Selected Essays of John Berger Page 9

  It is fatal for an artist’s moral sense to be in advance of his experience of reality. (Hogarth’s wasn’t; Greuze’s was.) Millet, without a trace of sentimentality, told the truth as he knew it: the passive acceptance of the couple in The Angelus was a small part of the truth. And the sentimentality and false morality afterwards foisted upon this picture will prove – perhaps already has proved – to be temporary. In the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art the same story is repeated again and again. The artist, isolated, knows that his maximum moral responsibility is to struggle to tell the truth; his struggle is on the near side, not the far, of drawing moral conclusions. The public, or certain sections of it, then draw moral conclusions to disguise the truth: the artist’s work is called immoral – Balzac, Zola: or is requisitioned for false preaching – Millet, Dostoevsky: or, if neither of these subterfuges work, it is dismissed as being naive – Shelley, Brecht.

  1956

  The Politics of Courbet

  Because Courbet was a declared and incorruptible Socialist (he was of course imprisoned for the part he played in the Commune and at the end of his life was driven into exile in Switzerland), reactionary critics have pretended that his politics were nothing to do with his art – they couldn’t deny his art itself if only because of his important influence on later artists such as Manet and Cézanne; progressive critics, on the other hand, have tended to assume that his art is great as an automatic result of his political loyalty. So it is pertinent to ask exactly how his socialism was implied in his paintings, how his attitude to life was reflected in the innovations of his art.

  First, though, it is necessary to clean off some of the mud that has stuck. Because Courbet was uncompromising in his convictions, because his work and his way of life ‘vulgarly’ proved that art was as relevant to the back-parlour, the workshop, the cell, as to the drawing-room, because his paintings never offered the slightest possibility of escape from the world as it was, he was officially rejected in his lifetime and has since been only grudgingly admitted. He has been accused of being bombastic. Look at his self-portrait in prison. He sits by the window quietly smoking his pipe, the invitation of the sunlight in the courtyard outside the only comment on his confinement. Or look at his copy of the Rembrandt self-portrait. He had the humility to impose that discipline on himself at the age of fifty. He has been accused of coarseness. Look at a Normandy seascape, in which the receding air between the empty sea and the low clouds holds firmly but with an extraordinary finesse all the mystery implied by the apparent fact and the actual illusion of an horizon. He has been charged with sentimentality. Look at his painting of the great hooked trout; its truth to the essential facts forces one to feel the weight of the fish, the power with which, struggling, his tail would slap the rocks, the cunning necessary to play him, the deliberation necessary to gaff him – he would be too large to net. Occasionally, of course, such criticisms are fair, yet no artist only paints masterpieces, and the work, say, of Constable (whom Courbet in his independent contribution to landscape painting somewhat resembled), Corot or Delacroix is just as unequal, but is far less frequently singled out for prejudiced attack.

  But to return to the main problem: Courbet believed in the independence of the artist – he was the first painter to hold a one-man show. Yet to him this meant independence from art for art’s sake, from the prevailing Romantic view that the artist or his work were more important than the existence of the subject painted, and from the opposing Classic view that the inspiration of all art was absolute and timeless. He realized that the artist’s independence could only be productive if it meant his freedom to identify himself with his living subject, to feel that he belonged to it, never vice versa. For the painter as such that is the meaning of Materialism. Courbet expressed it in words – this indestructible relationship between human aspiration and actual fact – when he wrote, ‘Savoir pour pouvoir – telle fut ma pensée.’ But Courbet’s acknowledgment, with all the force of his imagination, of the actuality of the objects he painted, never deteriorated into naturalism: a thoughtless superficial goggling at appearances – a tripper’s view of a beauty spot, for instance. One does not just feel that every scene he painted looked like that but that it was known like that. His country landscapes were revolutionary in so far as they presented real places without suggesting any romantic antithesis with the city, but within them – not imposed upon them – one can also discover a sense of potential Arcadia: a local recognition that for playing children and courting couples such ordinary scenes might gather familiar magic. A magnificent nude in front of a window and landscape is an uncompromising portrayal of a woman undressed – subject to many of the same laws as the trout: but, at the same time, the picture evokes the shock of the unexpected loneliness of nudity: the personal shock that inspires lovers, expressed in another way in Giorgione’s Tempest. His portraits (the masterpieces of Jules Vallès, Van Wisselingh, The Hunter) are particular people; one can imagine how they will alter; one can imagine their clothes worn, ill-fitting, by somebody else; yet they share a common dignity because all are seen with the knowledge of the same man’s affection. The light plays on them kindly because all light is welcome that reveals the form of one’s friends.

  A parallel principle applies to Courbet’s drawing and grasp of structure. The basic form is always established first, all modulations and outcrops of texture are then seen as organic variations – just as eccentricities of character are seen by a friend, as opposed to a stranger, as part of the whole man.

  To sum up in one sentence, one might say that Courbet’s socialism was expressed in his work by its quality of uninhibited Fraternity.

  1953

  Gauguin’s Crime

  Gauguin’s life – poverty, disease, loneliness, disillusion, guilt – was wholly tragic. The legend of the stockbroker who chucked up his family and job, or that of the Genius sublimely above Responsibility, are inadequate both to the facts and to the suffering involved. Gauguin was a criminal. It may seem perverse to call a great artist that – and one must remember that his ruthlessness always extended to his own treatment of himself – but it is the only way, I think, of beginning to understand him.

  Gauguin’s self-portraits, after he left his family in Copenhagen and became an outcast, are very revealing, especially if one remembers the innocence of Van Gogh’s. The large lumbering body, the big hooked nose, the dark eyes whose expression is defensive and gives nothing away, the whole face – like one carved forcefully but with a blunt knife out of crude wood – are seen bitterly, cynically, as though the image Gauguin saw in the mirror reminded him of how a convict might strike a prison visitor, or how a man might appear, brought up from a dark cell for interrogation.

  His crime was his decision in 1883 to become a professional, dedicated painter. It amounted to a crime partly because of the social attitude forced upon the imaginative artist at that time, and partly because of Gauguin’s own temperament. All the great works of the late nineteenth century were produced in the belief that the individual could only risk himself creatively against society. This by itself turned the artist into an outcast. One half of Gauguin’s character accepted this role so uncompromisingly that he was treated as a criminal: the other half, longing for acceptance and respect, made him feel a criminal. He instinctively understood both processes. ‘A terrible epoch,’ he wrote, ‘is being prepared in Europe for the coming generation: the reign of gold. Everything is rotten, both men and the arts. You must understand that two natures dwell within me: the Indian and the Sensitive Man.’ Although Gauguin claimed descent from the Peruvian Indians, the Indian also had a symbolic meaning for him: he was the Free Man, the Independent Hunter, the Pure Primitive of uncorrupted appetite. The sensitive man was the exact opposite: the man of Esteem, cultivated, articulate Taste, Affection and Family Feeling. The two combine, the independence of the Indian and the guilt of the Sensitive Man, in such twisted agonized remarks as: ‘Yes, I’m a great criminal all right. But what does
it matter? Michelangelo also. And I’m not Michelangelo.’

  All through his life until his attempted suicide six years before his death, this conflict continued. His letters from Panama, Brittany, Tahiti, the Marquesas, read like those of a man on the run, always planning to get over the border to security and comfort and a normal full life.

  You are without confidence in the future, but I have that confidence because I want to have it. Without that I should have long since thrown up the sponge. To hope is almost to live. I must live to do my duty to the end, and I can only do so by forcing my illusions, by creating hopes out of dreams. When day after day, I eat my dry bread with a glass of water, I make myself believe it is a beefsteak.

  And at the end he wrote: ‘You have known for a long time what it is I wish to establish: the right to dare everything.’ Dare not Do. In that difference of motive the conflict emerges again. One only talks of risking what one values.

  It was not until after the death of his favourite daughter and his attempt at poisoning himself that Gauguin seems to have given up hope, or, more accurately, to have accepted his own terrible sentence on himself of deportation. His physical sufferings increased even further, but in his mind he achieved a certain reconciliation and calm.

  Now, none of this would be worth pointing out and one could at least leave Gauguin his privacy, if it did not give us an important clue to understanding his art. Given the ideas of his time, Gauguin’s painting was a very direct expression of his personality.

  The Sensitive Man, robbed of security and sensibility, needed to dream. This might have led Gauguin to pure fantasy, symbolism, esoteric religious art – all of which he touched but never developed because the Indian in him required tangible trophies, required that ‘the dream’ should have weight and body to it. Hence his travels: to Brittany (where the dream had to be forced a little) and to the South Seas where dream and actuality were fused: the scene simultaneously exotic and stark.

  The Sensitive Man inspired the mood and often the titles of the paintings: Alone, Nevermore, Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Whither Do We Go? The Indian bound with contours as strong as leather the simple tangible forms. Neither was concerned with superficial illusions: both wanted to strip their subjects to what they thought was the heart of the matter: one to the essential mystery, the other to the instinctive body.

  Consider the masterpiece Nevermore. Like all Gauguin’s most original and mature works, it is, in one sense, clumsily painted. This clumsiness, however, is absolutely necessary to express the constant tension within the picture between the evocative and the real; between the hieratic gesture of a carved statue (or the stylized movement of a dancer) and the spontaneous pose of a Tahitian girl lying in wait on a couch: between flat decoration and solid structure: between allegorical and local colour. As in all Gauguin’s later works, there is a marked distinction between the figure and its surroundings. The girl’s body is modelled and physically convincing, the background is two-dimensional and schematic. As one thinks about this one suddenly realizes the explanation. The painting is the most accurate interpretation of what the girl herself might have felt as she lay there, intensely aware on the one hand of the reality of her own body, and, on the other hand, of the intangible comfort and threat of the dimensionless images projected around her from her own mind.

  I believe that, sometimes very directly and sometimes less so, this duality of interpretation explains a great deal in Gauguin’s greatest and most mysterious works. In his art he finally achieved his aim: to become a primitive and at the same time to remain finely articulate: to be simultaneously the Indian and the Sensitive Man. His work represents a single-handed attempt to build from primitive material an alternative civilization to the one he inherited. It is not altogether surprising that the latter considered the activity a criminal one.

  1955

  From The Moment of Cubism

  The Moment of Cubism

  This essay is dedicated to Barbara Niven who prompted it in an ABC teashop off the Gray’s Inn Road a long time ago.

  Certains hommes sont des collines

  Qui s’élèvent entre les hommes

  Et voient au loin tout l’avenir

  Mieux que s’il était présent

  Plus net que s’il était passé.

  Apollinaire

  The things that Picasso and I

  said to one another during those years will never be said again,

  and even if they were,

  no one would understand them any more.

  It was like

  being roped together on a mountain.

  Georges Braque

  There are happy moments,

  but no happy periods in history.

  Arnold Hauser

  The work of art is therefore

  only a halt in the becoming

  and not a frozen aim on its own.

  El Lissitzky

  I find it hard to believe that the most extreme Cubist works were painted over fifty years ago. It is true that I would not expect them to have been painted today. They are both too optimistic and too revolutionary for that. Perhaps in a way I am surprised that they have been painted at all. It would seem more likely that they were yet to be painted.

  Do I make things unnecessarily complicated? Would it not be more helpful to say simply: the few great Cubist works were painted between 1907 and 1914? And perhaps to qualify this by adding that a few more, by Juan Gris, were painted a little later?

  And anyway is it not nonsense to think of Cubism having not yet taken place when we are surrounded in daily life by the apparent effects of Cubism? All modern design, architecture and town planning seems inconceivable without the initial example of Cubism.

  Nevertheless I must insist on the sensation I have in front of the works themselves: the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are caught, pinned down, in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue a journey that began in 1907.

  Cubism was a style of painting which evolved very quickly, and whose various stages can be fairly specifically defined.1 Yet there were also Cubist poets, Cubist sculptors, and later on so-called Cubist designers and architects. Certain original stylistic features of Cubism can be found in the pioneer works of other movements: Suprematism, Constructivism, Futurism, Vorticism, the de Stijl movement.

  The question thus arises: can Cubism be adequately defined as a style? It seems unlikely. Nor can it be defined as a policy. There was never any Cubist manifesto. The opinions and outlook of Picasso, Braque, Léger or Juan Gris were clearly very different even during the few years when their paintings had many features in common. Is it not enough that the category of Cubism includes those works that are now generally agreed to be within it? This is enough for dealers, collectors, and cataloguers who go by the name of art historians. But it is not, I believe, enough for you or me.

  Even those whom the stylistic category satisfies are wont to say that Cubism constituted a revolutionary change in the history of art. Later we shall analyse this change in detail. The concept of painting as it had existed since the Renaissance was overthrown. The idea of art holding up a mirror to nature became a nostalgic one: a means of diminishing instead of interpreting reality.

  If the word ‘revolution’ is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season’s novelties, it implies a process. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self.

  Cubism cannot be explained in terms of the genius of its exponents. And this is emphasized by the fact that most of them became less profound artists when they ceased to be Cubists. Even Braque and Picasso never surpassed the works of their Cubist period: and a great deal of their later work was inferior.

  The story of how Cubism happened in terms of painting and of the leading protagonists has been told many times. The protagonists themselves found it extremely difficult – both at the time a
nd afterwards – to explain the meaning of what they were doing.

  To the Cubists, Cubism was spontaneous. To us it is part of history. But a curiously unfinished part. Cubism should be considered not as a stylistic category but as a moment (even if a moment lasting six or seven years) experienced by a certain number of people. A strangely placed moment.

  It was a moment in which the promises of the future were more substantial than the present. With the important exception of the avant-garde artists during a few years after 1917 in Moscow, the confidence of the Cubists has never since been equalled among artists.

  D. H. Kahnweiler, who was a friend of the Cubists and their dealer, has written:

  I lived those seven crucial years from 1907 to 1914 with my painter friends … what occurred at that time in the plastic arts will be understood only if one bears in mind that a new epoch was being born, in which man (all mankind in fact) was undergoing a transformation more radical than any other known within historical times.2

  What was the nature of this transformation? I have outlined elsewhere (in The Success and Failure of Picasso) the relation between Cubism and the economic, technological and scientific developments of the period. There seems little point in repeating this here: rather, I would like to try to push a little further our definition of the philosophic meaning of these developments and their coincidence.