Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  This is perhaps the best place to refer to the artists who influenced Léger: the artists who helped him to develop the means with which to express his unusual vision. I have already mentioned Michelangelo: for Léger he was the example of an artist who created an heroic, epic art based exclusively on man. Picasso and Braque, who invented Cubism, were also indispensable examples. Cubism may have meant something different to its inventors (theirs was perhaps a more consciously arthistorical approach and was more closely connected with an admiration for African art) but nevertheless Cubism supplied Léger with his twentieth-century visual language. The last important influence was that of the Douanier Rousseau: the naïve Sunday painter who was treated as a joke or, later, thought to be ‘delightful’, but who believed himself to be a realist.

  It would be foolish to exaggerate the realist element in Rousseau if one is using the word realist in its usual sense. Rousseau was quite uninterested in social issues or politics. His realism, as he believed it to be, was in no sense a protest against a specific set of social or ideological lies. But nevertheless there are elements in Rousseau’s art which in a long historical perspective can be seen to have extended the possibilities of painting certain aspects of reality, to use them and transform them for his own purpose.

  I will try briefly to explain what these elements were — for the connection between Léger and Rousseau is not yet sufficiently recognized. Rousseau can be termed an amateur artist in so far as he was untrained and both his social and financial position precluded him from having any place at all in the official cultural hierarchy of France. Measured by official standards he was not only totally unqualified to be an artist but also pathetically uncultured. All that he inherited was the usual stale deposit of petit-bourgeois clichés. His imagination, his imaginative experience, was always in conflict with his received culture. (If I may add a personal parenthesis, I would suggest that such conflicts have not yet been properly understood or described; which is one of the reasons why I chose such a conflict as the theme of my novel Corker’s Freedom.1) Every picture that Rousseau painted was a testimony to the existence of an alternative, unrecognized, indeed as yet unformulated culture. This gave his work a curious, self-sufficient and uninhibited conviction. (A little similar in this, though in nothing else, to some of the works of William Blake.) Rousseau had no method to rely on if his imagination failed him: he had no art with which to distract attention, if the idea he was trying to communicate was weak. The idea of any given picture was all that he had. (One begins to realize the intensity of these ideas by the story of how he became terrified in his little Parisian room when he was painting a tiger in the jungle.) One might say — exaggerating with a paradox — that Rousseau made all the other artists of his time look like mere virtuosos. And it was probably the strength of Rousseau’s ‘artlessness’ which first appealed to Léger, for Léger also was an artist with surprisingly little facility, for whom the ideas of his art were also constant and primary, and whose work was designed to testify to the existence of an alternative, unrecognized culture.

  There was, then, a moral affinity between Rousseau and Léger. There was also a certain affinity of method. Rousseau’s style had very little to do with the Fine Arts as they were then recognized: as little to do with the fine arts as the circus has with the Comédie Française. Rousseau’s models were postcards, cheap stage scenery, shop signs, posters, fairground and café decorations. When he paints a goddess, a nude, it has far more to do — iconographically but not of course emotionally — with the booth of any Fat Lady at a fair than with a Venus by Titian. He made an art of visual wonder out of the visual scraps sold to and foisted upon the petty bourgeoisie. It has always seemed over-romantic to me to call such scraps popular art: one might just as well call second-hand clothes popular couture! But the important point is that Rousseau showed that it was possible to make works of art using the visual vocabulary of the streets of the Parisian suburbs instead of that of the museums. Rousseau of course used such a vocabulary because he knew no other. Léger chose a similar vocabulary because of what he wanted to say. Rousseau’s spirit was nostalgic (he looked back to a time when the world was as innocent as he) and his ambience was that of the nineteenth century. Léger’s spirit was prophetic (he looked forward to the time when everyone would understand what he understood) and the atmosphere of his work belongs to this century. But nevertheless as painters they often both use similar visual prototypes. The posed group photograph as taken by any small-town photographer; the placing of simple theatrical props to conjure up a whole scene — Rousseau makes a jungle out of plants in pots, Léger makes a countryside out of a few logs: the clear-cut poster where everything must be defined — so that it can be read from a distance — and mystery must never creep into the method of drawing: flags and banners to make a celebration: brightly coloured prints of uniforms or dresses — in the pictures of Rousseau and Léger all the clothes worn are easily identifiable and there is a suggested pride in the wearing of them which belongs essentially to the city street. There is also a similarity in the way both artists painted the human head itself. Both tend to enlarge and simplify the features, eyes, nose, mouth, and in doing this, because the mass of people think of a head as a face and a face as a sequence of features to be read like signs — ‘shifty eyes’, ‘smiling mouth’ — both come far nearer to the popular imagination of the storyteller, the clown, the singer, the actor, than to the ‘ideal proportions’ of the ‘Fine’ artist.

  Lastly, one further element in Rousseau’s art which seems to have been important for Léger: its happiness. Rousseau’s paintings are affirmative and certain: they reject and dispel all doubt and anxiety: they express none of the sense of alienation that haunted Degas, Lautrec, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso. The probable reason for this is simple but surprising: Rousseau was so innocent, so idealistic that it was the rest of the world and its standards which struck him as absurd, never his own unlikely vision. His confidence and credulity and good-naturedness survived, not because he was treated well — he was treated appallingly — but because he was able to dismiss the corruption of the world around him as an absurd accident. Léger also wanted to produce an art which was positive and hopeful. His reasoning was very different; it was based on the acceptance and understanding of facts rather than their rejection; but except for Rousseau, there was no other nineteenth- or twentieth-century artist to whom he could look for support and whose fundamental attitude was one of celebration.

  In a certain sense Léger’s art is extremely easy to appreciate, and all efforts to explain it therefore run the danger of becoming pretentious. There is less obscurity in Léger’s work than in that of any of his famous contemporaries. The difficulties are not intrinsic. They arise from our conditioned prejudices.

  We inherit the Romantic myth of the genius and therefore find his work ‘mechanical’ and ‘lacking in individuality’. We expect a popular artist to use the style of debased magazine illustration, and therefore find his work ‘formalistic’. We expect socialist art to be a protest and so find his work ‘lacking in contradiction’. (The contradiction is in fact between what he shows to be possible and what he knew existed.) We expect his work to be ‘modern’ and therefore fail to see that it is often tender in the simplest manner possible. We are used to thinking of art in an ‘intimate’ context and therefore find his epic, monumental style ‘crude’ and ‘oversimplified’.

  I would like to end with a quotation from Léger himself. Everything I have said is only a clumsy elaboration of this text.

  I am certain that we are not making woolly prophecies: our vision is very like the reality of tomorrow. We must create a society without frenzy, a society that is calm and ordered, that knows how to live naturally within the Beautiful, without protestations or romanticism, quite naturally. We are going towards it; we must bend our efforts towards that goal. It is a religion more universal than the others, made of tangible, definite, human joys, free from the troubled, disappointme
nt-filled mysticism of the old ideals which are slowly disappearing every day, leaving the ground free for us to construct our religion of the Future.

  1963

  Thicker than Water (Corot)

  Any critic who attacks Corot does so at his own risk. This is not because Corot was a giant. Clearly he wasn’t. It is because in one way or another Corot has won his modest way into the hearts of all those who love painting. For the very sentimental, those for whom all art is a Swan Lake, there are the nymphs beneath the birches (silver); for the realists there are his pellucid landscape sketches coming between Constable and the Impressionists; for the romantics there are his nudes in the grass studio; for the classicists there are his Italianate muses in costume; and for the moralists there is the man himself, his humility, his great generosity, his keeping of Daumier after that dangerous seer had gone blind, his support for Millet’s widow, his friendliness and helpfulness to all but the pretentious.

  In fact I have no wish to attack Corot. To attack such a man is a form of historical hooliganism. What I do want to do is define his art and give his gifts their proper name. What I have to say is not original. But it is too often forgotten.

  Corot was initially a weak draughtsman. He got by with making notations. A little mark here connected with a little mark there. He was unable to grasp his subjects. He was like a mouse trying to come to terms with an elephant. In his early Italian landscape sketches, which he painted on the spot and which certain Corot purists claim as his best work, this always seems to me to be very evident. There is also their marvellous tonal accuracy which allows them to cup the air in their hands. But Corot’s eye for tone was again an eye for comparison: this tone here with that tone there. It is still a form of piecemeal notation, of matching and pinning. True, the influence of Poussin makes him stop before one sense rather than another, but it does not embolden him to take any liberties for the sake of art with what Nature presents him.

  Up to about 1840 you can see the same thing in his figure paintings. Even in his exquisite portraits of children. I nevertheless say ‘exquisite’ because the large burly Corot is on his hands and knees, on exactly the same level as his models, putting their small shapes down on to the canvas as tentatively as a small girl might enter a dark room, and such matter-of-fact gentleness is exquisite. But the painting is still frail; frail like a much darned garment. It is still piecemeal mending and stitching.

  Then in the middle 1840s, when Corot himself is nearly fifty, he achieves mastery in his craft. To himself the change was perhaps imperceptible. But to us it is clear. It is no longer a question of stitching. He can now cut the material to his own measure. He now sees his figures complete from their very inception. Consequently they have their due weight. Their patient hands really lie in their laps as they dream or read. In his own shy way he can now even afford to be extravagant. He pins distracting, eye-catching decorations upon them, a garland of leaves catching the light, a flutter of loose material by the bodice, an emphasized red stripe in the skirt, and these charming frivolities do not destroy the form or seriousness of the figure as a whole.

  In his landscapes he intensifies the atmosphere. His earlier landscapes are topographical in so far as everyone can plan his own route across them. In the landscapes of this period you must follow Corot. You must enter at that moment of delight at which he entered. (This question of Corot’s paintings recapturing the specific moment of discovery is far more relevant to his relationship with the Impressionists than the mere fact that he painted out of doors; it also relates him to later painters like Bonnard and Sickert.)

  Within ten years of acquiring this mastery, Corot became successful. And, instead of using his mastery, instead of making discoveries that could really have extended human awareness (as Géricault had done and Courbet was doing), he relapsed. He started his prodigious production of salon nymphs and glades. These were gauze and chiffon work, tacked together with flimsy, loose threads. They had neither the virtue of the darning nor the energy of the cutting period. They were consolations. He wrote:

  In the next room there is a pretty girl who comes and goes at my will. She is Folly, my invisible companion, whose youth is eternal and whose fidelity never wearies.

  Why was Corot at first so excessively tentative, and then why, when he could have taken huge steps forward, did he draw back? It would be quite unjust to say that he sold out. Despite his great success, he still believed in what he was doing. As a man he still impressed everyone by his purity. And out of his sales, whilst living modestly himself, he financed all his good works and charities.

  No, the answer is more subtle and less insulting. Corot remained a petit-bourgeois. Matching, pinning, sewing, he was never quite able to shake off the effect of his father’s drapery business and his mother’s dress-shop.

  In 1846 when Corot was decorated with the Legion of Honour, his father — according to Théophile Sylvestre — at first thought the cross was for himself:

  When he realized that the government had deigned to cast a benevolent eye on his son, who at fifty was still not earning enough to pay for his colours, he said: ‘My son — a man who has been decorated has duties towards society. I hope that you will understand them. Your negligent dress is unsuitable for one who wears the red ribbon in his buttonhole.’ A little later he said to his wife: ‘I think we ought to give a little more money to Camille.’

  Corot was certainly not the epitome of the petit-bourgeois, as was his father. Indeed this is specifically denied by those who knew him. ‘His naïve familiarity stops at exactly where that of the jovial commercial traveller would start.’ He must have hated his family’s way of life. But his reaction to it was to absent himself in dreams, in modest celibacy, in virtue — just as he absents his favourite models in reverie. I am not suggesting he was a prig — if he were, how could he have been a friend of Daumier’s? He was a petit-bourgeois only in his refusal to speculate on how the world could be changed. This explains why he was timid without being a coward. Instead of questioning, he set out to make his own peace, to avoid all contradictions. He knew it himself: ‘Delacroix is an eagle and I’m only a lark. I sing little songs in my grey clouds.’ He reveals it unconsciously when he says: ‘Charity is a still more beautiful thing than talent Besides, one benefits the other. If you have a kind heart, your work will show it.’ How comfortably without contradictions that ‘Besides’ is!

  Corot was tentative as an artist for so long because his true but excessive modesty was his answer to his class’s hypocritical obsequiousness. After all he was not really a mouse trying to come to terms with an elephant. As a landscape artist he should have been a man imposing order on nature. He drew back halfway through his career because to have gone on would have meant being involved in revolutionary changes. Impressionism was an art with a totally new basis, and it was Impressionism that stared him in the face — it was his own art that was leading him to it. His devotion to Poussin combined with his determination to be faithful to nature could conceivably even have led him beyond Impressionism to prophesy Cézanne. There are hints in Corot’s work of so much that was to come later, but they are the unconscious hints of a man who preferred not to see what was happening, what was changing around him.

  He knew after all what had befallen Daumier, Géricault, Millet, even Delacroix, and he might have guessed what was going to happen to the Impressionists. Nevertheless he could still, in the second half of the nineteenth century, write:

  If painting is a madness, it is a sweet madness which men should not merely forgive but seek out. Seeing my bright looks and my health, I defy anyone to find traces of worry, ambition or remorse, which hollow the faces of so many poor mortals. That is why one should love the art which procures calm, moral contentment and even health for those who know how to balance their lives.

  For others of the same class it has been vegetarianism, spiritualism, teetotalism …

  Corot was a lovable man. At his best he was an artist of minor genius, comparable t
o, say, Manet. And let me add — with the due modesty that ought to precede such a statement — that Corot has contributed to many people’s happiness.

  1960

  Painting a Landscape