Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  Modigliani began each painting with curves. The curve of an eyebrow, the shoulders, a head, a hip, a knee, the knuckles. And after hours of work, correction, refinement, searching, he hoped to re-find, preserve, the double function of the curve. He hoped to find curves that simultaneously would be both letter and flesh, would constitute something like a person’s name to those who know the person. The name which is both word and physical presence. ANTONIA.

  At the time of Cubism and its collages, it was not unusual for painters to introduce written words or even single letters into their paintings. And therefore one should not attach too much importance to Modigliani doing the same. And yet when he did do so, the letters always spelt out the name of the sitter: they did in their way what the paint was doing in its way – both recalling the person.

  More profound and important, however, is that where there are no words, the curves in Modigliani’s paintings, the curves with which he began, are still both two-dimensional like print, and three-dimensional like the line of a cheek or breast. It is this which gives to almost every figure painted by Modigliani something of the quality of a silhouette — although in fact these figures glow, and are, in other ways, the opposite of silhouettes. But a silhouette is both substance and two-dimensional sign. A silhouette is both writing and existence.

  Let us now consider the long, often violent process by which he proceeded from the initial curves to the finished vibrant static image. What did he intuitively seek through this process? He sought an invented letter, a monogram, a shape, which would print as permanent the transient living form he was looking at.

  The achieving of such a shape was the result of numerous corrections and redrawn simplifications. Unlike many artists, Modigliani began with a simplification and drawing was the process of letting the living form complicate it. In his masterpieces like ‘Nu Assis à la Chemise’ (1917), ‘Elvira Assise’ (1918), ‘La Belle Romaine’ (1917) or ‘Chaim Soutine’ (1916), the dialectic between simplification and complexity becomes hypnotic: what our eyes see swings like a pendulum, ceaselessly, between the two.

  And it is here that we find Modigliani’s remarkable visual originality. He discovered new simplifications. Or, to put it, I think, more accurately, he allowed the model, in that life and in that pose, to offer him new simplifications. When this happened, a shape, that part of the simplified invented letter, which meant an arm resting on the table, an elbow resting on a hip, a pair of legs crossed, this shape, cut for the first and unique time during the drawing of those sessions, turned like a key in its lock, and a door swung open on the very life of the limbs in question.

  An invented letter, a monogram, a name, the profile of a key — each of these comparisons stresses the stamped emblematic quality of the drawing in Modigliani’s paintings. But what of their colour? His colours are as instantly recognizable as his use of lines and curves. And as amazing. Nobody for at least two centuries painted flesh as radiantly as he did. And then, if in one’s mind one compares him with Titian or Rubens, what is specific to his use of colour becomes clearer. It is complementary to what we have already seen about his drawing.

  His colour is sensuously, mysteriously (how did he achieve that glow and bloom?) articulated to the present, to the tangible and to what extends in space, and it is also emblematic. The radiance of the body becomes an emblematic field of intimacy. It is at one and the same time body, and the aura of that body as lovingly perceived by another. I put it like that because the other is not necessarily or exclusively a lover in the sexual sense. The bodies painted by Modigliani are more transcendent than those painted by Titian or Rubens. They have perhaps a certain affinity with some figures by Botticelli, but Botticelli’s art was social, its symbolism and myths were public, whereas Modigliani’s are solitary and private.

  When critics discuss the influences behind Modigliani’s art (he was thirty and had seven more years to live when he achieved his true independence), they speak of the Italian primitives, Byzantine art, Ingres, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Brancusi, African sculpture. The latter had a very direct influence on his carving which, in my opinion, is unremarkable when compared to his painting. His sculpture remains a casing: the spirit of the subject is never freed. None of the visual dialectic we have examined can easily apply to sculpture.

  Yet it has always seemed to me that if Modigliani’s art has a close affinity with another, it is with the art of the Russian icon — although here there was probably no direct influence. The profound affinity is not stylistic. There may sometimes be a superficial resemblance in the ‘silhouettes’ of the figures, but in general the icon figures are more fluid, less taut; their grace was a given, and did not have to be rescued anew each time. The resemblance lies in the quality of the presence of the figures.

  They are attendant. They have been called back, and they wait. They wait with such patience, such calm, that one can almost say that they wait with abandon, and what they have abandoned is time. They are still like a coastline is still before the endless movement of the sea. They are there for when all has been said and done. And this distance — which is not a question of superiority but of span, in the sense of a roof spanning what happens in a house — means that in their presence there is a quality of absence. All this is at the first degree. At the second, as soon as they enter the mind of the spectator — and it is this which they are awaiting — they become more present than the immediate.

  Obviously this affinity cannot be pushed too far. On one hand, there are religious images of a traditional faith; on the other, secular images wrenched from a lonely and tempestuous modern life. Yet Modigliani’s admiration for the mystical poetry of Max Jacob, much of his reading, and the titles he gave to some of his paintings, are a reminder that he at least might not have found the comparison surprising.

  Let me now resume what we have so far noticed, before attempting an answer to the question with which I began. Modigliani wanted his paintings to name his subjects. He wanted them to have the constancy of a sign — like a monogram or an initial — and, equally, he wanted them to possess the variability, the temperamentality, the sentience of the flesh. He wanted his paintings to summon up the presence of the sitter and to diffuse it, but diffuse it as an aura within his and the spectator’s imagination or memory.

  He wanted his paintings to address both the flesh and the soul. And in his best works — through his method as a painter, not through simple nostalgia or yearning — this is what he achieved.

  His paintings are so widely acknowledged because they speak of love. Often explicitly sexual, sometimes not. Many painters have painted images of lovers, others — like Picasso — have painted images polarized by their own desire, but Modigliani painted images such as love invents to picture a loved one. (When no tenderness existed between him and his model, he failed and produced mere exercises.)

  That he was usually able to achieve this without sentimentality was the consequence of his extraordinary rigour. He knew that the problem was to find and reveal the structural laws, the gestalt, of some of the ways by which love visualizes a loved one. He was concerned with romantic love, seduction; his images are about being in love. They are distinct from, for example, Rembrandt’s images of love as familiarity and communion.

  Nevertheless, despite his romanticism, Modigliani refused the obvious romantic short cuts of symbols, gestures, smiles or expressions. This is probably the reason why he often suppressed the look of the eyes. He was, at his strongest, not interested in the obvious signs of reciprocal love. But only in how love holds and transports its own image of a loved one. How the image concentrates, diffuses, distinguishes, and is both emblem and existence, like a name. ANTONIA.

  Everything begins with the skin, the flesh, the surface of that body, the envelope of that soul. Whether the body is naked or clothed, whether the extent of that skin is finally bordered by a fringe of hair, by a neckline of a dress, or by a contour of a torso or a flank, makes little difference. Whether the body is male or fema
le makes no difference. All that makes a difference is whether the painter had, or had not, crossed that frontier of imaginary intimacy on the far side of which a vertiginous tenderness begins. Everything begins with the skin and what outlines it. And everything is completed there too. Along that outline are assembled the stakes of Modigliani’s art.

  And what is at stake? The ancient — and how ancient! — meeting between the finite and the infinite. That meeting, that recurring rendezvous, only takes place, so far as we know, within the human mind and heart. And it is both very complex and very simple. A loved one is finite. The feelings provoked are felt as infinite. Against the law of entropy, there is only the faith of love. But if this were all, there would be no outline, only a blending, a merging of the two.

  A loved one is also singular, distinct, separate. The more closely one defines, regardless of any given values, the more intimately one loves. The finite outline is a proof of its opposite, the infinity of emotion provoked by what the outline contains. This is the deepest reason for the frequent elongation of Modigliani’s figures and faces. The elongation is the result of the closest possible definition, of wanting to be closer.

  And the infinite? The infinite in Modigliani’s painting, as in the icons, abandons space and enters the realm of time in order to try to overcome it. The infinite seeks a sign, an emblem: it attaches itself to a name which belongs to a language that, unlike the body, endures. ANTONIA.

  I would not suggest that the entire secret of Modigliani’s art or of what his paintings say is identical to the secret of being in love. But the two do have something in common. And it may be this which has escaped the art theorists, but not those who pin up in their rooms postcards of Amadeo Modigliani’s paintings.

  1981

  The Hals Mystery

  Stories arrive in the head in order to be told. Sometimes paintings do the same. I will describe it as closely as I can. First, however, I will place it art-historically as the experts always do. The painting is by Franz Hals. My guess would be that it was painted some time between 1645 and 1650.

  The year 1645 was a turning point in Hals’s career as a portrait painter. He was in his sixties. Until then he had been much sought after and commissioned. From then onwards, until his death as a pauper twenty years later, his reputation steadily declined. This change of fortune corresponded with the emergence of a different kind of vanity.

  Now I will try to describe the painting. The large canvas is a horizontal one — 1.85 by 1.30 metres. The reclining figure is a little less than life size. For a Hals — whose careless working methods often led to the pigment cracking — the painting is in good condition; should it ever find its way to a saleroom, it would fetch — given that its subject matter is unique in Hals’s oeuvre — anything between two and six million dollars. One should bear in mind that, as from now, forgeries may be possible.

  So far the identity of the model is understandably a mystery. She lies there naked on the bed, looking at the painter. Obviously there was some complicity between them. Fast as Hals worked, she is bound to have posed during several hours for him. Yet her look is appraising and sceptical.

  Was she Hals’s mistress? Was she the wife of a Haarlem burgher who commissioned the painting; and if so, where did such a patron intend to hang it? Was she a prostitute who begged Hals to do this painting of herself — perhaps to hang in her own room? Was she one of the painter’s own daughters? (There is an opening here to a promising career for one of the more detective of our European art historians.)

  What is happening in this room? The painting gave me the impression that neither painter nor model saw beyond their present acts, and therefore it is these, undertaken for their own sake, which remain so mysterious. Her act of lying there on the dishevelled bed in front of the painter, and his act of scrutinizing and painting her in such a way that her appearances were likely to outlive them both.

  Apart from the model, the bottom two-thirds of the canvas are filled with the bed, or rather with the tousled, creased white sheet. The top third is filled with a wall behind the bed. There is nothing to be seen on the wall, which is a pale brown, the colour of flax or cardboard, such as Hals often used as a background. The woman, with her head to the left, lies along and slightly across the bed. There is no pillow. Her head, turned so as to watch the painter, is pillowed on her own two hands.

  Her torso is twisted, for whereas her bust is a little turned towards the artist, her hips face the ceiling and her legs trail away to the far side of the bed near the wall. Her skin is fair, in places pink. Her left elbow and foot break the line of the bed and are profiled against the brown wall. Her hair is black, crow black. And so strong are the art-historical conventions by which we are conditioned that, in this seventeenth-century painting, one is as surprised by the fact that she has pubic hair as one would be surprised in life by its absence.

  How easily can you imagine a naked body painted by Hals? One has to discard all those black clothes which frame the experiencing faces and nervous hands, and then picture a whole body painted with the same degree of intense laconic observation. Not strictly an observation of forms as such — Hals was the most anti-Platonic of painters — but of all the traces of experience left on those forms.

  He painted her breasts as if they were entire faces, the far one in profile, the near one in a three-quarter view, her flanks as if they were hands with the tips of their fingers disappearing into the black hair of her stomach. One of her knees is painted as if it revealed as much about her reactions as her chin. The result is disconcerting because we are unused to seeing the experience of a body painted in this way; most nudes are as innocent of experience as aims unachieved. And disconcerting, for another reason yet to be defined, because of the painter’s total concentration on painting her — her, nobody else and no fantasy of her.

  It is perhaps the sheet which most immediately proposes that the painter was Hals. Nobody but he could have painted linen with such violence and panache — as though the innocence suggested by perfectly ironed white linen was intolerable to his view of experience. Every cuff he painted in his portraits informs on the habitual movements of the wrist it hides. And here nothing is hidden. The gathered, crumpled, slewed sheet, its folds like grey twigs woven together to make a nest, and its highlights like falling water, is unambiguously eloquent about what has happened on the bed.

  What is more nuanced is the relation between the sheet, the bed and the figure now lying so still upon it. There is a pathos in this relationship which has nothing to do with the egotism of the painter. (Indeed perhaps he never touched her and the eloquence of the sheet is that of a sexagenarian’s memory.) The tonal relationship between the two is subtle, in places her body is scarcely darker than the sheet. I was reminded a little of Manet’s ‘Olympia’ — Manet who so much admired Hals. But there, at this purely optical level, the resemblance ends, for whereas ‘Olympia’, so evidently a woman of leisure and pleasure, reclines on her bed attended by a black servant, one is persuaded that the woman now lying on the bed painted by Hals will later remake it and wash and iron the sheets. And the pathos lies precisely in the repetition of this cycle: woman as agent of total abandon, woman in her role as cleaner, folder, tidier. If her face mocks, it mocks, among other things, the surprise men feel at this contrast — men who vainly pride themselves on their homogeneity.

  Her face is unexpected. As the body is undressed, the look, according to the convention of the nude, must simply invite or become masked. On no account should the look be as honest as the stripped body. And in this painting it is even worse, for the body too has been painted like a face open to its own experience.

  Yet Hals was unaware of, or indifferent to, the achievement of honesty. The painting has a desperation within it which at first I did not understand. The energy of the brush strokes is sexual and, at the same time, the paroxysm of a terrible impatience. Impatience with what?

  In my mind’s eye I compared the painting with Rembrandt’s ‘Bath
-sheba’ which (if I’m right about the dates) was painted at almost the same time, in 1654. The two paintings have one thing in common. Neither painter wished to idealize his model, and this meant that neither painter wished to make a distinction, in terms of looking, between the painted face and body. Otherwise the two paintings are not only different but opposed. By this opposition the Rembrandt helped me to understand the Hals.

  Rembrandt’s image of Bathsheba is that of a woman loved by the image maker. Her nakedness is, as it were, original. She is as she is, before putting her clothes on and meeting the world, before being judged by others. Her nakedness is a function of her being and it glows with the light of her being.

  The model for Bathsheba was Hendrickye, Rembrandt’s mistress. Yet the painter’s refusal to idealize her cannot simply be explained by his passion. At least two other factors have to be taken into account.

  First there is the realist tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. This was inseparable from another ‘realism’ which was an essential ideological weapon in the rise to an independent, purely secular power by the Dutch trading and merchant bourgeoisie. And second, contradicting this, Rembrandt’s religious view of the world. It was this dialectical combination which allowed or prompted the older Rembrandt to apply a realist practice more radically than any other Dutch painter to the subject of individual experience. It is not his choice of biblical subjects which matters here, but the fact that his religious view offered him the principle of redemption, and this enabled him to look unflinchingly at the ravages of experience with a minimal, tenuous hope.

  All the tragic figures painted by Rembrandt in the second half of his life — Hannan, Saul, Jacob, Homer, Julius Civilis, the self-portraits — are attendant. None of their tragedies is baulked and yet being painted allows them to wait; what they await is meaning, a final meaning to be conferred upon their entire experience.