Monday, Jul. 21, 1986
Wide Range the Sense of Sight
By Otto Friedrich
John Berger has what Henry James once called "a really grasping imagination." He not only sees more than most people do but seizes what he sees, twisting and probing until it yields up its meaning. Berger, who was born and educated in Britain, was originally a painter. He became an art critic for the New Statesman, then turned to the full-time writing of poetry, novels (G.), social criticism (Art and Revolution), films (La Salamandre), TV documentaries (Ways of Seeing). An unorthodox Marxist, he now lives in a village in the French Alps (about which he wrote Pig Earth), but he roams far. This collection of essays, his 17th book in a productive quarter- century, includes Berger's impressions of Moscow, New York City, Strasbourg and Istanbul.
But it is art and the act of seeing that remain central to Berger's imaginings. His eye ranges widely, from Rembrandt to Modigliani to an obscure Russian named Pirosmanishvili, who wandered from tavern to tavern a century ago painting pictures of food as inn signs. Berger begins one brilliant essay by describing how peasants in the Haute-Savoie spend winter evenings carving white wooden birds to hang in their kitchens. This leads him to analyze why the wooden birds are works of art, which leads him to wonder why certain things in nature are beautiful.
City dwellers think of nature "as a garden, or a view framed by a window," he writes, but peasants and sailors know better. "Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise . . . fearsomely indifferent . . . It is within this bleak natural context that beauty is encountered, and the encounter is by its nature sudden and unpredictable . . . This is why it moves us." After arguing that "art is always a form of prayer," Berger closes with a quick touch of irony: "The white wooden bird is wafted by the warm air rising from the stove in the kitchen where the neighbors are drinking. Outside, in minus 25 degrees C, the real birds are freezing to death!"
Berger is ready for any controversy, even a much debated question such as why Goya painted The Naked Maja and then painted her again with her clothes on. He did not, says Berger. On the contrary, he first painted his heroine fully dressed and then kept imagining what she might look like without her clothes. How can Berger know that? "Consider her breasts -- so rounded, high and each pointing outwards," he writes. "No breasts, when a figure is lying, are shaped quite like that. In the dressed version we find the explanation. Bound and corseted, they assume exactly that shape." And why did Goya pursue this fantasy? "Because he was haunted by the fact that he imagined her naked . . . He painted it to exorcise a ghost."
Berger strengthens his arguments with vivid prose. No windy academic generalities here. He likes sudden beginnings: "The day before yesterday a close friend of mine killed himself by blowing his brains out." He describes Albrecht Durer's view of the Apocalypse as the day when "the sun would go out, and the heavens would be rolled up and put away like a manuscript." He reports that the mosques of Istanbul are "the colour of ripe honeydew melons." He encapsulates a special quality in Bonnard's art by calling it "an art about cultivating one's own garden."
Admirers of Berger's writings need be told only that a new book of his is available. Strangers to that oeuvre should introduce themselves to a resourceful mind passionately at work.