by John Berger
And so we come to her paradox. How is it that a painter so concentrated on her own image is never narcissistic? People have tried to explain this by quoting Van Gogh or Rembrandt, who both painted numerous self-portraits. But the comparison is facile and false.
It is necessary to return to pain and the perspective in which Frida placed it, whenever it allowed her a little respite. The capacity to feel pain is, her art laments, the first condition of being sentient. The sensitivity of her own mutilated body made her aware of the skin of everything alive – trees, fruit, water, birds and – naturally – other women and men. And so, in painting her own image, as if on her skin, she speaks of the whole sentient world.
Critics say that Francis Bacon’s work was concerned with pain. In his art, however, pain is being watched through a screen, like soiled linen being watched through the round window of a washing machine. Frida Kahlo’s work is the opposite of Francis Bacon’s. There is no screen; she is close-up, proceeding with her delicate fingers, stitch by stitch, making not a dress, but closing a wound. Her art talks to pain, mouth pressed to the skin of pain, and it talks about sentience and its desire and its cruelty and its intimate nicknames.
One finds a comparable intimacy with pain in the poetry of the great living Argentinian poet, Juan Gelman.
that woman begs for alms in a twilight of pots and pans
that she’s washing furiously / with blood / with oblivion / to ignite her is like putting a gardel record on the phonograph /
streets of fire fall from her unbreakable barrio /
and a man and a woman walking tied
to the apron of pain we put on to wash /
like my mother washing the floors every day /
and the day would have a little pearl at its feet.*
Much of Gelman’s poetry has been written in exile during the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is about the compañeros – including his son and daughter-in-law whom the Junta made disappear. It is a poetry in which the martyred come back to share the pain of those bereaving them. Its time is outside time, in a place where pains meet and dance and those suffering grief make their assignations with their losses. Future and past are excluded there as absurd; there is only the present, only the immense modesty of the present which claims everything ever, except lies.
Often the lines of Gelman’s poems are punctuated by strokes, which somewhat resemble the beat of the tango – the music of Buenos Aires, his city. But the strokes are also silences which refuse entry to any lie. (They are the visible antithesis to censorship which is invariably imposed in order to defend a system of lies.) They are a reminder of what pain discovers and even pain cannot say.
did you hear me / heart? / we’re taking
defeat someplace else /
we’re taking this animal elsewhere
our dead / somewhere else /
let them make no noise / quiet as they can be / not
even the silence of their bones should be heard /
their bones, little blue-eyed animals /
who sit like good children at table /
who touch pain without meaning to /
saving not a word about their bullet wounds /
with a little gold star and a moon in their mouths /
appearing in the mouths of those they loved*
This poetry helps us see something else about Kahlo’s paintings, something that separates them distinctly from Rivera’s, or any of her Mexican contemporaries. Rivera placed his figures in a space which he had mastered and which belonged to the future; he placed them there like monuments: they were painted for the future. And the future (although not the one he imagined) has come and gone and the figures have been left behind alone. In Kahlo’s paintings there was no future, only an immensely modest present which claimed everything and to which the things painted momentarily return whilst we look, things which were already memories before they were painted, memories of the skin.
So we return to the simple act of Frida putting pigment on the smooth surfaces she chose to paint on. Lying in bed or cramped in her chair, a minute brush in her hand, which had a ring on every finger, she remembered what she had touched, what was there when the pain wasn’t. She painted, for example, the feel of polished wood on a parquet floor, the texture of rubber on the tyre of her wheelchair, the fluff of a chick’s feathers, or the crystalline surface of a stone, like nobody else. And this discreet capacity – for it was very discreet – came from what I have called the sense of double touch: the consequence of imagining she was painting her own skin.
There’s a self-portrait (1943) where she lies on a rocky landscape and a plant grows out of her body, her veins joining with the veins of its leaves. Behind her, flattish rocks extend to the horizon, a little like the waves of a petrified sea. Yet what the rocks are exactly like is what she would have felt on the skin of her back and legs if she had been lying on those rocks. Frida Kahlo lay cheek to cheek with everything she depicted.
That she became a world legend is in part due to the fact that in the dark age in which we are living under the new world order, the sharing of pain is one of the essential preconditions for a refinding of dignity and hope. Much pain is unshareable. But the will to share pain is shareable. And from that inevitably inadequate sharing comes a resistance.
Listen again to Gelman:
hope fails us often
grief, never.
that’s why some think
that known grief is better
than unknown grief.
they believe that hope is illusion.
they are deluded by grief.*
Kahlo was not deluded. Across her last painting, just before she died, she wrote Viva La Vida.
* From ‘Cherries (to Elizabeth)’. Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness, translated from the Spanish by Joan Lindgren (University of California Press, 1997).
* From ‘Somewhere Else’, Juan Gelman, ibid.
* From ‘The Deluded’, Juan Gelman, ibid.
18
A Bed
(for Christoph Hänsli)
On the hotel bed there is no body, nor on the bed beside it. In the English language the situation can be condensed into one word: no body becomes nobody. One cannot ask: Who is nobody? Or maybe one can ask (as the water pipes in the next room gurgle) but no answer will come.
Nobody is nobody and both beds are empty. There is not even a crease, a trace. There is nobody.
Nobody is your beloved or mine, and nobody is every couple who once occupied this room. Over the years they add up to thousands. They lay sleepless. They made love. They sprawled over the two beds pulled together. They pressed tight against one another in one twin bed. They went home next day or they never met again. They made money or lost it. They betrayed one another. They saved each other.
Nobody is here and the beds in all their anonymity are empty. Or I might say: full of absence, but this suggests a sentimentality, a regret, which your paintings do not allow.
Yet simply because we have lived, we cannot forget as we stand in front of your canvases – and they are life-size – we cannot forget, and you do not want us to forget, what beds promise. Beds promise more than any other man-made object. They promise like nature does when benign. Perhaps this is why beds are so hard to paint? Even in this one-star hotel with cheap synthetic sheets the beds promise like nature does.
The range of their promise is huge, from the modest to the voluptuous, from the timid to the ecstatic, from a pain’s small relief to the great pain of happiness, from a little rest to death.
No wonder that in hotel wardrobes there’s often a card to hang on the door handle, which says: DO NOT DISTURB.
And no wonder, Christoph, that you paint, whilst not changing anything, whilst following the example of Velazquez, that you paint these bedroom walls, papered or painted, as if they were infinite. Infinite like the sky or the sea? No. Not at all. Infinite like promise. Even a bed’s smallest promise partakes of infinity … Sleep.
Sle
ep. You are awake and painting, but we, lulled and half asleep, whisper unaccountably and recklessly to the absence: Come, my heart, I’m here, and we whisper this to nobody.
One of your canvases is about such a whisper. It’s of an unmade bed and a crumpled duvet. The infinite wall is behind. For centuries painted sheets and draperies have featured in European art. Danaë reclines upon them. The body of the dead Christ is laid out on them. They receive the marvellous body and are moulded by it. But here there are only the traces, only an absence.
I was here. And now I too have left. There is nobody.
19
A Man with Tousled Hair
During that winter walking around the centre of Paris I couldn’t stop thinking about a portrait. It’s of an unknown man and was painted some time in the early 20s of the nineteenth century. The portrait was the image on the posters, at every street corner, announcing a large Géricault exhibition at the Grand Palais.
The painting in question was discovered in an attic in Germany, along with four other similar canvases, forty years after Géricault’s early death. Soon afterwards it was offered to the Louvre who refused it. Imagined in the context of the denunciation and drama of the Raft of the Medusa, which had already been hanging in the museum for forty years, the offered portrait would at that time have had a nondescript air. Yet now it has been chosen to represent the same painter’s entire oeuvre. What changed? Why has this frail portrait become today so eloquent, or, more precisely, so haunting?
Behind everything that Géricault imagined and painted – from his wild horses to the beggars he recorded in London – one senses the same vow: Let me face the affliction, let me discover respect and, if possible, find a beauty! Naturally the beauty he hoped to find meant turning his back on most official pieties.
He had much in common with Pasolini:
I force myself to understand everything,
ignorant as I am of any life that isn’t
mine, till, desperate in my nostalgia,
I realise the full experience
of another life; I’m all compassion,
but I wish the road of my love for
this reality would be different, that
I then would love individuals, one by one.
The portrait on the poster was once entitled The Mad Murderer, later, The Kleptomaniac. Today it is catalogued as The Monomaniac of Stealing. Nobody any longer knows the man’s proper name.
The sitter was an inmate of the asylum of La Salpétrière in the centre of Paris. Géricault painted there ten portraits of people certified as insane. Five of these canvases survived. Among them is another unforgettable one of a woman. In the museum of Lyon, it was originally entitled The Hyena of the Salpétrière. Today she is known as The Monomaniac of Envy.
Exactly why Géricault painted these patients we can only guess. Yet the way he painted them makes it clear that the last thing he was concerned with was the clinical label. His very brush marks indicate he knew and thought of them by their names. The names of their souls. The names which are no longer known.
A decade or two earlier, Goya had painted scenes of incarcerated mad people, chained and naked. For Goya, however, it was their acts that counted, not their interiority. Before Géricault painted his sitters in La Salpétrière perhaps nobody, neither painter, nor doctor, nor kith, nor kin, had ever looked for so long and so hard into the face of someone categorised and condemned as mad.
In 1942 Simone Weil wrote: ‘Love for our neighbour, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.’ When she wrote this she was certainly not thinking about art.
The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man, exactly like we are, who was one day stamped with a special mark of affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable to know how to look at him in a certain way.
For me, Géricault’s portrait of the man with tousled hair and disarranged collar and with eyes which no guardian angel protects, demonstrates the ‘creative attention’ and contains the ‘genius’ to which Simone Weil refers.
Yet why was this painting so haunting in the streets of Paris? It pinched us between two fingers. I will try to explain the first finger.
There are many forms of madness which start as theatre. (As Shakespeare, Pirandello and Artaud knew so well.) Folly tests its strength in rehearsals. Anyone who has been beside a friend beginning to fall into madness will recognise this sense of being forced to become an audience. What one sees at first on the stage is a man or a woman, alone, and beside them – like a phantom – the inadequacy of all given explanations to explain the everyday pain being suffered. Then he or she approaches the phantom and confronts the terrible space existing between spoken words and what they are meant to mean. In fact this space, this vacuum, is the pain. And finally, because like nature it abhors a vacuum, madness rushes in and fills the space and there is no longer any distinction between stage and world, playing and suffering.
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous. The desolation lies there, not in the facts. This is why a third of the French population are ready to listen to Le Pen. The story he tells – evil as it is – seems closer to what is happening in the streets. Differently, this is also why people dream of ‘virtual reality’. Anything – from demagogy to manufactured onanistic dreams – anything, anything, to close the gap! In such gaps people get lost, and in such gaps people go mad.
In all five of the portraits Géricault painted in La Salpétrière the sitters’ eyes are looking elsewhere, askance. Not because they are focused on something distant or imagined, but because, by now, they habitually avoid looking at what is near. What is near provokes a vertigo because it is inexplicable according to the explanations offered.
How often today can one encounter a not dissimilar glance refusing to focus on the near – in trains, parking lots, bus queues, shopping precincts …
There are historical periods when madness appears to be what it is: a rare and abnormal affliction. There are other periods – like the one we have just entered – when madness appears to be typical.
All this describes the first of the two fingers with which the image of the man with tousled hair pinched us. The second finger comes from the compassion of the image.
Post-modernism is not usually applied to compassion. It might be both useful and humbling to apply it.
Most revolts in history were made to restore a justice which had been long abused or forgotten. The French Revolution, however, proclaimed the world principle of a Better Future. From that moment onwards all political parties of both left and right were obliged to make a promise which maintained that the amount of suffering in the world was being and would be reduced. Thus all affliction became, to some degree, a reminder of a hope. Any pain witnessed, shared or suffered remained of course pain, but could be partly transcended by being felt as a spur towards making greater efforts for a future where that pain would not exist. Affliction had an historical outlet! And, during these two tragic centuries, even tragedy was thought of as carrying a promise.
Today the promises have become barren. To connect this barrenness solely with the defeat of communism is short-sighted. More far-reaching are the ongoing processes by which commodities have replaced the future as a vehicle of hope. A hope which inevitably proves barren for its clients, and which, by an inexorable economic logic, excludes the global majority. To buy a ticket for this year’s Paris-Dakar Rally to give to the man with tousled hair makes us madder than he.
So we face him today without an historical or a modern hope. Rather we see him as a consequence. And this, by the natural order of things, means we see him with indifference. We don’t know him.
He’s mad. He’s been dead for more than a hundred and fifty years. Each day in Brazil a thousand children die of malnutrition or illnesses which in Europe are curable. They’re thousands of miles away. You can do nothing.
The image pinched. In it there is a compassion that refutes indifference and is irreconcilable with any easy hope.
To what an extraordinary moment this painting belongs in the history of human representation and awareness! Before it, no stranger would have looked so hard and with such pity at a lunatic. A little later and no painter would have painted such a portrait without exhorting a glimmer of a modern or romantic hope. Like Antigone’s, the lucid compassion of this portrait coexists with its powerlessness. And those two qualities, far from being contradictory, affirm one another in a way that victims can acknowledge but only the heart can recognise.
This, however, should not prevent us from being clear. Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world, which operates on the basis of necessity. The laws of necessity are as unexceptional as the laws of gravitation. The human faculty of compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural. To forget oneself, however briefly, to identify with a stranger to the point of fully recognising her or him, is to defy necessity, and in this defiance, even if small and quiet and even if measuring only 60cm. × 50cm., there is a power which cannot be measured by the limits of the natural order. It is not a means and it has no end. The Ancients knew this.