Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  The houses in which he worked and their atmosphere have changed a lot. The civilization in which he lived, as distinct from the civilization to which we can read his work as a signpost, has disintegrated. His studio is now in a suburb near a supermarket. The Jas de Bouffan with its large garden and avenue of chestnuts has become an island in a sea of autoroute works. The farm at Bellevue is inhabited but overgrown, broken down, by the side of a car dump. Students camp in the Château Noir at weekends.

  The natural landscape is largely unchanged: the Mont Sainte-Victoire, the yellowy-red rocks, the characteristic pine trees are there as they are in the paintings. At first everything looks smaller than you expected. However close you get to one of Cézanne’s subjects, it still looks further away than in the painting. But after a while, when you have got used to this, when you are no longer concentrating upon the appearance at any given moment of the mountain, or the trees, or the red roof, or the path through the wood, you begin to realize that what Cézanne painted, and what you are already familiar with because of his paintings, is the genius loci of each view.

  One might suppose the houses where he painted to be haunted today by a social way of life gone for ever (fortunately). But the landscapes are haunted by their own essence. Or so it seems, because you cannot become innocent of the paintings you know. Mont Sainte-Victoire appears primordial, as does the plain beneath it. Wherever you look, you feel that you are face to face with the origin of what is in front of you. You rediscover the famous silence of Cézanne’s paintings in the age of what you are looking at. I do not mean, however, the geological origin of the mountain; I mean the origin of the visibility of the landscape before you. Through this landscape — because Cézanne used it over and over again as his raw material — you come to see what seeing means.

  Given this, it is not surprising that Cézanne’s work had to wait about fifty years for a philosopher — and not an art historian or art critic — to define its general significance. (The particular significance of each work is of course indefinable beyond or outside its own self-definition as painting.) In 1945 the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty published an essay of seventeen pages entitled Le Doute de Cézane.1 These few concentrated pages have revealed more to me about Cézanne’s painting than anything else I have ever read.

  Merleau-Ponty quotes some of Cézanne’s own remarks. Of the old masters Cézanne said: ‘They created pictures: we are attempting a piece of nature.’ Of nature he said: ‘The artist must conform to this perfect work of art. Everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it; nothing else is worth remembering.’ ‘Are you speaking of our nature?’ asked Bernard. ‘It has to do with both,’ said Cézanne. ‘But aren’t nature and art different?’ ‘I want to make them the same,’ replied Cézanne.

  At what moment can art and nature converge and become the same? Never by way of representation, for nature cannot by definition be represented; and the representational devices of art depend entirely on artistic convention. The more consistently imitative art is, the more artificial it is. Metaphoric arts are the most natural. But what is a purely visual metaphor? At what moment is green, in equal measure, a perceived concentration of colour and an attribute of grass? It is the same question as above, formulated differently.

  The answer is: at the moment of perception; at the moment when the subject of perception can admit no discontinuity between himself and the objects and space before him; at the moment at which he is an irremovable part of the totality of which he is the consciousness. ‘The landscape,’ said Cézanne, ‘thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ ‘Colour,’ he also said, ‘is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’

  The Herculean task Cézanne set himself was to prolong this moment for as long as it took him to paint his picture. And paradoxically this is why he worked so slowly and required so many sittings: he never wanted to let the logic of the painting take precedence over the continuity of perception: after each brushstroke he had to re-establish his innocence as perceiver. And since such a task is never entirely possible, he was always dogged by a greater or lesser sense of his own failure.

  What he could not realize was that in failing to paint the pictures he wanted, he heightened our awareness of the visible as it had never been heightened before. He bequeathed to us something far more valuable than masterpieces: a new consciousness of a faculty.

  In his attempt to prolong this moment, to be faithful to his ‘sensation’, to treat nature as a work of art, he abandoned the systematic usages of painting — outlines, consistent perspective, local colour, the optical conventions of impressionism, classical composition, etc. — because he reckoned that these were only ways of constructing a substitute for nature post facto. The old masters, he said, ‘replaced reality by imagination and by the abstraction which accompanies it’. Today we are so accustomed to thinking that the tradition of the old masters was challenged by increasing abstraction and finally by non-figurative art that we fail to see that Cézanne was the most fundamentally iconoclastic of all modern artists.

  Since Cézanne’s death certain discoveries by psychologists have proved how true he was to his perceptual experience. For example: the perspective we live is neither geometrical nor photographic. When we see a circle in perspective we do not see a perfect ellipse but a form which oscillates round an ellipse without being one. There is something very poignant about Cézanne, shocked in moments of doubt by his own non-conformity, fearing that his whole art was based on a personal deformity of vision, and it later being established that no painter had ever been as faithful to the actual processes by which we all see. But neither this poignancy nor the piecemeal confirmation by science of some of his innovations is central to the overall significance of his work.

  Merleau-Ponty indicates wherein this significance lies:

  He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization. He makes a basic distinction not between ‘the senses’ and ‘the understanding’ but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences. We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with ‘nature’ as our base that we construct our sciences. Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial world … He wished, as he said, to confront the sciences with the nature ‘from which they came’.2

  This nature is not chaotic; it emerges into order because of ‘the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive’. If you compare a drawing of a coat on a chair with many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire from the side of the Château Noir made during the same period, you have an exaggerated demonstration of this principle. Not surprisingly the means of rendering the forms of both coat and mountain are similar, but, more importantly, the actual configuration of the coat resembles, to a remarkable degree, that of the mountain. It is an exaggerated, even aberrant case, because Cézanne was obsessed by that mountain; but we may presume that when drawing the coat he was as faithful as usual to his own perception.

  At a different level of experience Gestalt psychology has established that in the act of seeing we organize. Nevertheless most psychologists tend to preserve the distinct categories, as applied to vision, of objectivity and subjectivity. In another essay called Eye and Mind, written fifteen years later in a village beneath Mont Sainte-Victoire, Merleau-Ponty attacks the conservative oversimplification of these categories:

  We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere … borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, ‘exterior’, foreign to one another, yet absolutely together, are ‘simultaneity’; this is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives.3

  The space, the depth
in Cézanne’s later paintings refuses to close: it remains open to ‘simultaneity’: it is full of the promise of reciprocity. If you imagine taking up a position in the space of one of his pictures, the painting offers you the organizational guidelines of what you would see as you looked backwards or sideways to where you presume you are still standing. You look up at Mont Sainte-Victoire but within the terms of the painting, within its own elements, you are aware of the opportunity and the probable configuration presented by what you would see looking down from the mountain.

  Cézanne reasserted the value, complexity and unity of what we perceive (nature) as opposed to the counterfeit simplifications and singularity of European representational art. He testified that the visibility of things belongs to each one of us: not in so far as our minds interpret signals received by our eyes: but in so far as the visibility of things is our recognition of them: and to recognize is to relate and to order. It is apt that blind has come to mean not only unseeing but also directionless.

  It seems to me that these conclusions are finally applicable to the Chinese monuments considered as things to be seen.

  To honour individual living men by making them the subject matter of naturalistic art is to render them the creatures of another’s vision instead of acknowledging them as masters of their own. And this is true whatever the cultural development of the people concerned. If comparable decisions were taken in other fields of social and cultural activity all revolutionary initiative and democracy would eventually disappear. Meanwhile the monuments may encourage production, the importance of which cannot be dismissed.

  1970

  Revolutionary Undoing

  Some fight because they hate what confronts them; others because they have taken the measure of their lives and wish to give meaning to their existence. The latter are likely to struggle more persistently. Max Raphael was a very pure example of the second type.

  He was born near the Polish–German border in 1889. He studied philosophy, political economy and the history of art in Berlin and Munich. His first work was published in 1913. He died in New York in 1952. In the intervening forty years he thought and wrote incessantly.

  His life was austere. He held no official academic post. He was forced several times to emigrate. He earned very little money. He wrote and noted without cease. As he travelled, small groups of friends and unofficial students collected around him. By the cultural hierarchies he was dismissed as an unintelligible but dangerous Marxist: by the party communists as a Trotskyist. Unlike Spinoza he had no artisanal trade.

  In his book, The Demands of Art,1 Raphael quotes a remark of Cézanne’s (in the context of a quite different analysis):

  I paint my still lifes, these natures mortes, for my coachman who does not want them, I paint them so that children on the knees of their grandfathers may look at them while they eat their soup and chatter. I do not paint them for the pride of the Emperor of Germany or the vanity of the oil merchants of Chicago. I may get ten thousand francs for one of these dirty things, but I’d rather have the wall of a church, a hospital, or a municipal building.

  Since 1848 every artist unready to be a mere paid entertainer has tried to resist the bourgeoisization of his finished work, the transformation of the spiritual value of his work into property value. This regardless of his political opinions as such. Cézanne’s attempt, like that of all his contemporaries, was in vain. The resistance of later artists became more active and more violent — in that the resistance was built into their work. What constructivism, dadaism, surrealism, etc., all shared was their opposition to art-as-property and art-as-a-cultural-alibi-for-existing-society. We know the extremes to which they went: the sacrifices they were prepared to make as creators: and we see that their resistance was as ineffective as Cézanne’s.

  In the last decade the tactics of resistance have changed. Less frontal confrontation. Instead, infiltration. Irony and philosophic scepticism. The consequences in tachism, pop art, minimal art, neo-dada, etc. But such tactics have been no more successful than earlier ones. Art is still transformed into the properly of the property-owning class. In the case of the visual arts the properly involved is physical; in the case of the other arts it is moral properly.

  Art historians with a social or Marxist formation have interpreted the art of the past in terms of class ideology. They have shown that a class, or groups in a class, tended to support and patronize art which to some degree reflected or furthered their own class values and views. It now appears that in the later stages of capitalism this has ceased to be generally true. Art is treated as a commodity whose meaning lies only in its rarity value and in its functional value as a stimulant of sensation. It ceases to have implications beyond itself. Works of art become objects whose essential character is like that of diamonds or sun-tan lamps. The determining factor of this development — internationalism of monopoly, powers of mass-media communication, level of alienation in consumer societies — need not concern us here. But the consequence does. Art can no longer oppose what is. The faculty of proposing an alternative reality has been reduced to the faculty of designing — more or less well — an object.

  Hence the imaginative doubt in all artists worthy of their category. Hence the fact that the militant young begin to use ‘art’ as a cover for more direct action.

  One might argue that artists should continue, regardless of society’s immediate treatment of their work: that they should address themselves to the future, as all imaginative artists after 1848 have had to do. But this is to ignore the world-historical moment at which we have arrived. Imperialism, European hegemony, the moralities of capitalist-Christianity and state-communism, the Cartesian dualism of white reasoning, the practice of constructing ‘humanist’ cultures on a basis of monstrous exploitation — this entire interlocking system is now being challenged: a world struggle is being mounted against it. Those who envisage a different future are obliged to define their position towards this struggle, obliged to choose. Such a choice tends to lead them either to impotent despair or to the conclusion that world liberation is the pre-condition for any new valid cultural achievement. (I simplify and somewhat exaggerate the positions for the sake of brevity.) Either way their doubts about the value of art are increased. An artist who now addresses the future does not necessarily have his faith in his vision confirmed.

  In this present crisis, is it any longer possible to speak of the revolutionary meaning of art? This is the fundamental question. It is the question that Max Raphael begins to answer in The Demands of Art.

  The book is based on some lectures that Raphael gave in the early 1930s to a modest adult education class in Switzerland under the title ‘How should one approach a work of art?’ He chose five works and devoted a chapter of extremely thorough and varied analysis to each. The works are: Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire of 1904–6 (the one in the Philadelphia Museum), Degas’s etching of Madame X leaving her bath, Giotto’s Dead Christ (Padua) compared with his later Death of Saint Francis (Florence), a drawing by Rembrandt of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, and Picasso’s Guernica. (The chapter on Guernica was of course written later.) These are followed by a general chapter on ‘The struggle to understand art’, and by an appendix of an unfinished but extremely important essay entitled ‘Towards an empirical theory of art’, written in 1941.

  I shall not discuss Raphael’s analysis of the five individual works. They are brilliant, long, highly particularized and dense. The most I can do is to attempt a crude outline of his general theory.

  A question which Marx posed but could not answer. If art, in the last analysis, is a superstructure of the economic base, why does its power to move us endure long after the base has been transformed? Why, asked Marx, do we still look towards Greek art as an ideal? He began to answer by speaking about the ‘charm’ of ‘young children’ (the young Greek civilization) and then broke off the manuscript and was far too occupied ever to return to the question.

  ‘A transitional epoch,�
� writes Raphael,

  always implies uncertainty: Marx’s struggle to understand his own epoch testifies to this. In such a period two attitudes are possible. One is to take advantage of the emergent forces of the new order with a view to undermining it, to affirm it in order to drive it beyond itself: this is the active, militant, revolutionary attitude. The other clings to the past, is retrospective and romantic, bewails or acknowledges the decline, asserts that the will to live is gone — in short, it is the passive attitude. Where economic, social, and political questions were at stake Marx took the first attitude; in questions of art he took neither.

  He merely reflected his epoch.

  Just as Marx’s taste in art — the classical ideal excluding the extraordinary achievements of palaeolithic, Mexican, African art — reflected the ignorance and prejudice of art appreciation in his period, so his failure to create (though he saw the need to do so) a theory of art larger than that of the superstructure theory was the consequence of the continual, overwhelming primacy of economic power in the society around him.

  In view of this lacuna in Marxist theory, Raphael sets out to

  develop a theory of art that I call empirical because it is based on a study of works from all periods and nations. I am convinced that mathematics, which has travelled a long way since Euclid, will some day provide us with the means of formulating the results of such a study in mathematical terms.

  And he reminds the sceptical reader that before infinitesimal calculus was discovered even nature could not be studied mathematically.

  ‘Art is an interplay, an equation of three factors — the artist, the world and the means of figuration.’ Raphael’s understanding of the third factor, the means or process of figuration, is crucial. For it is this process which permits him to consider the finished work of art as possessing a specific reality of its own.