Selected Essays of John Berger (37 page)

A poster for the First of May 1937 celebrating the Popular Front in France. An arm holding a red flag and sprigs of cherry blossom; a vague background of clouds (?), sea waves (?), mountains (?). A caption from the
Marseillaise: ‘Liberté, liberté chérie, combats avec tes défenseurs!’
Everything about this poster is as symbolic as it is soon to be demonstrated politically false.

I doubt whether we are in a position to make moral judgements about Heartfield’s integrity. We would need to know and to feel the pressures, both from within and without, under which he worked during that decade of increasing menace and terrible betrayals. But, thanks to his example, and that of other artists such as Mayakovsky or Tatlin, there is one issue which we should be able to see more clearly than was possible earlier.

It concerns the principal type of moral leverage applied to committed artists and propagandists in order to persuade them to suppress or distort their own original imaginative impulses. I am not speaking now of intimidation but of moral and political argument. Often such arguments were advanced by the artist himself against his own imagination.

The moral leverage was gained through asking questions concerning utility and effectiveness. Am I being useful enough? Is my work effective enough? These questions were closely connected with the belief that a work of art or a work of propaganda (the distinction is of little importance here) was a
weapon
of political struggle. Works of imagination can exert great political and social influence. Politically revolutionary artists hope to integrate their work into a mass struggle. But the influence of their work cannot be determined, either by the artist or by a political commissar, in advance. And it is here that we can see that to compare a work of imagination with a weapon is to resort to a dangerous and far-fetched metaphor.

The effectiveness of a weapon can be estimated quantitatively. Its performance is isolable and repeatable. One chooses a weapon for a situation. The effectiveness of a work of imagination cannot be estimated quantitatively. Its performance is not isolable or repeatable. It changes with circumstances. It creates its own situation. There is no
foreseeable
quantitative correlation between the quality of a work of imagination and its effectiveness. And this is part of its nature because it is intended to operate within a field of subjective interactions which are interminable and immeasurable. This is not to grant to art an ineffable value; it is only to emphasize that the imagination, when true to its impulse, is continually and inevitably questioning the existing category of usefulness. It is ahead of that part of the social self which asks the question. It must deny itself in order to answer the question in its own terms. By way of this denial revolutionary artists have been persuaded to compromise, and to do so in vain — as I have indicated in the case of John Heartfield.

It is lies that can be qualified as useful or useless; the lie is surrounded by what has not been said and its usefulness or not can be gauged according to what has been hidden. The truth is always first discovered in open space.

1969

There are reports that many thousands of monumental sculptures have been recently put up in the towns and villages of China. These sculptures depict local groups of workers or peasants achieving some revolutionary feat — often a production record. The sculptural style is so naturalistic as to suggest the figures being cast from life. The apotheosis of the living heroes is as immediate as possible. They can straight away look at themselves in the monument, not as in a mirror, but as from the outside, as others in history may see them.

From here it is impossible to judge the effect of these works on the masses in China. But one can make a number of general comments. The conscious aim behind the policy decision in Peking to produce these monuments is not different in kind — though leading to a cruder practice — from the unformulated aims of nearly all the patrons of European art since the Renaissance. The aim is to isolate and
reproduce
an aspect of reality in order to award it an outside prize, to confer upon it a value which is not intrinsic to it but which derives from an abstract religious or historical schema. Thus, appearances are abstracted from nature and society, through the imitative faculty of art, and used to dress, to clothe a social-moral-historical ideal. When the schema is not abstract and does not have to be imposed on social life, it has no need of the borrowed clothes of appearances.

The distinction between works produced according to an abstract schema and those rare works which extend, as distinct from transposing, the experience of the spectator, is that the latter never remove appearances from the essential and specific body of meaning behind them. (They never flay their subjects.) They deny the validity of any outside prize. One must add, however, that such masterpieces have as yet contributed nothing directly to solving the problems of revolutionary political organization and education. It is impossible to oppose them
directly to the Chinese monuments. These monuments need not be assessed as art but they can be considered as things to be seen. And it is at this point that — somewhat surprisingly — the example of Cézanne may be relevant.

Millions of words have been written in psychological and aesthetic studies about Cézanne yet their conclusions lack the gravity of the works. Everyone is agreed that Cézanne’s paintings appear to be different from those of any painter who preceded him; whilst the works of those who came after seem scarcely comparable, for they were produced out of the profound crisis which Cézanne (and probably also Van Gogh) half foresaw and helped to provoke.

What then made Cézanne’s painting different? Nothing less than his view of the visible. He questioned and finally rejected the belief, which was axiomatic to the whole Renaissance tradition, that things are seen for what they are, that their visibility belongs to them. According to this tradition, to make a likeness was to reconstitute a truth; even fantastic painters, like Bosch, treated visibility in the same way; their only difference was that they conferred visibility upon imagined constructions. To be visible was to be there, to make visible was to make there. Reality (nature) consisted of an infinite number of sights; the duty of the artist was to bring together and arrange sights. The artist captured appearances and in capturing them preserved a truth. The world offered its visibility to men as a tree offers its reflection to water. The mediation of optics did not alter this fundamental relation. The visible remained the
object
of every man’s vision.

Cézanne, intensely introspective yet determinedly objective, propelled forward by continual self-doubt, born at a time when it was possible for a painter to recognize and give equal weight to his
petite sensation
on the one hand and
nature
on the other, Cézanne, who consciously strove towards a new synthesis between art and nature, who wanted to renew the European tradition, in fact destroyed for ever the foundation of that tradition by insisting, more and more radically as his work developed, that visibility is as much an extension of ourselves as it is a quality-in-itself of things. Through Cézanne we recognize that a visible world begins and ends with the life of each man, that millions of these visible worlds correspond in so many respects that from the correspondences we can construct the visible world, but that this world of appearances is inseparable from each one of us: and each one of us constitutes its centre.

What I am saying may become clearer if related to the actual landscapes in which Cézanne found his ‘motifs’. I have been to many places to see how they compare to a painter’s concentrated vision of them (Courbet’s Jura, Van Gogh’s southern Holland, Piero’s Umbria, Poussin’s Rome, etc.); but the experience of visiting and revisiting Cézanne’s landscape round Aix is unique.

The houses in which he worked and their atmosphere have changed a lot. The civilization in which he lived, as distinct from the civilization to which we can read his work as a signpost, has disintegrated. His studio is now in a suburb near a supermarket. The Jas de Bouffan with its large garden and avenue of chestnuts has become an island in a sea of autoroute works. The farm at Bellevue is inhabited but overgrown, broken down, by the side of a car dump. Students camp in the Château Noir at weekends.

The natural landscape is largely unchanged: the Mont Sainte-Victoire, the yellowy-red rocks, the characteristic pine trees are there as they are in the paintings. At first everything looks smaller than you expected. However close you get to one of Cézanne’s subjects, it still looks further away than in the painting. But after a while, when you have got used to this, when you are no longer concentrating upon the appearance at any given moment of the mountain, or the trees, or the red roof, or the path through the wood, you begin to realize that what Cézanne painted, and what you are already familiar with because of his paintings, is the
genius loci
of each view.

One might suppose the houses where he painted to be haunted today by a social way of life gone for ever (fortunately). But the landscapes are haunted by their own essence. Or so it seems, because you cannot become innocent of the paintings you know. Mont Sainte-Victoire appears primordial, as does the plain beneath it. Wherever you look, you feel that you are face to face with the origin of what is in front of you. You rediscover the famous silence of Cézanne’s paintings in the age of what you are looking at. I do not mean, however, the geological origin of the mountain; I mean the origin of the visibility of the landscape before you. Through this landscape — because Cézanne used it over and over again as his raw material — you come to see what seeing means.

Given this, it is not surprising that Cézanne’s work had to wait about fifty years for a philosopher — and not an art historian or art critic — to define its general significance. (The particular significance of each work is of course indefinable beyond or outside its own self-definition as painting.) In 1945 the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty published an essay of seventeen pages entitled
Le Doute de Cézane.
¹
These few concentrated pages have revealed more to me about Cézanne’s painting than anything else I have ever read.

Merleau-Ponty quotes some of Cézanne’s own remarks. Of the old masters Cézanne said: ‘They created pictures: we are attempting a piece of nature.’ Of nature he said: ‘The artist must conform to this perfect work of art. Everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it; nothing else is worth remembering.’ ‘Are you speaking of our nature?’ asked Bernard. ‘It has to do with both,’ said Cézanne. ‘But aren’t nature and art different?’ ‘I want to make them the same,’ replied Cézanne.

At what moment can art and nature converge and become the same? Never by way of representation, for nature cannot by definition be represented; and the representational devices of art depend entirely on artistic convention. The more consistently imitative art is, the more artificial it is. Metaphoric arts are the most natural. But what is a purely visual metaphor? At what moment is green, in equal measure, a perceived concentration of colour and an attribute of grass? It is the same question as above, formulated differently.

The answer is: at the moment of perception; at the moment when the subject of perception can admit no discontinuity between himself and the objects and space before him; at the moment at which he is an irremovable part of the totality of which he is the consciousness. ‘The landscape,’ said Cézanne, ‘thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ ‘Colour,’ he also said, ‘is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’

The Herculean task Cézanne set himself was to prolong this moment for as long as it took him to paint his picture. And paradoxically this is why he worked so slowly and required so many sittings: he never wanted to let the logic of the painting take precedence over the continuity of perception: after each brushstroke he had to re-establish his innocence as perceiver. And since such a task is never entirely possible, he was always dogged by a greater or lesser sense of his own failure.

What he could not realize was that in failing to paint the pictures he wanted, he heightened our awareness of the visible as it had never been heightened before. He bequeathed to us something far more valuable than masterpieces: a new consciousness of a faculty.

In his attempt to prolong this moment, to be faithful to his ‘sensation’, to treat nature as a work of art, he abandoned the systematic usages of painting — outlines, consistent perspective, local colour, the optical conventions of impressionism, classical composition, etc. — because he reckoned that these were only ways of constructing a substitute for nature
post facto.
The old masters, he said, ‘replaced reality by imagination and by the abstraction which accompanies it’. Today we are so accustomed to thinking that the tradition of the old masters was challenged by increasing abstraction and finally by non-figurative art that we fail to see that Cézanne was the most fundamentally iconoclastic of all modern artists.

Since Cézanne’s death certain discoveries by psychologists have proved how true he was to his perceptual experience. For example: the perspective we live is neither geometrical nor photographic. When we see a circle in perspective we do not see a perfect ellipse but a form which oscillates round an ellipse without being one. There is something very poignant about Cézanne, shocked in moments of doubt by his own non-conformity, fearing that his whole art was based on a personal deformity of vision, and it later being established that no painter had
ever been as faithful to the actual processes by which we all see. But neither this poignancy nor the piecemeal confirmation by science of some of his innovations is central to the overall significance of his work.

Merleau-Ponty indicates wherein this significance lies: