Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  Then there was the freedom of the Voice of America, the freedom of the Free World. By 1948 the United States needed an international cultural prestige to offset its military and political power: it needed a sophisticated reply to the slogans of ‘Yankee Go Home!’ This is why the CIA during the fifties and sixties covertly supported a multitude of initiatives whose aim was to present the new American art across the world as a promise for the future. Since the works (de Kooning apart) were abstract, they lent themselves to diverse interpretations.

  In this way a mostly desperate body of art, which had at first shocked the American public, was transformed by speeches, articles and the context in which it was displayed, into an ideological weapon for the defence of individualism and the right to express oneself. Pollock, I’m sure, was unaware of this programme — he died too soon; nevertheless, the propaganda apparatus helped to create the confusion surrounding his art after his death. A cry of despair was turned into a declaration for democracy.

  In 1950 Hans Namuth made a film of Pollock painting. Pollock puts on his paint-spattered boots — which appear as a kind of homage to Van Gogh — and then he starts to walk around the unprimed canvas laid out on the earth. With a stick he flicks paint on to it from a can. Threads of paint. Different colours. Making a net. Making knots. His gestures are slow but follow one another swiftly. Next he uses the same technique but this time on to a sheet of transparent glass placed on trestles, which allows the photographer to film the act through the glass, so that we see the paint falling around the pebbles and wires already placed on the glass. We look towards the painter from the painting’s point of view. We look out from behind to the front where everything is happening. The way he moves his arms and shoulders suggests something between a marksman and a beekeeper putting a swarm into a hive. It is a star performance.

  It was probably this film which prompted the phrase ‘action painting’. The canvas, according to this definition, becomes an arena for the artist’s free actions, which the spectator relives through the traces they leave. Art is no longer mediation but act. No longer pursuit but arrival.

  What we are slowly making our way towards are the pictorial consequences of Rosenberg’s nothingness and the fatality.

  Photos of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock together somehow indicate how much theirs was a marriage of two painters. It’s on their clothes. You can smell the paint. Lee Krasner’s first love was a Russian painter called Igor Pantuhoff. She lived with him for eleven years. When she first met Pollock, she was thirty-four and better known as an artist than he was. ‘I had a comet by the tail,’ she said afterwards. What called out to her was, surely, what she felt to be Pollock’s destiny as an artist. He was inspired, probably more inspired than anybody she had ever met. And for Jackson Pollock the champion, always fearful of losing. Lee was at last the judge he could trust. If she told him that something he had painted worked, he believed it — at least at the beginning of their marriage. Between them the ultimate in praise was ‘It works.’ A phrase between professionals.

  From 1943 till 1952 — the period when Pollock produced all his most surprising work — the two of them were, in part, painting for each other: to see each other’s surprise. It was a way of communicating, of touching or being touched. (Maybe there were not many ways of communicating with Pollock.) During these years Lee Krasner painted less than she did before or afterwards. Pollock took the studio on the property they bought in Springs, and she worked in a bedroom. Yet the argument that she sacrificed her art for his is as stupid as the argument about who influenced whom. (In 1953 Pollock produced a canvas called Easter and the Totem which anybody might mistake for a Krasner.) The truth is that as painters and as a man and a woman, they were engaged, during these years, in the same adventure which turned out to be more fatal than either of them realized at the time. And today their canvases speak of it.

  Lee Krasner’s paintings were, by nature, sensuous and ordered. Their colours and gestures frequently suggested flesh, the body; their order, a garden. Abstract as they are, one enters them to find, behind the colours or collage, a kind of welcome.

  By contrast, Pollock’s paintings were metaphysical in aim and violent. The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection. One can feel the painter, at first with gestures that are almost childish, and later like a strong, fully grown man, emptying his body of energy and liquids so as to leave traces to prove that he had physically existed. On one occasion he put his hand prints on the painting as if beseeching the canvas to acknowledge the exiled body. There is an order in these works, but it is like that at the centre of an explosion, and all over their surfaces there is a terrible indifference to everything that is sentient.

  When their paintings are hung together, the dialogue between them is very clear. He paints an explosion; she, using almost identical pictorial elements, constructs a kind of consolation. (Perhaps their paintings said things to one another during these years that they could never say in person.) Yet it would be wrong to give the impression that Krasner’s paintings were primarily consolatory. Between the two of them there was a fundamental issue at stake. Time and again her paintings demonstrated an alternative to the brink which they sensed his were heading for. Time and again her paintings protested against the art’s threat of suicide. And I think they did this as paintings whilst Lee Krasner as a person was being dazzled by the brilliance of his recklessness.

  An obvious example would be a painting called Bald Eagle, made in 1955, one year before the car accident. Here Lee Krasner took a canvas Jackson Pollock had abandoned — a bare hessian canvas with flicked black lines across it — and incorporated pieces of this canvas into a large colourful collage, a little suggestive of autumn and a bird soaring. Thus her picture saved the lost gestures of his. The example, however, is not typical, for it occurred after the suicide.

  Before, he would splatter, and she would take the same pigment, the same colours, and assemble. He would thrash; and she would make the same wound and stitch it. He would paint flames; and she would paint fire in a brazier. He would throw paint imitating a comet; and she would paint a part of the Milky Way. Every time the pictorial elements — as distinct from the purpose — were similar, if not almost identical. He would lend himself to a deluge; she would imagine water gushing into a basin.

  But the messages of her paintings to his paintings were not about domestication. They were about continuity, they were about the desire of painting to go on living.

  Unfortunately, it was already too late.

  Pollock had stood the art of painting on its head, reversed it, negated it.

  The negation had nothing to do with technique or abstraction. It was inherent in his purpose — in the will which his canvases expressed.

  On these canvases the visible is no longer an opening but something which has been abandoned and left behind. The drama depicted is something that once happened in front of the canvas — where the painter claimed to be nature! Within or beyond them there is nothing. Only the visual equivalent of total silence.

  Painting throughout its history has served many different purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been left borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant from palaeolithic times to cubism, from Tintoretto (who also loved comets) to Rothko. The act of faith consisted of believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance. Thus paintings were there to reveal a presence behind an appearance — be it that of a Madonna, a tree or, simply, the light that soaks through a red.

  Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism whi
ch was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

  1989

  Christ of the Peasants

  I try to imagine how to describe the pilgrim photographs of Marketa Luskacova to somebody who could not see them. An obviously vain exercise in one sense, because appearances and words speak so differently; the visual never allows itself to be translated intact into the verbal. Nothing I could say would enable the reader to imagine a single one of these pictures. Yet what of those who, finding themselves before the photographs, still have difficulty in seeing them? There are good reasons why this might happen. The pictures are of peasants whose experience over the centuries has been very rarely understood by other classes. Worse than that, the pictures are about the experience of religious faith when today most city-dwellers — at least in our continent — have become accustomed to living without any religious belief. Finally, even for the religious minority the pictures may well suggest fanaticism or heresy, because priests and the Church have for so long oppressed peasants, and this oppression has encouraged on both sides the recurring suspicion that principles are being betrayed. The Christ of the peasants has never been the Christ of the papacy. How, then, would I describe the photographs to somebody who could not see them?

  I’m inclined to believe that Marketa Luskacova had a secret assignment, such as no photographer had had before. She was summoned by the Dead. How she joined them I don’t know. The Dead live, of course, beyond time and are ageless; yet, thanks to the constant arrival of newcomers, they are aware of what happens in history, and sometimes this general, vast awareness of theirs provokes a kind of curiosity so that they want to know more. This curiosity led them to summon a photographer. They told her how they had the impression — and it had been growing for a century or more — that they, the Dead, were being forgotten by the Living to an unprecedented degree. Let her understand clearly what they were talking about: the individual Dead had always been quickly or slowly forgotten — it was not this which was new. But now it appeared that the huge, in fact countless, collective of the Dead was being forgotten, as if the living had become — was it ashamed? or was it simply negligent? — of their own mortality, of the very consanguinity which joined them to the Dead. Of this, they said they needed no proof, there was ample evidence. What they would like to see — supposing that somewhere in the heart of the continent in which she lived they still existed — were people who still remembered the Dead. Neither the bereaved (for bereavement is temporary) nor the morbid (for they are obsessed by death, not by the Dead), but people living their everyday lives whilst looking further, beyond, aware of the Dead as neighbours.

  ‘We would like you,’ they told her, ‘to do a reportage on us, in the eyes of the living: can you do that?’ She did not reply, for she already knew, although she was only in her early twenties, that the only possible reply could be in the images developed in a dark-room.

  Soon after, Luskacova found herself in the village of Sumiac. Before beginning her assignment proper, she took some pictures to remind the long-departed of the earth on which everything happens. A woman and a horse, with the grass cropped and the footpaths going as far back as living memory. A man sowing, striding slowly through the field he has ploughed, the gesture of his arm like that of a cellist. Three children asleep in a bed.

  Then she moved on to the unprecedented challenge of her commission. The people she was photographing trusted her; more than that, they allowed her to become intimate. This was a precondition for her assignment, for she could not photograph the presence of the Dead in the lives of the living from afar: a telescopic lens in this case would have been useless. Nor could she be in a hurry. Intimacy implies having time on one’s hands, even a kind of boredom. And further, she could not be in a hurry because the project demanded isolating an instant filled with the timeless, and isolating a set of appearances containing the invisible. These were not impossible demands, since the human eye and the human face are windows on to the soul.

  In some pictures she failed — failed for a simple and understandable reason. Sometimes the people being photographed were aware of her being there with her camera, they trusted her completely and so they appealed for recognition. In a flash they imagined how: Take Us Now = We’ll See How We Were at This Moment.

  In other pictures she succeeded; she carried out the assignment and she produced photos such as nobody had ever taken before. We see the photographed in all their intimacy and they are not there; they are elsewhere with their neighbours: the dead, the unborn, the absent. For instance, her extraordinary photo of the Sleeping Man might be a companion piece to a poem by Rilke:

  … You, neighbour God, if sometimes in the night

  I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so

  only because I seldom hear you breathe

  and know: you are alone.

  And should you need a drink, no one is there

  to reach it to you, groping in the dark.

  Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.

  I am quite near.

  Between us there is but a narrow wall,

  and by sheer chance; for it would take

  merely a call from your lips or from mine

  to break it down,

  and that without a sound.

  The wall is builded of your images …

  To stop there would be too resolved, too ‘transcendental’ for the peasant experience which Marketa Luskacova interprets so faithfully. The peasant, within the secrecy of his own mind, is independent, and he projects this independence on to those he worships. Nothing is ever quite arranged.

  Italo Calvino has recorded a story from the countryside near Verona; and I think of it when, for instance, I look at the picture of the builders at Sumiac eating a meal:

  Once there was a farmer who was devout, but who prayed only to St Joseph. When he died, St Peter refused to let him into heaven. ‘No question,’ said St Peter, ‘you forgot about Christ, God the Father and the Virgin.’ ‘Since I’m here,’ replied the man, ‘could I have a word with Joseph?’ Joseph appeared, recognized the farmer and said: ‘Come in, make yourself at home.’ ‘I can’t,’ complained the man, ‘Peter here has forbidden me to enter heaven.’ Joseph turned to Peter and angrily remonstrated: ‘You let him in here, or I’ll take my son and my wife and we’ll go somewhere else to build paradise!’

  1985

  A Professional Secret

  ‘When somebody is dead, you can see it from two hundred yards away,’ says Goya in a play we wrote, ‘his silhouette goes cold.’

  I wanted to see Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ. He painted it in 1552 when he was twenty-five. It is long and thin — like a slab in a morgue, or like the predella of an altarpiece — although it seems that this painting never joined an altarpiece. There is a legend that Holbein painted it from the corpse of a Jew drowned in the Rhine.

  I’d heard and read about the picture. Not least from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. ‘That painting!’ he exclaimed. ‘That painting! Do you realize what it could do? It could make a believer lose his faith.’

  Dostoevsky must have been as impressed as Prince Myshkin, for he makes Hypolyte, another character in The Idiot, say: ‘Supposing on the day before his agony the Lord had seen this picture, would he have been able to go to his crucifixion and death as he did?’

  Holbein painted an image of death, without any sign of redemption. Yet what exactly is its effect?

  Mutilation is a recurrent theme in Christian iconography. The lives of the martyrs, St Catherine, St Sebastian, John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, the Last Judgement. Murder and rape are common subjects in painted classical mythology.

  Before Pollaiuolo’s St Sebastian, instead of being horrified (or convinced) by his wounds, one is seduced by the naked limbs of both executioners and executed. Before Rubens’s Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, one thinks of nights of exchanged love. Yet this sleight-of-hand by which one set of appearances replaces another (the martyrdom becomes an Olympics: the rape becomes a seduct
ion) is nevertheless an acknowledgement of an original dilemma: how can the brutal be made visibly acceptable?

  The question begins with the Renaissance. In medieval art the suffering of the body was subservient to the life of the soul. And this was an article of faith which the spectator brought with him to the image; the life of the soul did not have to be demonstrated in the image itself. A lot of medieval art is grotesque — that is to say a reminder of the worthlessness of everything physical. Renaissance art idealizes the body and reduces brutality to gesture. (A similar reduction occurs in Westerns: see John Wayne or Gary Cooper.) Images of consequential brutality (Breughel, Grünewald, etc.) were marginal to the Renaissance tradition of harmonizing dragons, executions, cruelty, massacres.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century Goya, because of his unflinching approach to horror and brutality, was the first modern artist. Yet those who choose to look at his etchings would never choose to look at the mutilated corpses they depict with such fidelity. So we are forced back to the same question, which one might formulate differently: how does catharsis work in visual art, if it does?

  Painting is distinct from the other arts. Music by its nature transcends the particular and the material. In the theatre words redeem acts. Poetry speaks to the wound but not to the torturers. Yet the silent transaction of painting is with appearances and it is rare that the dead, the hurt, the defeated, or the tortured look either beautiful or noble.