Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  Léger’s subjects are cities, machinery, workers at work, cyclists, picnickers, swimmers, women in kitchens, the circus, acrobats, still-lifes — often of functional objects such as keys, umbrellas, pincers — and landscapes. A similar list of Picasso’s recurring subjects might be as follows: bullfights, the minotaur, goddesses, women in armchairs, mandolins, skulls, owls, clowns, goats, fawns, other painters’ paintings. In his preoccupations Picasso does not belong to the twentieth century. It is in the use to which he puts his temperament that Picasso is a modern man. The other major painters of the same generation — Braque, Matisse, Chagall, Rouault — have all been concerned with very specialized subjects. Braque, for instance, with the interior of his studio; Chagall with the Russian memories of his youth. No other painter of his generation except Léger has consistently included in his work the objects and materials with which everybody who now lives in a city is surrounded every day of his life. In the work of what other artist could you find cars, metal frames, templates, girders, electric wires, number plates, road signs, gas stoves, functional furniture, bicycles, tents, keys, locks, cheap cups and saucers?

  Léger then is exceptional because his art is full of direct references to modern urban life. But this could not in itself make him an important painter. The function of painting is not that of a pictorial encyclopedia. We must go further and now ask: what do these references add up to? What is Léger’s interest in the tools, artefacts and ornaments of the twentieth-century city?

  When one studies an artist’s life work as a whole, one usually finds that he has an underlying, constant theme, a kind of hidden but continuous subject. For example, Géricault’s continuous subject was endurance. Rembrandt’s continuous subject was the process of ageing. The continuous subject reflects the bias of the artist’s imagination; it reveals that area of experience to which his temperament forces him to return again and again, and from which he creates certain standards of interest with which to judge ordinary disparate subjects as they present themselves to him. There is hardly a painting by Rembrandt where the significance of growing older is not in some way emphasized. The continuous subject of Matisse is the balm of leisure. The continuous subject of Picasso is the cycle of creation and destruction. The continuous subject of Léger is mechanization. He cannot paint a landscape without including in it the base of a pylon or some telegraph wires. He cannot paint a tree without placing sawn planks or posts next to it. Whenever he paints a natural object, he juxtaposes it deliberately with a manufactured one — as though the comparison increased the value of each. Only when he paints a woman, naked, is he content to let her remain incomparable.

  A number of twentieth-century artists have been interested by machines — although, surprising as it may seem, the majority have not. The Futurists in Italy, Mondrian and the de Stijl group in Holland, the Constructivists in Russia, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists in England, artists like Roger de la Fresnaye and Robert Delaunay in France, all constructed for themselves aesthetic theories based on the machine, but not one of them thought of the machine as a means of production, making inevitable revolutionary changes in the relations between men. Instead they saw it as a god, a ‘symbol’ of modern life, the means with which to satisfy a personal lust for power, a Frankenstein’s monster, or a fascinating enigma. They treated the machine as though it were a new star in the sky, although they disagreed about interpreting its portents. Only Léger was different. Only Léger saw the machine for what it is — a tool: a tool both practically and historically in the hands of men.

  This is perhaps the best place to examine the frequently made accusation that Léger sacrifices the human to the mechanical and that his figures are as ‘cold’ as robots. I have heard this argument in Bond Street — put forward by those who, if they pay their money, expect art to console them for the way the world is going; but I have also heard it in Moscow, put forward by art experts who want to judge Léger by the standards of Repin. The misunderstanding arises because Léger is something so rare in recent European art that we have almost forgotten the existence of the category of art to which he belongs. He is an epic painter. That is not to say that he paints illustrations to Homer. It is to say that he sees his constant subject of mechanization as a human epic, an unfolding adventure of which man is the hero. If the word was not discredited one could equally say that he was a monumental painter. He is not concerned with individual psychology or with nuances of sensation: he is concerned with action and conquest. Because the standards by which we judge painting have been created since the Renaissance and because in general this has been the period of the bourgeois discovery of the individual, there have been very few epic painters. In an extraordinarily complex way Michelangelo was one, and if one compares Léger with Michelangelo, from whom he learnt a great deal, one sees how ‘traditional’ Léger suddenly becomes. But the best test of all is to place Léger beside the fifth-century Greek sculptors. Naturally there are enormous differences. But the quality of emotions implied and the distance at which the artist stands from the personality of his subject — these are very similar. The figures, for example, in Les Perroquets are no ‘colder’ or more impersonal than the Doryphorus of Polyclitus. It is absurd to apply the same standards to all categories of art, and it betrays an essential vulgarization of taste to do so. The epic artist struggles to find an image for the whole of mankind. The lyric artist struggles to present the world in the image of his own individualized experience. They both face reality, but they stand back to back.

  Léger’s attitude to mechanization did not stay the same all his life. It changed and developed as his political and historical understanding increased. Very roughly his work can be divided into three periods. I will try briefly to put into words the attitude suggested by each period so as to make it easier to grasp his general approach and the consistent direction of his thinking.

  In his early work, up to about 1918, he was fascinated (it is worth remembering that he came from a family of Norman farmers) by the basic material of modern industry — steel. He became a Cubist, but for him, unlike most of the other Cubists, the attraction of Cubism was not in its intellectual system but in its use of essentially manufactured metallic shapes. The turning, the polishing, the grinding, the cutting of steel, were all processes which fired the young Léger with a sense of modernity and a new kind of beauty. The cleanness and strength of the new material may also have suggested a symbolic contrast with the hypocrisy and corruption of the bourgeois world that plunged with self-congratulation and inane confidence into the 1914 war. I am of course simplifying and I don’t want to mislead as a result. Léger did not paint pictures of steel. He painted and drew nudes, portraits, soldiers, guns, aeroplanes, trees, a wedding. But in all his work at this time he uses shapes (and often colours) which suggest metal and a new awareness of speed and mechanical strength. All the artists of that period were aware of living on the threshold of a new world. They knew they were heralds. But it was typical of Léger that the new was epitomized for him by a new material.

  The second period in Léger’s work lasted roughly from 1920 to 1930. His interest shifted from basic materials to finished, machine-made products. He began to paint still lifes, interiors, street scenes, workshops, all contributing to the same idea: the idea of the mechanized city. In many of the paintings, figures are introduced: women in modern kitchens with children, men with machines. The relationship of the figures to their environment is very important. It is this that prevents anyone suspecting that Léger is only celebrating commodity goods for their own sake. These modern kitchens are not advertisements for paints, linoleum or up-to-date bungalows. They are an attempt to show (but in terms of painting and not lectures) how modern technology and modern means of production can enable men to build the environment they need, so that nature and the material world can become fully humanized. In these paintings it is as though Léger is saying: It is no longer necessary to separate man from what he makes, for he now has the power to make all that he
needs, so that what he has and what he makes will become an extension of himself. And this was based, in Léger’s mind, on the fact that for the first time in history, we have the productive means to create a world of plenty.

  The third period lasted roughly from 1930 to Léger’s death in 1955. Here the centre of interest moved again; this time from the means of production to productive relations. During these twenty-five years he painted such subjects as cyclists, picnickers, acrobats, swimmers diving, building-workers. At first these subjects may seem mysteriously irrelevant to what I have just said. But let me explain further. All these subjects involve groups of people, and in every case these people are depicted in such a way that no one can doubt that they are modern workers. One could, more generally, say therefore that in this period Léger’s recurring subjects were workers at work and at leisure. They are not of course documentary paintings. Further, they make no direct comment at all on working conditions at the time at which they were painted. Like almost every picture Léger painted, they are affirmative, gay, happy and, by comparison with the works of most of his contemporaries, strangely carefree. You may ask: What is the significance of these paintings? Can they do nothing but smile?

  I believe that their significance is really very obvious, and has been so little understood only because most people have not bothered to trace Léger’s development even as sketchily as we are doing now. Léger knew that new means of production make new social relations inevitable; he knew that industrialization, which originally only capitalism could implement, had already created a working class which would eventually destroy capitalism and establish socialism. For Léger this process (which one describes in abstract language) became implicit in the very sight of a pair of pliers, an earphone, a reel of unused film. And in the paintings of his last period he was prophetically celebrating the liberation of man from the intolerable contradictions of the late capitalist world. I want to emphasize that this interpretation is not the result of special pleading. It is those who wish to deny it who must close their eyes to the facts. In painting after painting the same theme is stressed. Invariably there is a group of figures, invariably they are connected by easy movement one with another, invariably the meaning of this connection is emphasized by the very tender and gentle gestures of their hands, invariably the modern equipment, the tackle they are using, is shown as a kind of confirmation of the century, and invariably the figures have moved into a new freer environment. The campers are in the country, the divers are in the air, the acrobats are weightless, the building-workers are in the clouds. These are paintings about freedom: that freedom which is the result of the aggregate of human skills when the major contradictions in the relations between men have been removed.

  To discuss an artist’s style in words and to trace his stylistic development is always a clumsy process. Nevertheless I should like to make a few observations about the way Léger painted because, unless the form of his art is considered, any evaluation of its content becomes one-sided and distorted; also because Léger is a very clear example of how, when an artist is certain about what he wants to express, this certainty reveals itself as logically in his style as in his themes or content.

  I have already referred to Léger’s debt to Cubism and his very special (indeed unique) use of the language of the Cubists. Cubism was for him the only way in which he could demonstrate the quality of the new materials and machines which struck him so forcibly. Léger was a man who always preferred to begin with something tangible (I shall refer later to the effect of this on his style). He himself always referred to his subjects as ‘objects’. During the Renaissance a number of painters were driven by a scientific passion. I think it would be true to say that Léger was the first artist to express the passion of the technologists. And this began with his seizing on the style of Cubism in order to communicate his excitement about the potentiality of new materials.

  In the second period of his work, when his interest shifted to machine-made products, the style in which he painted is a proof of how thoroughly he was aware of what he was saying. He realized (in 1918!) that mass production was bound to create new aesthetic values. It is hard for us now, surrounded by unprecedented commercial vulgarity, not to confuse the new values of mass production with the gimmicks of the salesmen, but they are not of course the same thing. Mass production turns many old aesthetic values into purely snob values. (Every woman now can have a plastic handbag which is in every way as good as a leather one: the qualities of a good leather one become therefore only the attributes of a status symbol.) The qualities of the mass-produced object are bound at first to be contrasted with the qualities of the hand-made object: their ‘anonymity’ will be contrasted with ‘individuality’, and their regularity with ‘interesting’ irregularity. (As pottery has become mass-produced, ‘artistic’ pottery, in order to emphasize and give a spurious value to its being hand-made, has become wobblier, rougher and more and more irregular.)

  Léger made it a cardinal point of his style at this time to celebrate the special aesthetic value of the mass-produced object in the actual way he painted. His colours are flat and hard. His shapes are regular and fixed. There is a minimum of gesture and a minimum of textural interest (texture in painting is the easiest way to evoke ‘personality’). As one looks at these paintings one has the illusion that they too could exist in their hundreds of thousands. The whole idea of a painting being a jewellike and unique private possession is destroyed. On the contrary, a painting, we are reminded, is an image made by a man for other men and can be judged by its efficiency. Such a view of art may be partisan and one-sided, but so is any view of art held by any practising artist. The important point is that in the way he painted these pictures Léger strove to prove the argument which was their content: the argument that modern means of production should be welcomed (and not regretted as vulgar, soulless or cheap) because they offered men their first chance to create a civilization not exclusive to a minority, not founded on scarcity.

  There are three points worth making about the style of Léger’s third period. He now has to deal with far more complex and variegated subjects — whole groups of figures, figures in landscapes, etc. It is essential to his purpose that these subjects appear unified: the cloud and the woman’s shoulder, the leaf and the bird’s wing, the rope and the arm, must all be seen in the same way, must all be thought to exist under the same conditions. Léger now introduced light into his painting to create this unity of condition. By light I do not mean anything mysterious; I mean simply light and shade. Until the third period Léger mostly used flat local colours and the forms were established by line and colour rather than by tone. Now the forms become much more solid and sculptural because light and shade play upon them to reveal their receding and parallel planes, their rises and hollows. But the play of the light and shade does more than this: it also allows the artist to create an overall pattern, regardless of where one object or figure stops and another begins. Light passes into shade and shade into light, alternately, a little like the black and white squares of a chessboard. It is by this device that Léger is able to equate a cloud with a limb, a tree with a sprig, a stream with hair; and it is by the same device that he can bind a group of figures together, turning them into one unit in the same way as the whole chessboard can be considered one unit rather than each square. In his later work Léger used the element of light (which means nothing without shade) to suggest the essential wholeness of experience for which all men long and which they call freedom. The other artist to use light in a similar way was Michelangelo, and even a superficial comparison between the drawings of the two artists will reveal their closeness in this respect. The all-important difference is that for Michelangelo freedom meant lonely individuality and was therefore tragic, whereas for Léger it meant a classless society and was therefore triumphant.

  The second point I want to make about Léger’s style in his third period concerns the special use to which he discovered he could put colour. This did n
ot happen until about the last ten years of his life. In a sense, it was a development which grew out of the use of light and shade which I have just described. He began to paint bands of colour across the features or figures of his subject. The result was a little like seeing the subject through a flag which, although quite transparent in places, imposed occasional strips or circles of colour on the scene behind. In fact it was not an arbitrary imposition: the colour strips were always designed in precise relation to the forms behind them. It is as though Léger now wanted to turn his paintings into emblems. He was no longer concerned with his subjects as they existed but with his subjects as they could exist. They are, if you like, paintings in the conditional mood. La Grande Parade represents what pleasure, entertainments, popular culture could mean. Les Constructeurs represents what work could mean. Les Campeurs represents what being at home in the world could mean. This might have led Léger to sentimental idealization and utopian dreams. It did not because Léger understood the historical process which has released and will increasingly release human potentiality. These last ‘conditional mood’ paintings of Léger’s were not made to console and lull. They were made to remind men of what they are capable. He did not deceive us by painting them as though the scenes already existed. He painted them as hopes. And one of the ways in which he made this clear (he did not employ the same method in all his last pictures) was to use colour to make the pictures emblematic. Here I am using the word in its two senses, thinking of an emblem as both a sign and an allegory. In discussions on twentieth-century art, references are often made to symbols. It is usually forgotten that symbols must by definition be accessible. In art, a private symbol is a contradiction in terms. Léger’s emblems are among the few true symbols created in our time.

  The last point I want to make about Léger’s later work has nothing to do, like the first two points, with any stylistic innovation, but with a tendency which, although inherent in all Léger’s painting, became stronger and more obvious and conscious as time passed: the tendency to visualize everything he wanted to paint in terms of its being able to be handled. His world is literally a substantial world: the very opposite of the world of the Impressionists. I have already said that Léger allowed no special value to the hand-made as opposed to the machine-made product. But the human hand itself filled him with awe. He made many drawings of hands. One of his favourite juxtapositions was to put a hand in front of, or beside, a face; as though to convey that without the hand all that makes the human eye human would never have occurred. He believed that man could be manager of his world and he recognized the Latin root of the word manager. Manus. Hand. He seized upon this truth as a metaphor, in his struggle against all cloudy mystification. Léger’s clouds are in fact like pillows, his flowers are like egg-cups, his leaves are like spoons. And for the same reason he frequently introduces ladders and ropes into his pictures. He wanted to construct a world where the link between man’s imagination and his ability to fashion and control with his hands was always emphasized. This, I am certain, is the principal explanation of why he simplified and stylized objects and landscapes in the way he did. He wanted to make everything he included in his art tangible and unmysterious: not because he was a mechanical nineteenth-century rationalist, but because he was so impressed by the greater mystery: the mystery of man’s insatiable desire to hold and understand.