Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  1964

  Mathias Grünewald

  The crooked houses, narrow streets and leaning door-frames of Colmar do not look picturesque. They are just old, unchanged and outdated. Apart from the square and the cathedral, there is one other landmark: a tall chimney belching out black smoke from the very centre of the town. This is the boiler of the public bath-house. Private baths are a modern luxury.

  Thus, in its own peculiar way, Colmar prepares the visitor for the Grünewald altarpiece. The town hints at a different age, with different expectations of life. Unless the visitor takes this hint, he will get no further than the cliché that Grünewald’s mystic genius was timeless.

  The altarpiece, now housed in the town’s museum, consists of ten separate panels, of which the most memorable are the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Temptation of St Anthony. The Crucifixion, now one of the most famous ever painted, is always being referred to in discussions on Expressionism, Germanic cruelty and religious ecstasy. Its true significance seems to me to be much more precise. It is one of the very few great paintings concerned with disease, with physical sickness.

  The altarpiece was originally commissioned by an Antonite hospice at Isenheim just outside Colmar, and Grünewald worked there from 1510 to 1515. This hospice was famous for its care and treatment of the sick, especially those suffering from the plague and syphilis. In the second half of the fifteenth century the plague was probably as common as influenza is today. In 1466, for example, 60,000 people died of it in Paris alone. Syphilis was also sweeping across Europe on an unprecedented scale. The uncertainty of life as a result of disease was at least as great as the uncertainty experienced by men in the front line in either of the two World Wars.

  When a new patient – although the word patient is already too modern – when a new recruit arrived at Isenheim, he was taken, even before he was examined or washed, to be shown Grünewald’s Crucifixion. Confronted with such evidence of physical suffering he became a little more reconciled and so easier to treat, if not cure.

  So much and no more is known from the records. There is also a report that later Grünewald died of the plague himself. But so far as his own attitudes are concerned we have to guess. The longer I looked at the Colmar altarpiece, the more convinced I became that for Grünewald disease represented the actual state of man. Disease was not for him the prelude to death – as modern man tends to fear: it was the condition of life.

  All the evidence around him suggested that he lived in an infected world. Like Jeremiah he cried out: Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? And the it represented all that made disease possible and incurable: the shifting insecurity of the world, the apparent indifference of God, the ignorance. He was obsessed with physical disease because it seemed to him to express the most far-reaching truths he had yet discovered about the healthy.

  Church and State, as he knew them, were corrupt and merciless. (He was later a follower of Luther and a supporter of the peasants in the Peasants’ War.) All authority, like an epidemic, was arbitrary and terrible. Everything, as the medieval world broke up, decreed that life was cheap.

  I am not, of course, suggesting that this Crucifixion is only about disease and not about the New Testament What I am suggesting is that its images and content have been taken straight from the medieval lazar-house. Christ’s body is a corpse from Isenheim, covered with sores, swollen, infected. The feet are gangrenous, the hands suffer a paralysing cramp. The whole is tallow-coloured.

  The Virgin Mary topples like a struck tree against St John’s trailing arm. Both of them are as dumb as wood – which is what makes them the most poignant and haunting survivors in the history of art. But, by the same token, it is clear that they were not imagined as figures in a historical religious tragedy. On the contrary, they were minutely observed bereaved at the hospice. And the fact that Grünewald knew that Christ in reality suffered at the hands of men only emphasizes how he saw disease as the epitome of the inhumanity of his world.

  It is the same in other panels. The monsters who surround St Anthony represent the traditional sins only in a nominal way. What they really represent is disease, fever, infection. This is a painting of a man on his sick bed. Once consider it in this way, and it becomes obvious. The text at the bottom reads: Where wert thou, Holy Jesus? Why wast thou not there to heal my wounds?

  In the Resurrection, Christ ascends to heaven, white and pallid as a corpse – whenever Grünewald uses white it has this connotation of the pallor of death, it is never a positive, pure colour. His winding sheet forks like lightning; and the soldiers, far from sleeping, writhe in convulsions as though poisoned.

  Even in the happier scenes the same fatality is implicit. In the Virgin and Child, the swaddling cloth is the same tattered (infected?) rag which serves as loin-cloth for the crucified Christ. In the Annunciation, the angel bursts in upon and dwarfs the Virgin with his promise, to which she reacts as to the news of an incurable illness.

  I want now to mention a highly personal and idiosyncratic motivation which Grünewald’s work appears to reveal and which perhaps supports this argument of mine, but which I have not seen previously discussed.

  In the Temptation of St Anthony, amongst all the grotesque, invented monsters, there is one passage which is painted with scrupulous accuracy. Its very literalness makes it outstanding. It is the passage concerned with the feathers of the mythical sparrow-hawk. It has clearly been painted by a man for whom feathers had a special significance: for whom feathers in themselves were as charged as all the apocalyptic details which surround them.

  One can also find (in other panels) evidence of a similar special significance for Grünewald attached to feathers. The wing feathers of Gabriel in the Annunciation have no connection whatsoever with the rest of the figure; they are like the severed wings of a bird mysteriously held in space above the angel’s shoulders. In the Angels’ Concert, there is the inexplicable feathered one – a kind of prophecy of Papageno in The Magic Flute. He wears a crown of feathers and is also clothed in them. As he plays, his expression suggests aspiration and longing.

  Even where feathers are not introduced directly, Grünewald insists again and again on textures and forms which are feather equivalents: palm trees against the sky like tail feathers, and the plaited palm robe worn by St Paul to keep himself warm: the ribbed, padded tunic of a soldier, each segment of cloth curving like a feather: the spires of a coronet worn by an angel.

  It is hard to say nearly 500 years afterwards what exact significance feathers may have had for Grünewald, especially as it was almost certainly an unconscious one. But in general psychological theory, feathers are a symbol of power, of aspiration and the ability to transcend (or escape from) material reality. The feathers of the sparrow-hawk probably emphasize the incomprehensible power of his aggression. The feathered angel in the Angels’ Concert may well represent the ‘flight’ of human imagination.

  The point of this observation about the feathers is that it may explain a little more about the great, mysterious figure of Christ in the Crucifixion. The lacerated body is unique: no other painter ever depicted Christ on the cross like this. The literal explanation of the lacerations is that the body has been scourged and scratched by thorns – some of the thorns, broken, are still in the flesh. The circumstantial explanation is that the lacerations resemble the sores of the sick – in the bottom left-hand corner of the Temptation of St Anthony there is a man suffering from syphilis who is pock-marked in a somewhat similar way.

  Yet the uniformity of the marks over the entire body makes both these explanations rather unconvincing. Surely the overall appearance of Christ’s body is more than anything else suggestive of a bird that has had its feathers plucked? Surely here Grünewald was being obedient to an imaginative compulsion, emotionally charged beyond the possibility of all narrative logic? Surely here he was saying: Christ, like the victims of Isenheim, dies in agony without the slightest comfort of hope because all his spiritual power has been drawn
out of him by the degree of his suffering – because he has been stripped naked unto death.

  1963

  L. S. Lowry

  Lowry was born in a Manchester suburb in 1887. He was a vague child. He never passed any exams. He went to art school because nobody was very convinced that he could do anything else. At the age of about thirty he began to paint the industrial scene around him: he began to produce what would now be recognizable Lowrys. He continued for twenty years with scant recognition or success. Then a London dealer saw some of his paintings by chance when he went to a framer’s. He inquired about the artist. A London exhibition was arranged – it was now 1938, and Lowry began slowly to acquire a national reputation. At first it was other artists who most appreciated his work. The public gradually followed. From 1945 onwards he began to receive official honours – honorary degrees, Royal Academician, freedom of the City of Salford. None of this has changed him in any way. He still lives on the outskirts of Manchester: modest, eccentric, comic, lonely.

  ‘You know, I’ve never been able to get used to the fact that I’m alive! The whole thing frightens me. It’s been like that from my earliest days. It’s too big you know – I mean life, sir.’1

  In 1964 the Hallé Orchestra gave a special concert in honour of Lowry’s seventy-fifth birthday: a number of artists, including Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore and Ivon Hitchens, contributed to an honorary exhibition: and Sir Kenneth Clark wrote an appreciation. In it, Clark compares Lowry to Wordsworth’s ‘Leech Gatherer’:

  Our leech gatherer has continued to scrutinise his small black figures in their milky pool of atmosphere, isolating and combining them with a loving sense of their human qualities … All those black people walking to and fro are as anonymous, as individual, as purposeless and as directed as the stream of real people who pass before our eyes in the square of an industrial town.2

  Edwin Mullins, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue of Lowry’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 1966, makes the point that Lowry is primarily interested in ‘the battle of life’.

  It is a battle engaged between undignified pea-brained homunculi who pour out of a mill after a day’s work, or congregate round a street fight, pace a railway platform, whoop it up on V.E. Day, watch a regatta or football match, take a pram and an idiotic dog for a walk along the promenade.3

  These quotations reveal the submerged patronage found in nearly all critical comment on Lowry’s work. This tendency to patronize is a form of self-defence: defence not so much against the artist as against the subject-matter of his work. It is hard to reconcile a life devoted to aesthetic expositions with the streets and houses and front doors of those who live in Bury, Rochdale, Burnley or Salford.

  Lowry has been compared with Chaplin, Brueghel and the Douanier Rousseau. The curious mood of his work has been analysed, sometimes with considerable subtlety. His technique has been explained and it has been pointed out that technically he is a highly sophisticated artist. Many stories are told about his behaviour and conversation. He is indeed an original, dignified man for whom one can feel deeply.

  I might add stories of my own, but there is something more important to say. The extraordinary fact is that nobody, faced with Lowry’s pictures whose subject-matter is nearly always social, ever discusses the social or historical meaning of his art. Instead it is treated as though it dealt with the view out of the window of a Pullman train on its non-stop journey to London, where everything is believed to be very different. His subjects, if they have to be considered at all in relation to what actually exists, are considered as local exotica.

  I don’t want to exaggerate the meaning of Lowry’s work or give it a historical load which is too heavy for it. The range of his work is small. It does not belong to the mainstream of twentieth-century art, which is concerned in one way or another with interpreting new relationships between man and nature. It is a spontaneous (as opposed to a consciously self-developing) art. It is static, local and subjectively repetitive. But it is consistent within itself, courageous, obstinate, unique, and the phenomenon of its creation and appreciation is significant.

  Perhaps I should emphasize here that this significance must be considered separately from, though not necessarily in opposition to, Lowry’s conscious intentions. He says he doesn’t know why he paints his pictures. They come to him.

  I started as I often do, with nothing particular in mind; things just happen – they grow from nothing. When I had painted the figure of the woman on the left, walking away, I got stuck. I just couldn’t think what to do next. Then a young lady friend of mine came to the rescue. ‘Why don’t you paint another figure walking towards you,’ she suggested. ‘Shall I paint the same woman turned around?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that would be a very good idea.’ ‘All right,’ I replied, ‘but what can I call the picture?’ ‘Why not call it The Same Woman Coming Back?’ she said. And I did!4

  Even allowing for the simplification Lowry makes in telling this story, it is clear that he works intuitively, without fixed aims. His aim is only to finish the picture. Any wider significance his work may have is the result of a certain coincidence between his own private half-hidden motivations and the nature of the outside world which he uses as raw material and to which he delivers back his finished pictures. On a certain level, he himself is probably aware of this coincidence: it is probably the substance of his conviction that what he has to say as an artist is, in some mysterious way, relevant. But this is very far from implying that he consciously intends the meaning which his pictures acquire.

  What is this meaning? I have already suggested that its basis is social. Let us now try to place Lowry’s pictures within a context. First, they are very specifically English. They could be about nowhere else. Nowhere else are there comparable industrial landscapes. The light, which is not natural but which was manufactured in the nineteenth century, is unique. Only in the Midlands and North of England do people live – to use Sir Kenneth Clark’s euphemism – in such a milky pool.

  The character of the figures and crowds is also specially English. The industrial revolution has isolated them and uprooted them. Their homemade ideology, except when they are led and organized by revolutionaries, is a kind of ironic stoicism. Nowhere else do crowds look so simultaneously civic and deprived. They appear to have as little to lose as a mob: and yet they are not a mob. They know each other, recognize each other, exchange help and jokes – they are not, as is sometimes said, like lost souls in limbo; they are fellow-travellers through a life which is impervious to most of their choices.

  All this might seem at first to date Lowry’s paintings. One might suppose that they are more to do with the nineteenth century than with today when there are television aerials on the houses, cars in the back streets, hairdressers for mill girls, and a Labour government.

  Yet, in order to place Lowry’s work within an historical as well as geographical context, we must distinguish rather carefully between different elements in it. Most of Lowry’s paintings are synthetic, insofar as they are constructed from his observation and memory of different incidents and places. Only a few represent specific scenes. If, however, one goes to the mill towns, to the potteries, to Manchester, to Barrow-in-Furness, to Liverpool, one finds countless streets, skylines, doorsteps, bus stops, squares, churches, homes, which look like those depicted by Lowry, and have never been depicted by anybody else. His paintings are no more dated than certain English cities and towns.

  If one looks more carefully at the pictures one notices that the figures, even in the most recent ones, are wearing clothes which belong, at the latest, to the 1920s or early 1930s: that is to say to the period when Lowry first determined to paint the area where he had been brought up and where he was going to spend the rest of his life. Similarly, there are very few cars or modern buildings to be seen. He says that he hates change. And his pictures, both in detail, as cited above, and in general spirit, suggest an essential changelessness. (One sees this in a different way in
his deserted landscapes and seascapes of endlessly repeating hills or waves.) The bustle of the crowds, the walk to the sea and back, the fight, the accident, the once-yearly excitement of the fair, the ageing of some, the crippling of others, changes nothing. In certain canvases this sense of unchanging time becomes an almost metaphysical sense of eternity.

  Thus we can summarize: Lowry’s paintings correspond in many respects to existing places: certain details belong to the past: the artist’s vision exaggerates a feeling of changelessness: the three elements combine together to create an atmosphere of dramatic obsolescence. Stylistic considerations apart, there is in fact no question of these pictures belonging to the spirit of the nineteenth century. The notion of progress – however it is applied – is foreign to them. Their virtues are stoic: their logic is one of decline.

  These paintings are about what has been happening to the British economy since 1918, and their logic implies the collapse still to come. This is what has happened to the ‘workshop of the world’. Here is the recurring so-called production crisis: the obsolete industrial plants: the inadequacy of unchanged transport systems and overstrained power supplies: the failure of education to keep pace with technological advance: the ineffectiveness of national planning: the lack of capital investment at home and the disastrous reliance on colonial and neo-colonial overseas investments: the shift of power from industrial capital to international finance capital, the essential agreements within the two-party system blocking every initiative towards political independence and thus economic viability.

  The argument is not so far-fetched as it may seem if one pauses to consider the circumstances in which the pictures have been painted. Lowry has happened to live and work in an area where the truth of our economic decline has been far less disguised than elsewhere. His art is partly subjective, but what he has seen around him has confirmed, and perhaps even helped to sustain and create, his subjective tendencies. In the 1920s, Lancashire was a depressed area. (One tends to forget that before the depression of the 1930s, there were never less than one million unemployed.) What the 1930s were like has been described many times. Yet the relevance of their desolation to Lowry is seldom mentioned. Here Orwell is virtually describing a painting by Lowry: