Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ – pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore tears of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.5

  The poverty of the 1930s has passed. But in many parts of the north-west today there is a sense of profound exhaustion. There is nothing Spenglerian about this: it is the result of the scale of what has to be destroyed before anything can be renewed. Town-planners, investors, educationalists know it. I quote from the government’s North-West Study, published in 1965:

  Slums, general obsolescence, dereliction and neglect all add up to a formidable problem of environmental renewal extending over a wide area of the region. It is plain that this problem cannot be disposed of in a few years and the question which arises is whether it is feasible to break the back of it in, say, ten to 15 years or whether the turn of another century will find Lancashire still struggling under the grim heritage of the industrial revolution.

  In a different way many of the voters know it too. They have always voted Labour, believing in an alternative plan. Today they see Wilson thirty-five years later performing the same role as Ramsay MacDonald and abandoning any possibility of an alternative.

  Historians of the future will cite Lowry’s work as both expressing and illustrating the industrial and economic decline of British capitalism since the First World War. But of course he is not simply that, as described in those remote terms. He is an artist concerned with loneliness, with a certain humour – somewhat like Samuel Beckett’s: the humour found in the contemplation of time passing without meaning. He is an artist who has uniquely found a way of painting the character of hand-me-down clothes, the sensation of damp rising from the ground, the effect of smog on the texture of the surfaces exposed to it, the strange closing of distance which smoke and mist bring about so that each person carries with him his own small parcel of visibility, which constitutes his world.

  ‘My three most cherished records,’ says Lowry, ‘are the fact that I’ve never been abroad, never had a telephone and never owned a motorcar.’ He is a man strongly attached to where he found himself. Everything in his work is informed by the character of a specific place and period.

  I have tried to define that character. If Lowry were a greater artist, there would be more of himself in his work. (His ‘naïvety’ is probably an excuse for hiding his own experience.) It would then be far less possible to localize his work, either geographically or historically: emotions are always more general than circumstances. As it is, given his inhibitions as an artist, he intuitively chose correctly. He chose to paint the historic.

  1966

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

  To understand the work of Toulouse-Lautrec two current fallacies have to be demolished.

  There are those – however surprising it may seem – who still argue that, despite some unfortunate incidents, Lautrec, the illustrious son of one of the noblest families in France, remains a credit to his background.

  The second argument has more respect for the facts and the suffering involved. Even Lautrec’s last words on his death-bed at the age of thirty-seven are admitted. They were: ‘Le vieux con’ – and they referred to his father. But this argument maintains that his life was transcended by his art. In a sense this is true, but only if one also recognizes that his work was a direct expression of his life. The only miracle is art; but even in art, the facts count.

  Lautrec was born with two terrible handicaps: the family around him and the disease in his bones. His father was mad about horses and women. His mother was a martyr to his father’s infidelities. It was a family of many châteaux, but also of empty rooms and absences. The ideals it instilled in the young Lautrec were exclusively extrovert ideals of physical prowess.

  The disease struck when he was fourteen. It is sometimes thought that his legs stopped growing as the result of two falls. But recent medical opinion strongly suggests that this would have happened anyway and that the fractures were the result of an inborn dystrophic disease which was probably in its turn the result of his parents being first cousins.

  The disease transformed the boy into a monster. Adolescence, instead of being the process of becoming sexually mature, became the process of becoming sexually obscene. It was not only a question of walking on stunted legs. His body, his organs, his face, his fingers, all coarsened as though swollen with the pressure of frustrated growth. The thickness of his lips made him splutter when speaking. It was as if at the moment of first recognizing his own sex, he discovered only the final price of debauchery.

  He escaped into a Paris milieu of prostitutes, singers, dancers. This was the traditional field for the aristocrat’s other ‘sport’, but to him it offered a kind of peace. Here the absurdity of his ravenous sexual appetite could be temporarily forgotten in the business of satisfying it; here he could avoid (as he would not have been able to do in a circle of artists) all middle-class preoccupations with cause and effect, aims and purpose; here he could easily be allowed to kill himself by trying through sex and drink to achieve a momentary, impossible equality.

  His art records this milieu. But his great paintings – nearly all of women by themselves, lying or sitting on beds, dressing, waiting, gazing – amount to far more than a record. They are also intensely moving. Why? Why do these off-duty moments of old, tired prostitutes seem hallowed? There is no appeal to religion or social conscience. There is no spirituality and, in the proper sense of the word, there is no evidence of compassion. Compassion shows what lies behind. Lautrec shows only what is there in front of his eyes.

  Can we explain it by claiming that art is the pursuit of truth? Hardly, for we then have to ask what we mean by truth: and certainly Lautrec’s view of the truth was excessively limited. The truth was only what he could stare at. He was the most banally existential of all the great artists. Yet his work is never banal. The more clinical his observation, the more tender and lyrical the image becomes. Why?

  The explanation is to be found in his own condition. The reality of other people’s daily lives and bodies was for him something unapproachable. Thus it was already an ideal – and he painted it as such. The closer he came to representing a woman as she was, the more ideal she became for him.

  Lautrec, his posters apart, was no great innovator. It is the content of his best paintings which is unique. He makes us look at his models as though it were impossible to judge them (not just morally but in any way), as though they were a species never before seen, as though all we could wish to do is to watch them endlessly because they are there. We see a breast or an arm which normally we would consider prematurely worn out, and Lautrec makes us wonder whether it was not naturally and pristinely meant to be like that.

  His actual technique of painting and drawing poignantly confirms this. He took from the Impressionists the system of painting with small, separate brushmarks. In the case of the Impressionists themselves, the Pointillists and later painters like Bonnard, these brushmarks form a kind of curtain of colour and light through which the scene appears or from which it emerges. In the case of Van Gogh the brushmarks actually imitate the substance of what is being depicted and become metaphors of paint.

  Lautrec’s use of the same technique was quite different. Each brushmark is like a touch on the skin of what is being painted. The form as an idea or generalization is established by vigorously drawn contours, but all its part
icular, sensuous reality is built up by touch after touch, each qualifying the last. It is as if his models had nine skins, the ninth being paint from the touch of his sable brushes.

  His method reveals his attitude. His intelligence instantaneously recognized and intermittently defined his subject – sometimes to the point of caricature. This was the ironic gift of a man watching others hurrying past him. The process of discovering the sensuous individuality of his subject was a very much slower one: a process of imaginatively touching her, of coming as close to her as possible again and again. The tentativeness, the delicacy of each touch had more to do with diffidence than tenderness. The touches are like the timid flicks of a lizard’s tongue. The diffidence was the result of Lautrec’s certain knowledge that he could never in fact approach as an equal this creature who let him watch her.

  The resulting paintings imply an intimacy between seer and seen unparalleled in the history of art: an intimacy which precludes all judgement. This is not because the women were tired prostitutes who did not care who saw them. (They would have cared.) It is because of the intensity of Lautrec’s need to idealize. As so often, a terrible and extreme case throws light on the universal. Intimacy is in fact always an imaginative construction, and for all of us what distinguishes it from familiarity is our need to idealize. Lautrec’s need was greater and from it, paradoxically, he created his uniquely realistic art.

  1964

  Alberto Giacometti

  The week after Giacometti’s death Paris-Match published a remarkable photograph of him which had been taken nine months earlier. It shows him alone in the rain, crossing the street near his studio in Montparnasse. Although his arms are through the sleeves, his raincoat is hoiked up to cover his head. Invisibly, underneath the raincoat, his shoulders are hunched.

  The immediate effect of the photograph, published when it was, depended upon it showing the image of a man curiously casual about his own well-being. A man with crumpled trousers and old shoes, ill-equipped for the rain. A man whose preoccupations took no note of the seasons.

  But what makes the photograph remarkable is that it suggests more than that about Giacometti’s character. The coat looks as though it has been borrowed. He looks as though underneath the coat he is wearing nothing except his trousers. He has the air of a survivor. But not in the tragic sense. He has become quite used to his position. I am tempted to say ‘like a monk’, especially since the coat over his head suggests a cowl. But the simile is not accurate enough. He wore his symbolic poverty far more naturally than most monks.

  Every artist’s work changes when he dies. And finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive. Sometimes one can read what his contemporaries had to say about it. The difference of emphasis and interpretation is largely a question of historical development. But the death of the artist is also a dividing line.

  It seems to me now that no artist’s work could ever have been more changed by his death than Giacometti’s. In twenty years no one will understand this change. His work will seem to have reverted to normal – although in fact it will have become something different: it will have become evidence from the past, instead of being, as it has been for the last forty years, a possible preparation for something to come.

  The reason Giacometti’s death seems to have changed his work so radically is that his work had so much to do with an awareness of death. It is as though his death confirms his work: as though one could now arrange his works in a line leading to his death, which would constitute far more than the interruption or termination of that line – which would, on the contrary, constitute the starting point for reading back along that line, for appreciating his life’s work.

  You might argue that after all nobody ever believed that Giacometti was immortal. His death could always be deduced. Yet it is the fact which makes the difference. While he was alive, his loneliness, his conviction that everybody was unknowable, was no more than a chosen point of view which implied a comment on the society he was living in. Now by his death he has proved his point. Or – to put it a better way, for he was not a man who was concerned with argument – now his death has proved his point for him.

  This may sound extreme, but despite the relative traditionalism of his actual methods, Giacometti was a most extreme artist. The neo-Dadaists and other so-called iconoclasts of today are conventional window-dressers by comparison.

  The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality – and he was concerned with nothing else except the contemplation of reality – could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of his staring at it. The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him – it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute. It was the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly suspended between being and the truth.

  If he had been born in an earlier period, Giacometti would have been a religious artist. As it was, born in a period of profound and widespread alienation, he refused to escape through religion, which would have been an escape into the past. He was obstinately faithful to his own time, which must have seemed to him rather like his own skin: the sack into which he was born. In that sack he simply could not in all honesty overcome his conviction that he had always been and always would be totally alone.

  To hold such a view of life requires a certain kind of temperament. It is beyond me to define that temperament precisely. It was visible in Giacometti’s face. A kind of endurance lightened by cunning. If man was purely animal and not a social being, all old men would have this expression. One can glimpse something similar in Samuel Beckett’s expression. Its antithesis was what you could see in Le Corbusier’s face.

  But it is by no means only a question of temperament: it is even more a question of the surrounding social reality. Nothing during Giacometti’s lifetime broke through his isolation. Those whom he liked or loved were invited to share it temporarily with him. His basic situation – in the sack into which he was born – remained unchanged. (It is interesting that part of the legend about him tells of how almost nothing changed or was moved in his studio for the forty years he lived there. And during the last twenty years he continually recommenced the same five or six subjects.) Yet the nature of man as an essentially social being – although it is objectively proved by the very existence of language, science, culture – can only be felt subjectively through the experience of the force of change as a result of common action.

  Insofar as Giacometti’s view could not have been held during any preceding historical period, one can say that it reflects the social fragmentation and manic individualism of the late bourgeois intelligentsia. He was no longer even the artist in retreat. He was the artist who considered society as irrelevant. If it inherited his works it was by default.

  But having said all this, the works remain and are unforgettable. His lucidity and total honesty about the consequences of his situation and outlook were such that he could still save and express a truth. It was an austere truth at the final limit of human interest; but his expressing of it transcends the social despair or cynicism which gave rise to it.

  Giacometti’s proposition that reality is unshareable is true in death. He was not morbidly concerned with the process of death: but he was exclusively concerned with the process of life as seen by a man whose own mortality supplied the only perspective in which he could trust. None of us is in a position to reject this perspective, even though simultaneously we may try to retain others.

  I said that his work had been changed by his death. By dying he has emphasized and even clarified the content of his work. But the change – anyway as it seems to me at this moment – is more precise and specific than that.

  Imagine one of the portrait heads confronting you as you stand and look. Or one of the nudes standing there to be inspected, hands at her side, touchable on
ly through the thickness of two sacks – hers and yours – so that the question of nakedness does not arise and all talk of nakedness becomes as trivial as the talk of bourgeois women deciding what clothes to wear for a wedding: nakedness is a detail for an occasion that passes.

  Imagine one of the sculptures. Thin, irreducible, still and yet not rigid, impossible to dismiss, possible only to inspect, to stare at. If you stare, the figure stares back. This is also true of the most banal portrait. What is different now is how you become conscious of the track of your stare and hers: the narrow corridor of looking between you: perhaps this is like the track of a prayer if such a thing could be visualized. Either side of the corridor nothing counts. There is only one way to reach her – to stand still and stare. That is why she is so thin. All other possibilities and functions have been stripped away. Her entire reality is reduced to the fact of being seen.

  When Giacometti was alive you were standing, as it were, in his place. You put yourself at the beginning of the track of his gaze and the figure reflected this gaze back to you like a mirror. Now that he is dead, or now that you know that he is dead, you take his place rather than put yourself in it. And then it seems that what first moves along the track comes from the figure. It stares, and you intercept the stare. Yet however far back you move along the narrow path, the gaze passes through you.