Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  From the outset of his career Turner was extremely ambitious in an undisguisedly competitive manner. He wanted to be recognized not only as the greatest painter of his country and time, but among the greatest of all time. He saw himself as the equal of Rembrandt and Watteau. He believed that he had outpainted Claude Lorrain. This competitiveness was accompanied by a marked tendency towards misanthropy and miserliness. He was excessively secretive about his working methods. He was a recluse in the sense that he lived apart from society by choice. His solitariness was not a by-product of neglect or lack of recognition. From an early age his career was a highly successful one. As his work became more original, it was criticized. Sometimes his solitary eccentricity was called madness; but he was never treated as being less than a great painter.

  He wrote poetry on the themes of his paintings, he wrote and sometimes delivered lectures on art, in both cases using a grandiloquent but vapid language. In conversation he was taciturn and rough. If one says that he was a visionary, one must qualify it by emphasizing hardheaded empiricism. He preferred to live alone, but he saw to it that he succeeded in a highly competitive society. He had grandiose visions which achieved greatness when he painted them and were merely bombastic when he wrote about them, yet his most serious conscious attitude as an artist was pragmatic and almost artisanal: what drew him to a subject or a particular painting device was what he called its practicability – its capacity to yield a painting.

  Turner’s genius was of a new type which was called forth by the British 19th century, but more usually in the field of science or engineering or business. (Somewhat later the same type appeared as hero in the United States.) He had the ability to be highly successful, but success did not satisfy him. (He left a fortune of £140,000.) He felt himself to be alone in history. He had global visions which words were inadequate to express and which could only be presented under the pretext of a practical production. He visualized man as being dwarfed by immense forces over which he had no control but which nevertheless he had discovered. He was close to despair, and yet he was sustained by an extraordinary productive energy. (In his studio after his death there were 19,000 drawings and watercolours and several hundred oil paintings.)

  Ruskin wrote that Turner’s underlying theme was Death. I believe rather that it was solitude and violence and the impossibility of redemption. Most of his paintings are as if about the aftermath of crime. And what is so disturbing about them – what actually allows them to be seen as beautiful – is not the guilt but the global indifference that they record.

  On a few notable occasions during his life Turner was able to express his visions through actual incidents which he witnessed. In October, 1834, the Houses of Parliament caught fire. Turner rushed to the scene, made furious sketches and produced the finished painting for the Royal Academy the following year. Several years later, when he was sixty-six years old, he was on a steamboat in a snow storm and afterwards painted the experience. Whenever a painting was based on a real event he emphasized, in the title or in his catalogue notes, that the work was the result of first-hand experience. It was as though he wished to prove that life – however remorselessly – confirmed his vision. The full title of The Snowstorm was Snowstorm. Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich.

  When a friend informed Turner that his mother had liked the snowstorm painting, Turner remarked: ‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like: I got sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture.’

  ‘But my mother went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her.’

  ‘Is your mother a painter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then she ought to have been thinking of something else.’

  The question remains what made these works, likeable or not, so new, so different. Turner transcended the principle of traditional landscape: the principle that a landscape is something which unfolds before you. In The Burning of the Houses of Parliament the scene begins to extend beyond its formal edges. It begins to work its way round the spectator in an effort to outflank and surround him. In The Snowstorm the tendency has become fact. If one really allows one’s eye to be absorbed into the forms and colours on the canvas, one begins to realize that, looking at it, one is in the centre of a maelstrom: there is no longer a near and a far. For example, the lurch into the distance is not, as one would expect, into the picture, but out of it towards the right-hand edge. It is a picture which precludes the outsider spectator.

  Turner’s physical courage must have been considerable. His courage as an artist before his own experience was perhaps even greater. His truthfulness to that experience was such that he destroyed the tradition to which he was so proud to belong. He stopped painting totalities. The Snowstorm is the total of everything which can be seen and grasped by the man tied to the mast of that ship. There is nothing outside it. This makes the idea of anyone liking it absurd.

  Perhaps Turner did not think exactly in these terms. But he followed intuitively the logic of the situation. He was a man alone, surrounded by implacable and indifferent forces. It was no longer possible to believe that what he saw could ever be seen from the outside – even though this would have been a consolation. Parts could no longer be treated as wholes. There was either nothing or everything.

  In a more practical sense he was aware of the importance of totality in his life’s work. He became reluctant to sell his paintings. He wanted as many of his pictures as possible to be kept together, and he became obsessed by the idea of bequeathing them to the nation so that they could be exhibited as a whole. ‘Keep them together,’ he said. ‘What is the use of them but together?’ Why? Because only then might they conceivably bear obstinate witness to his experience for which, he believed, there was no precedent and no great hope of future understanding.

  1972

  Rouault and the Suburbs of Paris

  ‘I have been so happy painting, a fool who paints, forgetting everything in the blackest gloom.’ This is one of the many remarks which Georges Rouault made about himself. Like his art, it is apparently simple, in fact contradictory (how is one happy forgetting everything in the blackest gloom?) and authentically desperate.

  He was a short man of 5 feet 6 inches. Versions of his own face are to be found in several of his clown paintings. Yet in reality Rouault’s face was thinner skinned and both more receptive and more malicious than those of his painted clowns. It was a nocturnal, solitary face. One might have rashly concluded from his photograph that he was an aberrant entomologist obsessed by moths.

  He was born in Paris in May, 1871, when the city was being shelled by government troops, just before they entered and began their massacres. His father was a cabinetmaker. The suburbs of Paris where he was brought up were to supply him with the setting and the atmosphere of many of his paintings and etchings. There are many different aspects of the suburbs of Paris and different ways of seeing them. Rouault’s suburbs have little to do with those of the Impressionists or of Utrillo. His are the suburbs of the long road leading away, of dim street lamps at dusk, of lonely itinerants and of those who have failed in the city but are forced to stay on its fringes. There are no precise landmarks of these suburbs in Rouault’s paintings. What they constitute is a spiritual climate – probably the climate of his own youth. He himself called one such work The Suburb of Long Suffering.

  At the age of fourteen he became an apprentice to a stained-glass maker and attended art classes in the evening. Critics have made much of the influence of stained glass on his art, citing particularly his luminous colours and his heavy black outlines like the lead in stained-glass windows. The resemblance is indeed close, but in my opinion it does not explain much. The essence of Rouault’s art is psychological,
not stylistic.

  When he was nineteen he became the pupil of Gustave Moreau and began to paint dark mysterious landscapes and religious subjects in that nineteenth-century Romantic manner which it was believed followed in the footsteps of Rembrandt. They seem, these pictures, like images imagined in the folds of heavy hanging curtains. Pupil and master became deeply attached to each other. ‘My poor Rouault,’ Moreau said to him, ‘I can read your future. With your absolute single-mindedness, your passion for work, your love of the unusual in paint structures – all your essential qualities, in fact – you will be more and more a figure on your own.’

  In 1898, Moreau died. The shock and the ensuing solitude projected Rouault, frenzied, beside himself, into the great creative period of his life.

  My feelings at Moreau’s death were heartbreaking, but after being completely overwhelmed at first, I was not long in reacting, and it was an extremely profound inner change. I had just won a medal at the Salon and I could have built up a very comfortable position in official circles; I also had steady contacts with Moreau’s admirers.

  But you have to suffer and see for yourself, my master used to say, and it was no merit of mine to do so; there was nothing else I could do. Without deliberately wanting to forget all I had loved in the museums, I was gradually carried away by a more objective vision.

  It was then that I passed through a most violent moral crisis. I experienced things that cannot be put into words. And I set about doing painting of an outrageous lyricism which disconcerted everybody.

  For many years I wonder how I lived. Everybody dropped me, in spite of elegant, but vain, protests. People even wrote letters of abuse. That was the time to remember the words of my master: ‘Thank heaven that you are not successful, at least until as late as possible. That way you can express yourself more completely, and without constraint.’

  But when I looked at some of my pictures, I asked myself, was it really I who painted that? Can it be true? It is frightening what I have done.

  What had he done? Death had made life real and at the same time hateful to him. He went out into the streets, the waste lots, the law courts, the cabarets, the public institutions of the city and painted those he saw there. He painted hucksters, judges, prostitutes, rent collectors, bons vivants, teachers, circus performers, wives, butchers, barristers, criminals, lecturers, tradesmen. Some he hated for themselves. The victims aroused his hatred of those who had wronged them. He painted on scraps of paper with an eccentric mixture of materials: watercolour, gouache, pastel, oil paint, ink. This may at first have been due to his poverty – he had to use whatever was at hand; but his intemperate use of material on top of material corresponded also to the paroxysmal nature of his vision.

  He had descended into what he thought was hell. Hell was established for him by the people he encountered there and their uses of each other, but it was established no less by his awareness of his own intransigence and the power of his own hatred. He was himself permeated by the outrages and sins among which he found himself. But unlike Baudelaire, whom he admired, he could never place himself in the position of another. Rouault remains at all times the one who records and condemns.

  This is very clear in, for example, a painting of a prostitute sitting before the mirror. Describing such prostitutes who posed for him, Rouault wrote of their ‘thick gelatinous masses of flesh, vacillating flesh, upon which no genuine kiss will ever again be pressed’. Today these paintings are said to illustrate the vanity of the flesh, the bitter truths of ageing, the bleakness of promiscuity. But if you look more carefully at the picture, it is evidence of something quite different. What degrades the woman sitting there are the black lines with which Rouault has outlined and interpreted her. The slash between the breasts. The burnt holes of the eyes. Remove these black marks in your imagination and you are left with a not unattractive woman whose nakedness is ambiguous. You are still seeing through Rouault’s eyes: but what you see no longer corresponds to the disgust of his verbal description because you have removed the stigma of his misanthropy and you are seeing the woman as he would have perceived her if he had not already decided that ‘no genuine’ kiss would ever again be pressed upon her, and that, therefore, he was obliged to press on her nakedness his own judgment of the world.

  A work like this is born of a vision which condemns the world a priori. The judgement does not arise out of what it shows; on the contrary, what it shows has been sought in order to confirm the judgement. Yet as an artist Rouault worked in good faith, for these images, if one looks at them with open eyes, reveal the truth about their own motivation. No other artist has ever produced such a volume of purely misanthropic work as Rouault during the period between 1905 and 1912. These pictures record the tragedy of their own vision. Confronted with the head of the scourged Christ, you see the lines and slashes and black marks of his paint confessing to their own cruelty.

  In 1912, a second death deeply affected Rouault, this time that of his father.

  We are all refugees in this life. Refugees from illness, from boredom, from nethermost poverty, from friendlessness, from the whisper of scandal, from death above all. We hide ourselves under the sheets, pulling them up to our chins with a shaky hand, and even at the moment of going under we are still talking – talking of retirement, and of taking our ease among the Borromean Isles in Italy.

  His painting gradually changed. Some of his subjects remained the same – clowns, dwarfs, judges. The new painting was no less sombre in spirit. But it was resonant in colour and it increasingly referred to another hieratic, introspective, sacred world where there was no place for hatred but only contrition. The black lines and stains of paint changed their function. Instead of condemning, they register static accepted suffering.

  It is as though in his new work Rouault paints from within a church. His work is not conventional religious art, nor is it Catholic propaganda. The point I am making is only in terms of Rouault’s own personal psychic development. From about 1914 onwards, most of his paintings are images conceived as altarpieces. They continually refer back to the period from 1905 to 1912, but they do so in something like a spirit of atonement. Is it to atone for his earlier work, one asks oneself, that he is now there alone in the church?

  No life is as simple as the answer to a direct question like that. But the rest of Rouault’s story does suggest a tortuous, guilt-ridden attitude to his own creative past.

  In 1917, the art dealer Vollard bought up Rouault’s entire output, which then consisted of nearly 800 paintings, many of them belonging to the period of 1905–1912. Rouault claimed that most of these paintings were unfinished, and he made Vollard agree that he would sell no work until the painter declared it finished. During the following thirty years of his working life, Rouault saw himself as the prisoner of his contract, bound to the impossible of finishing to his own satisfaction what was already completed. ‘Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders,’ he wrote, ‘is a child compared to me … it is killing me … the whole of my effort, past, present and future, is at stake with Ambroise Vollard. That is why I exhaust myself with sleepless nights, why I pray in secret, it is perhaps why I shall succumb.’

  Vollard was killed in an accident in 1939. The news of his death in no way came as a release to Rouault. Once again he was stricken. But after the war he brought a legal case against Vollard’s heirs and demanded the return of his unfinished works. He won the case. His old paintings passed into his hands. On November 5, 1948, he publicly burned 315 of them because he believed that he could never finish them, never render them acceptable to his own conscience and the world.

  1972

  Magritte and the Impossible

  Magritte accepts and uses a certain language of painting. This language is over 500 years old and its first master was Van Eyck. It assumes that the truth is to be found in appearances which are therefore worth preserving by being represented. It assumes continuity in time as also in space. It is a language which treats, most naturally, of objects �
�� furniture, glass, fabrics, houses. It is capable of expressing spiritual experience but always within a concrete setting, always circumscribed by a certain static materiality – its human figures were like miraculous statues. This value of materiality was expressed through the illusion of tangibility. I cannot trace here the transformation which this language underwent during five centuries. But its essential assumptions remained unchanged and form part of what most Europeans still expect from the visual arts: likeness, the representation of appearances, the depiction of particular events and their settings.

  Magritte never questioned the aptness of this language for expressing what he had to say. Thus there is no obscurity in his art. Everything is plainly readable. Even in his early work when he was far less skilful than he became during the last twenty years of his life. (I use the word readable metaphorically: his language is visual, not literary, though being a language, it signifies something other than itself.) Yet what he had to say destroyed the raison-d’ětre of the language he used; the point of most of his paintings depends on what is not shown, upon the event that is not taking place, upon what can disappear.

  Let us examine some early examples: L’Assassin menacé. The assassin stands listening to a record on a gramophone. Two plain-clothes policemen wait behind corners to arrest him. A woman lies dead. Through the window three men stare at the murderer’s back. We are shown everything – and nothing. We see a particular event in its concrete setting, yet everything remains mysterious – the committed murder, the future arrest, the appearance of the three staring men in the window. What fills the depicted moment is the sound of the record, and this, by the very nature of painting, we cannot hear. (Magritte frequently uses the idea of sound to comment upon the limitation of the visual.)

  Another early painting: La Femme Introuvable. It shows a number of irregular stones embedded in cement. These stones frame a nude woman and four large hands searching for her. The painting stresses the quality of tangibility. Yet although the hands can feel their way over the stones, the woman eludes them.