by John Berger
Renoir did not paint many landscapes, but when he did, his vision transformed them into something like chintz cushion covers. Landscapes are frightening because they imply exits and entrances. Renoir’s are not, because there is no gravity, no resistance, no edges, no horizon. You simply lay your cheek on them. It is interesting to speculate what Renoir, in another age, might have designed for tapestries — the medium would have curiously touched his genius.
The second consequence of Renoir’s relation to reality and the salvation which painting offered him is to be found in the way he painted women and their bodies. And here, if one really looks, one discovers something which, given his reputation, is a little surprising. The women he depicts are never naked; they and everything around them are clothed, covered, by the act of painting. He made hundreds of nudes and they are the least present, the most chaste in European art.
He paints their flesh, their skin, the light playing on it. He observes this with the sweet obsessiveness of love. (I reject the word fetishism because it is too patronizing.) Nobody before had watched this play of light with such single-minded concentration — not even Titian. It is the light of the early Mediterranean afternoon, when work has stopped and only the bees maintain their energy. Looking at these paintings, we enter a kind of paradise, an Eden of the sense of touch. (He forbade his children to cut their nails, for they protected the sensibility of their fingertips.) Yet what is within these dappled skins and what is without?
Within, there is nobody — the living flesh, so alive, is the equivalent of a dress that nobody is wearing. Without — beyond the body’s limits — there are trees or rocks or hills or the sea, but all these prolong and extend the same paradise. Every conflict, every edge of difference and distinction has been eliminated. Everything — from the silicate rocks to the hair falling on a woman’s shoulders — is homogeneous, and as a consequence, there is no identity, because there are no dualities. We are faced with a cloth of delight that covers all. This is why the paintings are so chaste.
Passion begins with a sense of the uniqueness, the solitude, the vulnerability of the loved one in a harshly indifferent world. Or, to put this in an active rather than a passive mood, it begins with the loved one’s impudence, defiance or promise of an alternative. In an unfeeling world such a promise becomes like a well in a desert. None of this exits in Renoir’s world because there are no contrasts and no edges. Everything has been dressed by the act of painting. The paradox is strange. We gaze at shoulders, breasts, thighs, feet, mounds, dimples, and we marvel at their softness and warmth. Yet everything has been veiled. Everything, however apparently intimate, is in purdah — for the person has been eternally hidden.
They are sweet paintings of a terrible loss. They speak to the dreams of frightened men, their obsession with the surface of femininity, and their lack of women. Perhaps they also speak to some women’s dreams: those dreams in which the guise of femininity alone can arrange everything.
‘Me,’ Renoir once said, ‘I like paintings which make me want to take a stroll in them if they’re landscapes, and if they’re figures of women, to touch their breasts [’tits’ is closer to the word he used] or their backs.’ The wish, the fantasy, is timeless. Passion and the erotic, as John Donne knew so well, are not:
For I had rather owner be
of thee one hour, than all else ever.
1985
A Household
It was seven years ago, in the National Gallery in Stockholm, that I first became really interested in Zurbarán. Zurbarán, renowned during his lifetime in the seventeenth century, has again become eloquent at the end of ours, the twentieth. I want to try to discover why this might be so.
The painting in Stockholm which stopped me in my tracks was of Veronica’s Veil. (He painted several versions.) The white kerchief is pinned to a dark wall. Its realism is such that it borders on trompe l’oeil. Rubbed on to the white linen (or is it cotton?) are the traces of Christ’s face, haggard and drawn as he carried the cross to Golgotha. The imprint of the face is ochre-coloured and monochrome, as befits an image whose medium was sweat.
The canvas in Stockholm made me realize something which applies, I think, to any visual work of art that has the power to move us. Painting first has to convince us — within the particular use of the pictorial language it is using — of what is there, of the reality of what it depicts. In the case of Zurbarán, of the kerchief pinned to the wall. Any painting which is powerful first offers this certitude. And then it will propose a doubt. The doubt is not about what is there, but about where it is.
Where is the face so faintly printed on the kerchief? At what point in space and time are we looking? It is there, it touches and even impregnates the reality of the cloth, but its precise whereabouts is an enigma.
Before any impressive painting one discovers the same enigma. The continuity of space (the logic of the whereabouts) will somewhere on the canvas be broken and replaced by a haunting discontinuity. This is as true of a Caravaggio or a Rubens as of a Juan Gris or a Beckmann. The painted images are always held within a broken space. Each historical period has its particular system of breaking. Tintoretto typically breaks between foreground and background. Cézanne miraculously exchanges the far for the near. Yet always one is forced to ask: what I’m being shown, what I’m being made to believe in, is exactly where? Perspective cannot answer this question.
The question is both material and symbolic, for every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence. This is why man paints. The broken pictorial space confesses the art’s wishfulness.
Let us now return to what is specific to Zurbarán. One of his early paintings shows St Pierre Nolasque kneeling before the apparition of St Peter, crucified upside down on his cross. Nolasque kneels on solid, solid ground. The crucified saint, who is the same size as the living figure, is a vision from beyond time and space. And on the ground where the two spaces (one solid, the other visionary) are hinged, Zurbarñn has placed his signature. He was the master of such hinges. They were his life’s obsession.
What sort of man was he? Apart from his paintings and the commissions he received, we know little about him. A supposed self-portrait — he is standing with his painter’s palette at the foot of the Cross — shows us a rather indecisive man who is both devout and sensuous. A contemporary of Velázquez, he worked not for the sophisticated royal court but almost exclusively for the Spanish Church at the height of its fanatical Counter-Reformation. A large number of his canvases were painted especially for monasteries.
I should perhaps say that I have a visceral antipathy for the kind of religious institution for which Zurbarán worked. Cults of martrydom, flagellation, saints’ relics, damnation and inquisitorial power are for me detestable. All my spiritual sisters and brothers were its victims. Yet for years this man’s art has — not fascinated me, for one can be fascinated by horror — but touched me, made me dream. It took me a long time to guess why.
Zurbarán was married three times and was the father of nine children — most of whom in the age of the plague died before he did. He worked for the monasteries, yet his inspiration was domesticity — an inspiration which became more and more obvious during the course of his life. Not the domesticity of a paterfamilias or a bourgeois male moralist (sufficient here to compare his paintings with Dutch contemporaries like Jan Steen), but a domesticity which accrues through labour: childbirth, ironed linen, prepared food, fresh clothes, arranged flowers, embroidery, clean children, washed floors. His art is infused, as that of no other painter of his time, by the experience, pride and pain of women — and, in this sense, is very feminine. Perhaps it was this ‘contraband’, carried in by his paintings, which created such a demand for them among the religious orders?
In qualifying Zurbarán’s vision as domestic, I am not only thinking of certain favourite subjects he painted, or of the turn he gave to certain subjects (his Immaculate Conceptions are
perfumed like layettes), but, more profoundly, of the way he envisaged almost any scene he was ordered to paint. For example, in an early painting of the monstrously tortured St Serapion, what we actually see in his picture are the hands and head of a peasant husband asleep, and the robes hanging from his body, like precious linen tousled by the wind on a clothes-line. It isn’t that the subject has been secularized; it is rather that the life of the soul has been thought of, has been tended, and finally, has been saved, like the life of a household.
Art historians point out that Zurbarán remained in some ways a provincial painter. He was never at ease in the grand architecture of ambitious compositions. This is true. His genius lay in making a shelter, a home of corners.
Let us go to The Holy House of Nazareth (in Cleveland). On the right, Mary imagining the future; on the middle finger of her right hand a thimble, by the flank of her nose a tear. On the left, her son Jesus, who is making a crown of thorns, one of which has pricked his finger. Between them a kitchen table. Every object in the picture has its symbolic tag: the two turtle doves are for the Purification of the Virgin after the birth of her child; the fruit on the table for Redemption; the lilies for Purity, and so on. In the seventeenth century, such scenes from the childhood of Christ, and also from the childhood of the Virgin (another subject which Zurbarán loved), were widely popular and were controlled and distributed by the Church as models of devotion and patience. None of this, however, explains the image’s emotional charge. The French painter Laneuville, who was a pupil of David, wrote in 1821 about ‘the magic’ of this canvas.
The magic begins, as I’ve said, with a doubt following a certitude. It begins with a spatial break, a discontinuity. The foreground of the floor is continuous right across the canvas. The hinge of the discontinuity is the nearest leg of the table.
From his knees upwards, the child is placed in a space that is indefinable, and opens on to angels. To the right of the table leg, in the territory of the mother, the space remains that of a room in a house — even the window, or picture, on the wall takes up its everyday position.
The table-top, impossibly upturned towards us, mediates between the two spaces. The pages of the open book on the left flicker in the light of the angels. The two books on the right are unmistakably placed on the kitchen table.
The two different spaces correspond with two different times: on the right everyday time, every nighttime: on the left the time of prophecy, pierced time — like the boy’s finger pierced by the thorn.
We come now to the psychic spatial discontinuity — to the narrative jolt which, given the rest, increases further the picture’s extraordinary charge. It is the sight of her boy which is making the mother so pensive. The sight reminds her of his future. She foresees their destiny. And yet she is not looking at him. Spatially, she is simply not looking in his direction. It is we who are looking at two spaces. She, confined to one, knows.
Mothers in Nazareth today, foreseeing the tragic destiny of their sons, are Palestinians. I say this to recall us to the century in which we are living. What does Zurbarán mean in our contemporary world?
Let us first be clear. It is no longer a single historical world — as it has been from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture of commodities, are living our crisis; the rest of the world are living theirs. Our crisis is that we no longer believe in a future. Their crisis is us. The most we want is to hang on to what we’ve got. They want the means to live.
This is why our principal preoccupations have become private and our public discourse is compounded of spite. The historical and cultural space for public speech, for public hopes and action, has been dismantled. We live and have our being today in private coverts.
The fact that Zurbarán’s art is domestic means it is an art to which we are not necessarily closed. By contrast, public art — whether it be that of Piero della Francesca, Rubens, Poussin, David or the cubists — leaves us cold. (The debate of post-modernism is simply about the loss of public nerve.) Zurbarán’s art of the interior suits our fear of the outside.
Once we are inside with him, we are intrigued, troubled, and obliged to dream about the colossal difference between the life he paints and ours. Everything he paints looks as if it is eternal. (His eternity has a lot to do with childhood.) Everything with which we surround ourselves feels as if it’s disposable. Return to the marvellous house in Nazareth.
Her sewing, the cushion on her lap, her dress the colour of pomegranates, the chiffon scarf round her neck, her cuffs, the hand holding her head, her lips, are as present as a Manet or Degas might have wished, painted with a tactile intensity which reminds one yet again that only the eye can do justice to the phenomenon of existence. And yet, present as she is, the expression of her eyes shows she is also elsewhere. The hinge of the two spaces within the picture is a visible one. A similar but invisible hinge exists within the being of this woman.
Zurbarán painted a few still lifes of jars, cups, fruit. The objects are invariably placed on the edge of a table (or shelf) against a dark background. Under them, beneath the table, or, above and behind them, there is a darkness which may be nothingness. What is visible has been placed on the very edge of this darkness, as if somehow the visible has come through the darkness like a message. Everything and everybody in the house at Nazareth has a similar quality of being or receiving a message. And so, quite apartfrom the fact that the subject is aprophecy concerning the Holy Family — everything in the painting is perceived as being sacred.
What do I mean by sacred? ‘Set apart because holy’, as the dictionary suggests? Why holy? On account of the angels? No — curiously enough, angels in the sky are the least holy thing in Zurbaáan’s repertoire. (They are simply a fond parent’s baby fantasies.) His sense of the sacred comes not from symbolism but from a way of painting and of placing. In everything he paints, he sees not only a form but a task accomplished or being accomplished. The tasks are everyday household ones such as I have already mentioned. They imply care, order, regularity: these qualities being honoured not as moral categories but as evidence of meaning, as a message. Any peasant not entirely dispossessed of his land would recognize what I’m talking about here. It is where, against the chaos of nature, a sense of achievement includes aesthetics. It is why, if possible, the wood is stacked and not just thrown into a corner. Against the myriad natural risks, daily acts of maintenance acquire a ritual meaning.
In Zurbarán’s art we don’t find the chaos of nature, but we do find a background — as in all Spanish art — which is blackness: the blackness represents the world into which we have been thrown like salt into water.
It is not Zurbarán’s saints or martyrs or angels that emanate a sense of the sacred for us, but the intensity of his looking at what has been worked upon against this background, and his knowledge that human space is always broken and twofold. Such knowledge comes through compassion, for which there is no space in our culture of greed. As for ritual acts — such as making a cup of coffee or tea — they are still performed every day, and within a family or between an old couple, they may still preserve a meaning, but publicly there are no everyday ritual acts, for a ritual requires a permanent sense of past and future and in our culture of commodities and novelties there is neither.
Zurbarán has become eloquent at the end of our century because he paints stuff — stuff one might find in a flea market — with a concentration and care that reminds us how once it may have been sacred.
1985
Drawing on Paper
I still sometimes have a dream in which I am my present age with grown-up children and newspaper editors on the telephone, and in which nevertheless I have to leave and pass nine months of the year in the school to which I was sent as a boy. As an adult, I think of these months as an early form of exile, but it never occurs to me in the dream to refuse to go. In life I left that school when I was sixteen. The war was on and I went to London. Amongst the debris of
bomb sites and between the sirens of the air-raid warnings, I had a single idea: I wanted to draw naked women. All day long.
I was accepted in an art school — there was not a lot of competition, for nearly everyone over eighteen was in the services — and I drew in the daytime and I drew in the evenings. There was an exceptional teacher in the art school at that time — an elderly painter, a refugee from fascism named Bernard Meninsky. He said very little and his breath smelt of dill pickles. On the same imperial-sized sheet of paper (paper was rationed; we had two sheets a day), beside my clumsy, unstudied, impetuous drawing, Bernard Meninsky would boldly draw a part of the model’s body in such a way as to make its endlessly subtle structure and movement clearer. After he had stood up and gone, I would spend the next ten minutes, dumbfounded, continuously looking from his drawing to the model and vice versa.
Thus I learnt to question with my eyes a little more probingly the mystery of anatomy and of love, whilst outside in the night sky, audibly, RAF fighters were crossing the city to intercept the approaching German bombers before they reached the coast. The ankle of the foot on which her weight was posed was vertically under the dimple of her throat — directly vertical.
Recently I was in Istanbul. There I asked my friends if they could arrange for me to meet the writer Latife Tekin. I had read a few translated extracts from two novels she had written about life in the shanty towns on the edge of the city. And the little I had read had deeply impressed me by its imagination and authenticity. She must herself have been brought up in a shanty town. My friends arranged a dinner and Latife came. I do not speak Turkish and so naturally they offered to interpret. She was sitting beside me. Something made me say to my friends, ‘No, don’t bother, we’ll manage somehow.’
The two of us looked at each other with some suspicion. In another life I might have been an elderly police superintendent interrogating a pretty, shifty, fierce woman of thirty repeatedly picked up for larceny. In fact, in this our only life we were both story-tellers without a word in common. All we had were our powers of observation, our habits of narration, our Aesopian sadness. The suspicion between us gave way to shyness.
