Selected Essays of John Berger (21 page)

We are meant to presume that the next thing the girl in the photograph will do is to take her panties off. She wears them for our benefit rather than for her own. Rubens’s wife is in the act of turning, her fur about to slip off her shoulders. Clearly she cannot remain as she is for more than a second. In a superficial sense her image is more instantaneous than the photograph’s.

But, in a more profound sense, the painting ‘contains’ time and its experience. It is easy to imagine that a moment before the woman pulled the fur round her shoulders, she was entirely naked. The consecutive stages up to and away from the moment of total disclosure have been transcended. She can belong to any or all of them simultaneously. This is not the case with the girl in the photograph. Everything about her – her expression, her pose, her relationship with the viewer and the nature of the medium as used here – makes it certain that she can only be about to undress further.

Something similar happens in terms of form. In the photograph she confronts us as a matter of fact. Our own or anybody else’s possible pleasure in this fact is a totally separate issue. It is not that we are disinterested, but that the image offered us is disinterested. It is as though we saw her through the
eyes
of a eunuch while our sexual interest remained normal. Hence her so peculiar tangibility. She is there and yet she is not there: this contradiction being the result, not of the naturalism of the picture, but of its total lack of subjectivity. One might describe this lack – projecting it back onto her – by saying that her body looks as though it is numb.

In the Rubens the woman’s body, far from looking numb, looks extremely susceptible and vulnerable: which, by the same conversion as we have just made, means that she confronts us as experience.

Why do we have such an impression? There are superficial literary reasons: her dishevelled hair, the expression of her eyes revealing how sex liberates into temporary timelessness, the extreme paleness of her skin. But the profound reason is a formal and visual one. Her appearance has been literally broken by the painter’s subjectivity. Beneath the fur that she holds across herself, the upper part of her body and her legs can never meet. There is a displacement sideways of about nine inches:
her thighs, in order to join on to her hips, are at least nine inches too far to the left.

I doubt whether Rubens planned this: just as I doubt whether most viewers consciously notice it. In itself it is unimportant. What matters is what it permits. It permits the body to become impossibly dynamic. Its coherence is no longer within itself but within the wishes of the viewer. More precisely, it permits the upper and lower halves of the body to rotate separately and in opposite directions round the sexual centre which is hidden: the torso turning to the right, the legs to the left. At the same time this hidden sexual centre is connected by means of the dark fur coat to all the surrounding darkness in the picture, so that she is turning both
around
and
within
the dark which has been made a metaphor for her sex.

Apart from the necessity of transcending the single moment and of admitting subjectivity, there is one further element which is essential for any great sexual image of the nude. This is the element of banality. In one form or another this has to exist because, as we saw, it is what transforms the voyeur into the lover. Different painters – Giorgione in the
Tempesta
, Rembrandt, Watteau, Courbet – have introduced it in different ways: Rubens introduces it here by means of his compulsive painting of the softness of the fat flesh.

1966

The great revelations all occur before the age of twenty-five. Perhaps because one is so keenly expecting them. Rilke was the first modern European poet I read. Matisse the first draughtsman I understood. My experience of their works is impossible to separate from a girl’s bed, London streets in the early hours of the morning, the stair-well we gazed down into, leaning over the balustrade smoking, whilst the model in the life class rested and the German planes flew very high overhead; in the stair-well we watched men and women ascending and descending, each with their own life full of unexpected changes, partings and offers. Certain poems of Rilke’s are still charged for me with the pride of that time.

The revelations which come later are more objective. One has the sense of suddenly seeing in a new light. But the light is almost as impersonal as the truth. The images are no longer coloured by the recent sensations of one’s own limbs. One becomes simultaneously humbler and more arrogant. One feels a duty and not, as before, just the desire to recognize and be recognized. Everyone over thirty-five starts to explain.

Vermeer’s
Painter in His Studio
was a comparatively late revelation. It was the summer a few years ago in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Outside in the public garden the sparrows were bathing in the dust. These sparrows were already making their way into the mind of Corker: the central character of the novel I was writing.

For many years I had walked past Vermeers without looking. The painter Friso ten Holt first persuaded me to look. Then I realized that the only thing Vermeer had in common with the other Dutch interior painters was his subject matter, and this was no more than his starting point. His real concern was different and mysterious.

What was it that he wanted to say in the stillness of his rooms which the
light fills like water a tank? (It is almost possible to imagine that the light flowing in is audible.) What is the meaning of these women at table and window whom the light discloses? Why can we feel so near to them, our eyes taking in every intimate drop of light (as though by observing we were drying slightly moist surfaces), and yet at the same time be so remote from them?

The questions are not purely rhetorical, for Vermeer was one of the most deliberate painters who ever lived. (His extremely small output is related to this.) The meaning of his art, however complex, must have been in large measure conscious.

The explanation usually given is technical. Vermeer used a camera obscura. (A camera obscura works like an old-fashioned plate camera with a head covering for the photographer. But instead of the light falling on a sensitized plate, the artist himself traces the image on paper or canvas.) This is why Vermeer’s perspective has a strange remoteness – the foreground objects, although very close, always being seen as if in the middle distance; and this is why his subjects have the odd, cold intimacy of colour photography.

Although this is certainly a partial explanation, it never seemed to me entirely adequate. It begs the question of why Vermeer used his technical means with such a single-minded passion. Lawrence Gowing in his book on Vermeer
¹
offers a psychological explanation: that Vermeer could not face reality unprotected, that he always needed an artificial process of mediation. The book interested me when I read it, but I was still not satisfied. There still seemed a philosophical purpose in Vermeer’s art which had not yet been fully understood. I did not know what it was.

Meanwhile I merely noticed, as a possible contribution to an unknown answer, his recurring interest in signs, images and writing. In nearly every interior he painted, there is either a map, a sheet of music, a letter, a chart, or a picture whose subject-matter functions like an ideogram. (For instance, behind the woman weighing pearls in a pair of scales is a picture of the Last Judgement.) Was this only the result of convention and contemporary interests? Or was it a more personal, obsessive preoccupation?

I had gone to Vienna to look particularly at the Brueghels and Rubens and also at the Strozzis. Strozzi is a minor painter who fascinates me like a great conversationalist. I find it easy to believe that he was a doctor – this might explain his remarkable psychological insight. I noticed the Vermeer, but saw it as it were out of the corner of my mind. Then, suddenly, it absorbed all my attention. Here was Vermeer’s own comment on being a painter, his own confession of purpose. All the other Vermeers I had ever seen might now be tested.

The painting shows a painter painting a young girl standing in the light from an unseen window. It has been interpreted as an allegory in which the young girl represents Clio, the muse of history, holding the
trumpet of fame and the golden record of the world’s events. According to this interpretation, she is looking at the emblems of three other muses which are lying on the table: the mask of Comedy, the book of Polyhymnia, the muse of music, and the score of Euterpe, the muse of flute-playing. All commentators are agreed that the painter is Vermeer himself in his own studio in Delft.

The interpretation of the allegory is ingenious, but it seemed to me beside the point. There was a far starker statement waiting to be read. What the girl is looking at on the table are precisely the visual ingredients or elements of her own appearance. There is a face (the mask), another large book, a piece of blue material like that of her own dress, a piece of yellow material the same colour as the binding of her book, a strip of pinkish paper which corresponds to the glimpse we have of her pinkish collar and, woven into the design of the curtain which hangs in front of the table, are the blue leaves from which her laurel wreath is made. True, there is no trumpet on the table, but there is the written music which the trumpet can turn into sound. The point of the confrontation is to demonstrate the difference between the living and the inert: a difference which transcends all the common visual elements. It is as though Vermeer were exclaiming: Breath is all!

And to emphasize how relevant this is to the art of painting, he shows himself carefully making marks on a canvas to represent the laurel leaves of the living girl. The marks he is making are different from the woven leaves on the curtain. The leaves of the curtain are lifeless. The living girl, wearing the same leaves, transforms them; they become, like her, unpredictable. The painter ‘fixes’ these leaves on his canvas: they become once more inert and two-dimensional but charged now with the painter’s awareness of the mystery of his living model.

Vermeer’s father was a silk-weaver who probably designed the flowers and figures for the curtains he made. It was perhaps he who first taught Vermeer to draw. If so, Vermeer’s ambition to be a painter may well have made him question his father’s decorative formulae, so that he became especially aware of the differences between a living form and its formalized representation. Later, his use of the camera obscura must have further increased this awareness. On the one hand, it helped him to be very faithful to living appearances; on the other hand, it emphasized how much art had to depend upon a device. There, outside, was the changing tangible reality! And here, inside the box, was its flat appearance which he traced! This is not to suggest that there is any self-disparagement in Vermeer’s art. He was preoccupied, not by his limitations, but by those aspects of reality which by their nature defy visual representation.

Historically this is not surprising. He was born in the year in which Galileo published his Copernican dialogues. He was a contemporary of Pascal, who less than ten years before had written:

Vermeer was a friend and exact contemporary of the microscopist Leeuwenhoek, who found and described invisible bacteria. For the first time science, rather than religion, was proving the evidence of the eye inadequate.

I began to realize the significance of the maps on Vermeer’s walls: the maps are diagrams of the country outside the window which we never see; of his favourite theme of the letter, either just delivered or just being written, and whose message from or to the outside world we cannot know; of the light which always enters obliquely through a window we cannot see through. The fundamental difference between Vermeer and the other Dutch interior painters is that everything in every interior he paints refers to events outside the room. Their spirit is the opposite of the domestic. The function of the closed-in corner of the room is to remind us of the infinite.

Vermeer was the first sceptic in painting, the first to question the adequacy of visual evidence. Because three centuries later this scepticism was transformed into disillusion, and the art of recording immediate appearances was abandoned, it is difficult for us to appreciate how affirmative and calm Vermeer’s scepticism was. It was the condition of his approach to reality. He was able to portray with unique precision what constituted one moment because he was so keenly aware, objectively and without a trace of nostalgia, that each succeeding moment is unrepeatable.

The Impressionists were concerned with the momentary, passing effects of light. But they worked on the assumption that these effects, given similar atmospheric conditions, were repeatable. In front of a Monet landscape we become aware of the hour of the day and the season of the year. In front of a Vermeer woman exactly turning her head, reading a letter, pouring milk, trying on a necklace in a mirror, raising a glass, we become aware of the flow of time itself.

That is why the light seems like water.

1966

‘I have neglected nothing.’ Such was Poussin’s modest reply when asked to comment on his own unique mastery. It is revealing in two ways. It emphasizes Poussin’s methodical, obstinate, highly conscious way of working. He never allowed himself to be in debt to his genius: a fact which has led a lot of stupid and blind people to assume that he had everything except genius, that he achieved what he did simply by obeying all the rules. The remark also emphasizes the outstanding quality of Poussin’s finished art. In Poussin’s world there are no coincidences, no happy or unhappy accidents. Everything seen is foreseen.