Selected Essays of John Berger Read online

  1955

  Juan Gris

  By temperament Gris appears to have been obstinate, cold, mean, but courageous about his health – he died at forty; his great virtues as an artist were his intelligence and clarity, the latter quality being the result, as with Stendhal, of an extreme, disciplined frankness. He was as near to a scientist as any modern painter has been, and thus, because Picasso’s and Braque’s discovery of Cubism was the discovery of a formula, Gris was the purest and most apt of all the Cubists.

  It may seem shocking in our period of hysterical individualism to say that Cubism supplied a formula. Yet this was its unique advantage over all other twentieth-century movements, and is why many second-rate artists who came under its influence were temporarily made first-rate. At its best it was not, of course, a formula for making pictures, although it finally became that; it was a formula for interpreting and understanding reality.

  Theoretically, the reality of an object for a Cubist consisted of the sum total of all its possible appearances. Yet in practice this total could never be arrived at, because the number of possible visual appearances (or aspects) was infinite. Consequently, the most the Cubist could do was somehow to suggest the range of, the infinity of possibilities open to, his vision. The real subject of a Cubist painting is not a bottle or a violin; the real subject is always the same, and is the functioning of sight itself. The bottle or the violin is only the point of focus, the stake to which the artist’s circling vision is tied. (The Cubists’ trick of imitating the surfaces of the objects they were painting – by wood graining, marble patterning, etc. – served to fix this necessary focus in the quickest possible way.) To look at a Cubist painting is like looking at a star. The star exists objectively, as does the subject of the painting. But its shape is the result of our looking at it.

  The artist, in other words, became his own subject, not in any subjective or egocentric manner, but as a result of his considering himself and the functioning of his own senses as an integral part of the Nature he was studying. This was the formula for Cubism and when Cézanne insisted on being faithful to Nature via his petite sensation he predicted it. Again, however, I want to emphasize that by formula I mean a new, revolutionary truth, which, once posed, can be generally learned, taught and applied. Why revolutionary? Because, simultaneously with the scientific discoveries of that period (Rutherford, Planck, Einstein) which were just beginning to give man, for the first time in history, the possibility of an adequate control of his environment, the Cubist formula presupposed, also for the first time in history, man living unalienated from Nature. And it is perhaps this which explains why those few Cubist pictures which were created during the years immediately preceding the First World War are the calmest works painted since the French Revolution.

  Following the war and its consequences, the prophetic confidence of the Cubists was broken. They had enlarged the vocabulary of painting, but the revolutionary meaning of what they had added was largely forgotten. Only Léger remained consistently faithful to the original spirit of Cubism: Picasso was so spasmodically: whilst Braque and Gris withdrew into decorative idioms – Gris in an architectural spirit, Braque with the spirit of an epicure poet.

  It still seems logical to believe, however, that when eventually a modern tradition of art and teaching is established – and this tradition will inevitably be materialist in philosophy and uncommercial in context – it is to Cubism that its exponents will return as a starting point.

  1958

  Jacques Lipchitz

  Critics should always look their hobby-horses in the mouth. Yet despite this warning, the more I think about the art of the last and the next forty years (which is the minimum time-span with which any critic should concern himself) the more I am convinced that the question of Cubism is a – and probably the – fundamental one. Cubist mannerisms are of course widespread, but it is not to these that I refer; stylistic mannerisms are the small-talk of art. It is the Cubist attitude to nature, to the content of art, which has opened up so many real and truly modern possibilities.

  The static single viewpoint in painting and sculpture can no longer satisfy the expectations deriving from our new knowledge of history, physical structure, psychology. We now think in terms of processes rather than substances. Many twentieth-century artists have expressed this shift and progress in our knowledge by using unusual, eccentric viewpoints whose significance depends on vibrant comparisons, made outside the picture, with other less eccentric viewpoints. This is the principle behind expressionist distortions and surrealist juxtapositions. Their success depends on – as it were – setting the viewer spinning. Their argument is: a form is not in fact what it appears to be, and therefore if we wilfully deform it we can usefully make people doubt the apparent truth; so let us cast off and trust to the unknown currents. The reduction to absurdity of this attitude is the worship of the accident, as in Action Painting.

  The Cubist attitude is totally opposed to this. The Cubists established the principle of using multiple viewpoints within the picture and therefore of controlling the spin and the vibrations of meaning. They were concerned with establishing new knowledge rather than with destroying the old, and so they were concerned with statements, not doubts. They wanted their art to be as self-sufficient as the truth. They aimed to disclose processes, not to ride hell bent down them into ferment. They were not of course scientists. They were artists, and so they connected one phenomenon with another by an imaginative rather than physical logic. Human consciousness was their arena as well as their tool. But they were almost unique in modern art in that they believed that this consciousness could be considered rationally, not, as all romantics believe, just suffered.

  Readers might now reasonably assume that I am talking about the classic Cubist works of 1908 to 1913, and that when I say ‘multiple viewpoints’ I mean it literally and optically. The true consequences of Cubism, however, are far wider, and nobody illustrates this better than the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, along with Zadkine among the few possibly great sculptors of our time.

  Lipchitz would be the first to admit that he was formed by Cubism. Indeed, from 1913 for about ten years he produced sculpture which looked very like early Cubist paintings: the same scrolly shapes, sharp edges, lack of depth, and even the same subjects. These were the works of his apprenticeship. Mostly they fail as sculpture. The forms have been taken too directly from painting. They look like canvases seen through stereoscopic spectacles. But from the middle twenties Cubism ceased to be a matter of style for him, and became a question of imaginative vision. Some of his new works were open wire-like sculptures; others were massive figures, a little like the sculptural equivalent of Léger’s, with surfaces sometimes polished and sometimes very broken-up. All, however, were metaphors in movement.

  I fear that that is an obscure phrase but perhaps I can clarify it by an example. There is a large work of a pair of lovers on the ground. The forms are very severely simplified. There are no hands, no feet, no faces. One mass presses down on another. Their four legs have become two simple forms – a little like the front wings of a car. The man’s arms connect two shoulders – his own with hers. Their heads, both bent backwards from the chin, form a shape like an open beak, his the top bill and hers the bottom. In profile the whole work looks somewhat like a tortoise – the shell their two bodies – raising itself up on its legs. But its spirit is not in the least zoomorphic. It is cast in bronze and its forms are metallic. Just as much as a tortoise, it also suggests a fulcrum, levers and counter-weights. Its distortions and simplifications have not been governed by the material as in Moore, nor by emotional urges and fears as in Marini; they have been very carefully derived from the objective structural stresses and movements of the subject. Hence the energy of the work. It springs from its own base. Rodin, whom Lipchitz much admires, was also concerned with movement, but for Rodin the movement of a figure was something that happened to it. For Lipchitz, concerned with processes rather than substances, and lo
oking in imagination from multiple viewpoints, movement is the very mode of being for his figures.

  Poetically this means that he conjures up allusions to all forms of movement: to the wind, to animals, to fire, to plants opening, to gestation. His refugees fall like stones from a collapsing building; Prometheus strangles the vulture (an intended symbol for Fascism) as wind strangles a flame. His happy figures are like new boats on the stocks. Orpheus rediscovers his love and they are like two clouds in the sky.

  Ideologically it means that he is in a position to make the truthful symbols of our time. Speed is rightly – but not just in the sense of travelling fast – our special concern. We aim to set processes in motion. Only gods are static. And historically it means that Lipchitz has learnt, when he is at his best, the lessons of Cubism: has learnt to control the spin and produce a modern rational art.

  1959

  Ossip Zadkine

  In May 1940 the centre of Rotterdam – including, among other buildings, 25,000 homes – was bombed to rubble. It was the second European city to be a victim of the German policy of extermination bombing. Warsaw was the first.

  On the waterfront of the new city there now stands Zadkine’s monument to the ordeal of the old city. It is a reminder of which the citizens of Rotterdam are almost unanimously proud. It is a memorial which can shame those Germans capable of admitting shame. It is an inspiration in the struggle for progress and peace. And quite apart from this, it is – in my opinion at least – the best modern war monument in Europe.

  You can only see it properly by walking round it on foot. It stands by itself, well away from any road or large building, overlooking the harbour. Although near the centre, this is one of the few quiet, still places in the modern city. You walk round the plain granite block on which the figure, cast in dark bronze, simultaneously stands, dies and advances. The scale is big. Two or three large gulls can perch on the hand that appears to be flattened against the surface of the sky. Between the outstretched arms the clouds move. A ship’s siren sounds on the other side of the water, and you think of the largest anchor, but buckled, and trailing not over the sea bed but over those moving clouds. At night it is different. It becomes a silhouette, less symbolic and more human. Shadows, which are half the visual language of sculpture, are obliterated. Only the gesture therefore remains. A man stands, arms raised to hold off an invisible load between him and the stars. Then in the early morning you see again the lime of the gulls and the dead fixed texture of the massively cast bronze in contrast with the bright, crinkling surface of the water. Thus the sculpture changes with the time of day. It is not a passive figure with a corrugated cloak waiting to be benighted, lit up, scorched and snowed upon until it becomes no more than the unmeltable core of a snowman. Its function and not just its appearance depends upon the hours. It engages time. And the reason for this is that its whole conception as a work of art is based on an awareness of development and change.

  But first let me admit that there is one very weak passage in this work: the tree stump by the side of the figure. An upright form is necessary there to support the figure, but both the shape and the associations of a tree stump are quite unsuitable: like a potato by the side of a crystal. However, it is almost possible to ignore this. It is not part of the figure and it is not part of the work’s true image.

  What is the meaning of this image? Or, rather, what are the meanings? – for it is the fact that this work has simultaneous meanings that allows it to express development and change so well. The figure represents the city. And the first dominant theme is that of the city being ravaged, razed. The hands and the head cry out against the sky from which the man-aimed bombs fall. I say man-aimed because this makes the anguish sharper and fiercer than that of an Old Testament prophet crying out against the wrath of his god, and this extra anguish partly explains, I think, the violence of the distortions in modern tragic works like this. The torso of the man is ripped open and his heart destroyed. The wound is not portrayed in terms of flesh. The man represents a city, and the sculpture is of bronze and so the wound, which in fact is a hole right through the body, is seen in terms of the twisted metal of the burnt-out shell of a building. The legs give at the knees. The whole figure is about to fall.

  The second theme is very different. This is also a figure of aspiration and advance. The heart is ripped out, but the arms and hands are not only held high in anguish and a vain attempt to hold off, they also raise and lift. The legs not only give at the knees, they also bend because they are steady. And from every direction as you walk round this figure, the step appears to be forwards. The figure has no back – and so cannot retreat. It advances in every direction (and do not think I am now talking metaphorically; I am being quite literal). On the site of the old city a new one was to be built. One week after the German attack, plans were made to rebuild Rotterdam after the Germans were eventually driven out. And so the curses also become a rallying cry.

  How does the work achieve this duality? Not by philosophic dualism, not by separating the spiritual from the physical – as in certain crucifixions where the body of Christ is tortured and the expression of his face peaceful and triumphant. This is a work which is uncompromisingly physical and the basis of its double meaning is a material one. First, the statue has an existence and logic of its own. It is not imitative. It is a piece of bronze demonstrating something and it does not disguise the fact that it is a piece of bronze: its forms are metallic in both shape and tension. This allows it to express the content of one moment – the moment of dying or the moment of resurrection – whilst not being exclusively committed to that moment; it also clearly remains a piece of bronze on the waterfront at Rotterdam in 1960. Thus its formalizations become the equivalent of a historical perspective: they do more than generalize, they allow for change. Yet by itself this is a dangerous principle to work upon because it can lead to that kind of abstraction which ‘contains’ any meaning because it actually has none. Formalizations governed by the material of the work in question must always be modified and checked by observation of the reality of the subject. And this is the second way in which the basis of the double meaning of this work is a material one. It is not by magic that Zadkine has modelled a figure which simultaneously advances and collapses; it is by learning from the methods of Cubism. He now knows what is constant in all the ways in which a body can move and retain its balance. He can sense the points of physical coincidence between a man falling and a man going forwards. (Who has not mistaken laughter for weeping, a gesture of affection for one of attack?)

  And so having established these points and the precise relationship between them – round the wrists, at the pit of the neck, under the shoulders, along the thighs, near the knees – he constructs the form of each limb to suggest, given those fixed points, all its possibilities of movement. The figure becomes like a dance which does not need time to unfold. The dancer’s movements have been made simultaneous, but within itself each movement obeys its natural law.

  Naturally the way Zadkine actually worked was not as cerebral as I have made it seem; nor is the impact of the sculpture half as involved. It is a popular work, accepted by the citizens of Rotterdam, because its dialectic is a very human one. Unlike most memorials, it is neither gruesome nor patronizing. It does not try to turn defeat into victory, nor does it hide the truth by invoking Honour. It shows that different people can use the words defeat and victory to describe the same thing, whilst the reality which is actually suffered is something continuously developing and changing out of that apparent contradiction. And it shows this in terms of pain and effort. It stands on the edge of the land. And it is as if this figure has crossed the world and come through history to stand on the most advanced point to meet those who will soon arrive.

  1959

  Fernand Léger

  Our productive, scientific abilities have outstripped our ethical and social conscience. That is a platitude and no more than a half truth, but it is nevertheless a way of summing up a
t least an aspect of the crisis of our time. Nearly all contemporary artists who have faced up to this crisis at all have concentrated on the ensuing conflict of conscience. Léger was unique because he seized upon our technical achievements and by concentrating upon their real nature was led on to discover the spirit, the ethics, the attitude of mind, necessary to control and exploit them to our full advantage. It is because of this – because Léger put the facts of our environment first and through them arrived at his attitude to life – that one can claim that he was so boldly a materialist.

  As an artist Léger is often accused of being crude, vulgar, impersonal. He is none of these things. It is his buoyant confidence that makes him seem crude to the diffident. It is his admiration of industrial techniques and therefore of the industrial worker that makes him seem vulgar to the privileged; and his belief in human solidarity that makes him seem impersonal to the isolated. His works themselves refute the charge. Look at them. I always feel absurdly pretentious when trying to write about Léger. His works so clearly affirm themselves. In front of a painting by Picasso or Bonnard, one senses such an urgency of conflict that it seems quite appropriate to discuss and debate and plead for all the issues involved. But in front of a Léger one thinks: There it is. Take it or leave it. Or rather, take it when you want it, and leave it when you don’t. Scribble moustaches on his girls if you like. Buy a postcard of it and send it home along with a vulgar one. Lean against it, and prompted by the bicycle in it, discuss where you’re going next Sunday. Let the dumb-bells in another remind you that you’ve stopped doing your early morning exercises. Or stand entranced and reflect afterwards that he has probably learned more from Michelangelo than from any other artist. It doesn’t matter. Look at his bicycles, and his girls in their sports clothes, and his holiday straw hats, and his cows with their comic camouflage dapples, and his steeplejacks and acrobats each knowing what the other takes, and his trees like the sprigs you put into a jam jar, and his machinery as gay as the youth who plans to paint his motor-bike, and his nudes as familiar as wives – what other modern painter doesn’t paint a nude as though she were either a piece of studio furniture or a surreptitious mistress? – and his compasses and keys painted as if they were emblems on flags to celebrate their usefulness – does his work seem mechanical and cold?