; when they speak, they do so like fountains. When they move, it’s like hearing a voice, and when they concentrate (shaving or tightening a screw or copying a poem), they give off the same mystery as a priest does performing a liturgy. The old man I met was like this. And you are, too. (Here I give away the clue to our correspondence.)
To be intimate is to re-find in oneself that which is most hidden and private; intimacy can also imply a marvellous, narrow relationship between two people. To be intimate is a way of listening to one’s internal sense, of listening to one’s own dialogue between the said and the unsaid. The second jubilant intimacy, the one which is (occasionally) shared, implies two listenings, two dialogues which overlap and couple.
To put it differently, my argument is that such intimacy is the sine qua non for any INVITATION, whether it concerns art or bodies or (probably) souls. And without the first – intimacy with oneself – no other is possible …
The late paintings of Titian are, I’m sure, the fruits of an individual intimacy. For him, whatever his disguise, for him, the man of power, the intimacy of feeding his art came from keeping marvellously in touch with his own truth.
Show me – it’s a challenge – a painting which is the fruit of a shared intimacy between two people. Could you?
Love, Katya
PARIS
Kut,
You end your letter by challenging me to name a painting in which we see or are allowed to feel a shared, double intimacy – that of painter and model, simultaneously.
