by John Berger
True, there are exceptions: self-portraits which do look at us: a Chardin, a Tintoretto, a copy of a Frans Hals self-portrait when he was bankrupt, Turner as a young man, the old Goya as an exile in Bordeaux. Nevertheless, they are few and far between. And so how is it that during the last ten years of his life Rembrandt painted nearly twenty portraits which address us directly?
When you’re trying to do a portrait of somebody else, you look very hard at them, searching to find what is there, trying to trace what has happened to the face. The result (sometimes) may be a kind of likeness, but usually it is a dead one, because the presence of the sitter and the tight focus of observation have inhibited your response. The sitter leaves. And it can then happen that you begin again, referring not any more to a face in front of you, but to the recollected face which is now inside you. You no longer peer; you shut your eyes. You begin to make a portrait of what the sitter has been left behind in your head. And now there is a chance that it will be alive.
Is it possible that Rembrandt did something similar with himself? I believe he used a mirror only at the beginning of each canvas. Then he put a cloth over it, and worked and reworked the canvas until the painting began to correspond to an image of himself which had been left behind after a lifetime. This image was not generalised, it was very specific. Each time he made a portrait he chose what to wear. Each time he was highly aware of how his face, his stance, his appearance had changed. He studied the damage unflinchingly. Yet, at a certain moment, he covered the mirror so that he no longer had to adjust his gaze to his gaze, and then he continued to paint only from what had been left behind inside him. Freed from the double-bind, he was sustained by a vague hope, an intuition, that later it would be others who would look at him with a compassion that he could not allow himself.
13
Brancusi
Thank you for the painting, Marisa, I’ve put glass over it. Your painted man, and around him the horizons, and beside him the real, not painted, lichen which has resisted drought and every extreme of temperature for millions of years. Primeval lichen, petals, feathers – you keep them between pages and you take one out, like a ticket from a purse, whenever you paint a journey!
Me? I’m standing in the biggest ever Brancusi exhibition. No lichen, no feathers, nothing itches here. Almost everything is polished and pure.
I have the impression, that just after Brancusi’s death in 1957 I visited his studio in the Impasse Ronsin. I was with a friend – perhaps with Zadkine who was also a friend of his. I remember the name BRANCUSI scrawled on the door with a horseshoe hung beside it, the high skylights, the vice on his bench and the sculptures and the famous carved pedestals and the segments of his Column-without-end, all crowded together but never jostling one another – each work platonically arm in arm with its neighbour.
Particularly I remember the benevolent presence of the man who had just been buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse. The studio seemed to me to be like a bakery, the ovens still warm, from which the baker had just walked out to go down to the river.
Yet is this true? Was I really there or have I made it up, my imagination influenced by all the flaring, mysterious photos he took of his studio, or by a visit I made to the reconstructed one which was later opened as a museum?
There’s nobody I can check with today. Yet the doubt is appropriate, for Brancusi had the perplexing gift of being entirely himself and, at the same time, always slipping away. (He was seven years old when he ran away from his home in the Carpathian Mountains the first time.) It’s not birds that I sculpt, he once said, it’s the act of flying.
He dressed like a Russian peasant yet his friend Marcel Duchamp sold Brancusi’s sculptures in the 1920s to avant-garde collectors in the USA, where they were viewed as shining emblems of the modern era.
His first sculpted birds were inspired by the mythical bird of the Romanian forests called the Maïastra. When he came to Paris from Bucharest in 1904 he made most of the journey on foot. Yet his last birds, made in the 1930s, already prophesy the form of the Concorde jet!
When you look at his drawings, they have the air of maps, which is odd for a sculptor. The contours don’t mould forms, they simply mark frontiers which can be crossed. All his work is about leaving. Above all about leaving the earth for the sky, as his Columns-without-end are supposed to do.
And standing here, Marisa, I suddenly want to resist. I think of one of your feathers falling down on to the earth. Maybe I love the imperfect and the flawed too much. I want to find out how to judge the rascal. He’ll remain great, of course, but we ought to know a bit more about his pain.
There’s a work in the show called Sculpture for the Blind. It’s an oval, lying on its side, made of marble, about the size of an ostrich’s egg but not so symmetrical.
Say somebody blind picks it up and starts feeling it, fascinated, with their fingertips. Is this slight ridge the place of a nose? Is this gentle hollow becoming an eye-socket? Can the ripple here be a hair-line? After a while they’ll turn the egg over and start touching it to discover whether there is a crack, as with an Easter egg that opens. And finally they’ll ask themselves a question: Is this thing I’m holding in my hands a container or a core? Is there a head within it, or is it a head coming into being?
Now, this work is one of a long series of horizontal oval heads made between 1910 and 1928. Some he called The Sleeping Muse, others The New Born, The Beginning of the World, First Cry, Prometheus. Obviously Brancusi imagined them as cores not containers.
And he strove for the same thing in all his polished carvings – the birds, the fishes, the princesses. Each time when carving, he wanted to go back, eliminating all imperfections, all wear and tear, to the growing point of the first Creation, to the pure idea as it takes on form. Platonic once more. That he spent months polishing his sculptures was an integral part of that return journey to the pure, to that which existed before gravity and before the Fall.
The preposterous challenge the rascal set himself was to do this using heavy, earthy materials such as marble, bronze and oak. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed. When he fails the polished form does remain a case, a container, and doesn’t become the core. When he succeeds, the material is utterly transformed by the movement he miraculously gives it. In the case of the big, flat Fish, the marble becomes water.
Nearly all the birds and fishes succeed, as also the oval heads. The penguins, the tortoises, the torsos, Leda, the smart women, fail. They remain containers. At the best like sea shells and at the worst, like custom-built motorbike petrol tanks.
The notorious story of how in 1927 the US customs taxed one of Brancusi’s sculptures because they considered it, not a work of art, but an industrial utensil, is often retold as an example of bureaucratic philistinism. It seems to me that their colossal error was a little understandable, and not quite as stupid as is made out.
I think the old man in his solitude sensed the problem of the containers. And if during his last twenty years he made almost nothing new, it was probably because he realised that he had found all he was likely to find. After all, there are not that many cores, and the infinite multiplicity of feathers, leaves, barks, skins is NOT what interested him.
With one exception. The exception which is his most astonishing invention. The Kiss. He made the first one in 1907 and he went on making others till 1940. This is the most recurring theme in his oeuvre, a counterpart to the bird. All the Kisses are in rough stone. Not one is polished and not one is platonic.
All the versions show an embracing couple carved out of a single block of stone which remains very rectangular, like a pillar. Their two eyes in profile form a single eye, their four lips a single mouth. A shallow line marks the frontier of their two skins pressed together. The outermost surface of the block stands in for their four encircling arms, which end in their poor open hands, pressing the other inwards, breast to breast.
The stone now does not have to transcend its material nature. It remains earth
bound, part of the same world as lichen and moss and feathers. And although these couples are recognisably by the same artist, they aspire to something very different from the rest of his work.
In face of them one encounters what came, not before the Fall, but afterwards. The stocky lovers are on this side, on our side, in all our usual mess. They are not seeking perfection; they are simply longing to be a bit more complete. Time and again with the Kisses the old rascal instilled an ache into stone: the ache of a desire for a lost unity.
Thank you again, Marisa, for your man and the lichen stuck on the coarse paper …
14
The River Po
Michelangelo Antonioni comes from Ferrara – in the simple sense that he was born there, but also, in a more complex way, because the city or its spirit is invariably present in his work. (It seems to me that even his face and the way he is handsome is an expression of that city of Ariosto and the house of Este.)
Today a strange city of small luxuries (small in dimension, jewel-like, reminiscent of the objects in the paintings of Cosimo Tura) and great sadness. A city where young women marry and become mothers and then the mothers are inexplicably transformed into stepmothers. A city where fathers unaccountably become strangers to their children. Where nothing, however familiar, is what it appears to be, and everything becomes slowly more and more distant.
I have no right to say this, for I have never lived there, but every visit during forty years has confirmed this impression, and when I began reading the stories of Bassani, I came to the conclusion it was probably true. A city like a glass case whose panes are always misting up. Containing what? A secret. Maybe a necklace of secrets. Or maybe a weapon, if so, a cruel one.
Whoever says Ferrara, says also the River Po. Other places are more intimate with the river – Cremona, Torino, the little town of Paesana near its source, but Ferrara is its monument, its mortuary headstone. After Ferrara the river begins to negotiate and finally join the beyond. This dimension of the beyond is marvellously held at the end of Antonioni’s first nine-minute documentary film, Gente del Po, made between 1943 and 1947.
The plain of the Po has given northern Italy its wealth, but the river is unpredictable, always shifting, meandering, refusing norms. A sprawling story of regular repetitions and unpredictability. It silts up. It pushes the sea back! Its riverbed gets higher and higher – hence the everlasting danger of floods. On the surface she is still (the Po is a feminine river – perhaps the most feminine in the world: by contrast the Danube is male) but deeper down, there are invisible, ferocious currents. Beware all inexperienced boatmen! The Po irrigates, offers harvests and is indifferent, as are all rivers.
In Antonioni’s film the river is the chief character, defined by her colossal will, but not her impatience, to reach the sea. When she does, the sea, instead of embracing her, gives her a leg up and she clambers into the white bed of the sky.
The other principal characters in Gente del Po are the captain of the tugboat, hauling five barges down the river, the captain’s wife and their daughter, who is down below in her bunk for she has been taken ill. The mother goes ashore to buy a remedy for her daughter in the chemist’s shop of a poor riverside village. The tugboat is called Milano and the river constantly reminds the villagers of elsewhere. This was twenty years before Italy’s postwar economic miracle.
In Antonioni’s later films the milieu tends to be rich and elegant rather than rural proletarian. Yet isn’t it true that in most of them there is a search for a remedy? A remedy which never quite works – despite all the effort.
This first, brief, black-and-white film without spoken dialogue is prophetic in another way too. In it we today recognise Antonioni’s special way of framing his shots – as though the focus of his interest is always beside the event shown, and the protagonist is never centred, because the centre is a destiny we do not understand and whose outline is not yet clear.
Essentially his cinematic handwriting hasn’t changed since he began making this first film when he was thirty-one years old. An immense evolution is to come – including that of colour – but the same vision, the same pair of eyes was already there in 1943.
Whoever says Po, says Fog. It is part of the river’s character, like the smell of her skin. The Po was the first river – years after this film was made – on which radar was installed, for her worst fogs are impenetrable.
The fogs extend over the plain of the Po, creating a very special atmosphere and tension, which writers like Gianni Celati and, earlier, Césare Pavese have described so well.
To understand this tension one has to ask the question of what is hidden by the fog and what isn’t. In the sunlight the plain is flat and wide and long, often stretching to the horizon; the roads are straight; the farmhouses are rectangular; the poplars are in perfect line; the irrigation channels never meander. It’s impossible to imagine a less mysterious landscape. (In Holland, for example, there is always the tumult of the sky.) This lack of mystery is not, however, reassuring, for the scale of the plain and its geometry and inevitability dwarf anything that is only 2 m. high – like a man or a woman. The desert dwarfs with the authority of God; the plain of the Po dwarfs with the banality of a remorseless, regulated calendar. And so, somewhere, the soul prays for fog and it’s the only prayer to which the river listens.
The fog comes. The air gets polluted. The isolation becomes insupportable. The lorries have their headlights on, even if they pull over and stop. The claustrophobia mounts. But in the mystery of what’s behind the fog there is – nothing as simple and naive as a hope for the people of Emilia have watched everything – there is a memory, similar to the memory of a mother. (I do not think in psychoanalytic terms, and have never done so, but in climatic ones.)
I might call this memory the Madonna of the Fog. This is the most red, least mystic, least Catholic part of Italy. (Perhaps during the war she was a Partisan.) In any case everyone knows her when the visibility has been reduced to a few metres. Barely discernible, she stands there, arms extended, palms towards us, announcing that the truth is invisible (with all the ambiguity of that phrase) and that we should close our eyes in order to bring everything together!
The film that Antonioni is now making with Wim Wenders begins and finishes with a fog in Ferrara. And its provisional tide is Beyond the Clouds. After the four stories, which constitute the film, have been told, the narrator says:
We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one and so on up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.
Those who admire Antonioni’s films often say that he narrates like a novelist. Those who criticise his films often accuse them of being abstract, over-aesthetic, formalist. It seems to me that if one wants to enter the world of his imagination, one should first think of him as a painter. Human behaviour and stories interest him, but he begins with what somebody or somewhere looks like. His most important perceptions are pre-verbal. (This is perhaps why he can use silence so well.) Kieslowski, for example, is a real novelist of the cinema because he thinks about the consequence of actions. Antonioni gazes at the silhouette of an action, with all the painter’s desire to find in it something that is timeless. I would even go so far as to suggest he often forgets the consequence.
Since Antonioni exhibits as a painter, I’m not pointing out anything very original here. But if we go back to the Po and the Madonna of the Fog, and if we remember how he’s a painter, we discover, I think, a clue to his life’s work.
Antonioni’s films question the visible until there’s not enough light to see any more. The visible may be Monica Vitti or Marcello Mastroianni or a river bank or a ship’s hull or a tree or a tennis court. Unlike a true painter he can’t touch the image with his hands; he has to worry it in other ways – by lighting, by movement, by waiting, by a kind of cinematic stealth. His purpose is to make us p
eer into his films as one peers into the Po as it flows, as Monet peered into the depths of his water lily pond, as one walks peering through the fog.
The hope which, I believe, sustained him as he made each film, was that, as we peer, something will come to meet us, something that almost escaped him, something so real that it doesn’t have a name.
Halfway through Gente del Po a peasant on the river bank sharpens a scythe and a line of women, dressed in black, rake hay. One of the women straightens her back to gaze at the river as the barges pass. She is young. She is like nobody else. She has slightly protruding white teeth when she smiles. And she smiles, because whilst she gazes at the wide river with its colossal will to reach the sea, something comes out of it to meet her. We can read it on her face. But on the film we can’t see it.
15
Giorgio Morandi
(for Gianni Celati)
He was a solitary who lived all his life surrounded by people. The opposite of a hermit. A man closely linked to the everyday life of his neighbours and town, who nevertheless pursued and developed the purity of his own solitude. This is a very specially Italian phenomenon. It is what can happen behind the shutters and the sunblinds. The solitude not of the forest or the cave but of sunlight reflected from a perfectly built wall.
He remained unmarried in a way which is also particularly Italian. Nothing much to do with celibacy or sexual predilection. Rather a hazard determined by statistics – as if each city (in this case Bologna) needs a required number of bachelors and spinsters. What is particularly Italian is the way the hazard is accepted and finally enjoyed as if it were a wrapped sweetmeat served with strong bitter coffee.
His face became like that of a sexton, but a sexton for whom the modest role of looking after the precious objects in the sacristy was not a second-best but rather, the chosen vocation. The face of a virile not timid sexton.