Selected Essays of John Berger (70 page)

The painted lilac tree is both more precise and more vague than any painting you have seen before. Everything has been more or less sacrificed to the optical precision of its colours and tones. Space, measurement, action (history), identity, all are submerged within the
play of light. One must remember here that
painted
light, unlike the real thing, is
not
transparent. The painted light covers, buries, the painted objects, a little like snow covering a landscape. (And the attraction of snow to Monet, the attraction of things being lost without a loss of first-degree reality, probably corresponded to a deep psychological need.) So the new energy
is
optical? Monet was right to nod his head? The painted light dominates everything? No, because all this ignores how the painting actually works on the viewer.

Given the precision and the vagueness, you are forced to re-see the lilacs of your own experience. The precision triggers your visual memory, while the vagueness welcomes and accommodates your memory when it comes. More than that, the uncovered memory of your sense of sight is so acutely evoked, that other appropriate memories of other senses — scent, warmth, dampness, the texture of a dress, the length of an afternoon — are also extracted from the past. (One cannot help but think again of Baudelaire’s
Correspondances
.) You fall through a kind of whirlpool of sense memories towards an ever receding moment of pleasure, which is a moment of total re-cognition.

The intensity of this experience can be hallucinating. The fall into and towards the past with its mounting excitement, which, at the same time, is the mirror-opposite of expectation for it is a return, a withdrawal, has something about it which is comparable with an orgasm. Finally everything is simultaneous with and indivisible from the mauve fire of the lilac.

And all this follows — surprisingly — from Monet’s affirmation, with slightly different words on several occasions, that ‘the motif is for me altogether secondary; what I want to represent is what exists between the motif and me’ (1895). What
he
had in mind were colours; what is bound to come into the viewer’s mind are memories. If, in a generalized way, Impressionism lends itself to nostalgia (obviously in particular cases the intensity of the memories precludes nostalgia) it is not because we are living a century later, but simply because of the way the paintings always demanded to be read.

What then has changed? Previously the viewer entered into a painting. The frame or its edges were a threshold. A painting created its own time and space which were like an alcove to the world, and their experience, made clearer than it usually is in life, endured changeless and could be visited. This had little to do with the use of any systematic perspective. It is equally true, say, of a Sung Chinese landscape. It is more a question of permanence than space. Even when the scene depicted was momentary — for example, Caravaggio’s ‘Crucifixion of St Peter’ — the momentariness is held within a continuity: the arduous pulling up of the cross constitutes part of the permanent assembly point of the painting. Viewers passed one another in Pierro della Francesca’s ‘Tent of Solomon’
or on Grünewald’s ‘Golgotha’ or in the bedroom of Rembrandt. But not in Monet’s ‘Gare de St Lazare’.

Impressionism closed that time and that space. What an Impressionist painting shows is painted in such a way that
you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there
. It is here and here only that Impressionism is close to photography. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you — the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens
between
you and it. No more within it. The memories extracted are often pleasurable — sunlight, river banks, poppy fields — yet they are also anguished, because each viewer remains alone. The viewers are as separate as the brush strokes. There is no longer a common meeting place.

Let us now return to the sadness in Monet’s eyes. Monet believed that his art was forward-looking and based on a scientific study of nature. Or at least this is what he began by believing and never renounced. The degree of sublimation involved in such a belief is poignantly demonstrated by the story of the painting he made of Camille on her death bed. She died in 1879, aged thirty-two. Many years later Monet confessed to his friend Clemenceau that his need to analyse colours was both the joy and torment of his life. To the point where, he went on to say, I one day found myself looking at my beloved wife’s dead face and just systematically noting the colours, according to an automatic reflex!

Without doubt the confession was sincere, yet the evidence of the painting is quite otherwise. A blizzard of white, grey, purplish paint blows across the pillows of the bed, a terrible blizzard of loss which will for ever efface her features. In fact there can be very few death-bed paintings which have been so intensely felt or subjectively expressive.

And yet to this — the consequence of his own act of painting — Monet was apparently blind. The positivistic and scientific claims he made for his art never accorded with its true nature. The same was equally true of his friend Zola. Zola believed that his novels were as objective as laboratory reports. Their real power (as is so evident in
Germinal
) comes from deep — and dark — unconscious feeling. At this period the mantle of progressive positivist enquiry sometimes hid the very same premonition of loss, the same fears, of which, earlier, Baudelaire had been the prophet.

And this explains why
memory
is the unacknowledged axis of all Monet’s work. His famous love of the sea (in which he wanted to be buried when he died), of rivers, of water, was perhaps a symbolic way of speaking of tides, sources, recurrence.

In 1896 he returned to paint again one of the cliffs near Dieppe which he had painted on several occasions fourteen years earlier. (’Falaise à Vavengeville’, ‘Gorge du Petit-Ailly’.) The painting, like many of his
works of the same period, is heavily worked, encrusted, and with the minimum of tonal contrast. It reminds you of thick honey. Its concern is no longer the instantaneous scene, as revealed in the light, but rather the slower dissolution of the scene by the light, a development which led towards a more decorative art. Or at least this is the usual ‘explanation’ based on Monet’s own premises.

It seems to me that this painting is about something quite different. Monet worked on it, day after day, believing that he was interpreting the effect of sunlight as it dissolved every detail of grass and shrub into a cloth of honey hung by the sea. But he wasn’t, and the painting has really very little to do with sunlight. What he himself was dissolving into the honey cloth were all his previous memories of that cliff, so that it should absorb and contain them all. It is this almost desperate wish to save
all
which makes it such an amorphous, flat (and yet, if one recognizes it for what it is, touching) image.

And something very similar is happening in Monet’s paintings of the water lilies in his garden during the last period of his life (1900-26) at Giverny. In these paintings, endlessly reworked in face of the optically impossible task of combining flowers, reflections, sunlight, underwater reeds, refractions, ripples, surface, depths, the real aim was neither decorative nor optical; it was to preserve everything essential about the garden, which he had made, and which now as an old man he loved more than anything else in the world. The painted lily pond was to be a pond that remembered all.

And here is the crux of the contradiction which Monet as a painter lived. Impressionism closed the time and space in which previously painting had been able to preserve experience. And, as a result of this closure, which of course paralleled and was finally determined by other developments in late-nineteenth-century society, both painter and viewer found themselves more alone than ever before, more ridden by the anxiety that their own experience was ephemeral and meaningless. Not even all the charm and beauty of the Ile de France, a Sunday dream of paradise, was a consolation for this.

Only Cézanne understood what was happening. Single-handed, impatient, but sustained by a faith that none of the other Impressionists had, he set himself the monumental task of creating a new form of time and space within the painting, so that finally experience might again be shared.

1980

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my reactions to Nicos Hadjinicolaou’s book
Art History and Class Consciousness
.
¹
These reactions are complex for both theoretical reasons and personal ones. Nicos Hadjinicolaou sets out to define the possible practice of a scientific Marxist art history. How necessary it is to produce this initiative, first proposed by Max Raphael nearly fifty years ago!

The exemplary figure of the book, one could almost say its chosen father, is the late Frederick Antal. To see at last this great art historian’s work being recognized is a heartening experience; the more so for me personally because I was once an unofficial student of Antal’s. He was my teacher, he encouraged me, and a great deal of what I understand by art history I owe to him. Two pupils of the same exemplary master might be likely to make common cause.

Yet I am obliged to argue against this book as a matter of principle. Hadjinicolaou’s scholarship is impressive and well used; his arguments are courageously clear. In France, where he lives, he has helped to form with other Marxist colleagues the Association Histoire et Critiques des Arts, which has held several notable and important conferences. My argument will, I hope, be fierce but not dismissive.

Let me first try to summarize the book as fairly as I can. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ Opening with this quotation from the Communist Manifesto, Hadjinicolaou asks: how should this apply to the discipline of art history? He dismisses as over-simple the answers of ‘vulgar’ Marxism which seek direct evidence of the class struggle in the class origins and political opinions of the painter or, alternatively, in the story the painting tells. He recognizes the relative autonomy of the production-of-pictures (a term which he prefers to
art
because implicit in the latter is a value judgment deriving from bourgeois aesthetics). He argues that pictures have their own ideology — a visual
one, which must not be confused with political, economic, colonial and other ideologies.

For him an ideology is the systematic way in which a class or a section of a class projects, disguises and justifies its relations to the world. Ideology is a social/historical element — encompassing like water — from which it is impossible to emerge until classes have been abolished. The most one can do is identify an ideology and relate it to its precise class function.

By
visual ideology
he means the way that a picture makes you see the scene it represents. In some ways it is similar to the category of
style
, yet it is more comprehensive. He regrets totally the ordinary connotations of style. There is no such thing as the style of an artist. Rembrandt has no style, everything depends upon which picture Rembrandt was producing under what circumstances. The way each picture renders experience visible constitutes its visual ideology.

Yet in considering the visible — and this is my gloss, not his — one must remember that according to such a theory of ideology (which owes a lot to Althusser and Poulantzas) we are, in some ways, like blind men who have to learn to allow for and overcome our blindness, but to whom sight itself, whilst class societies continue, cannot be accorded. The negative implication of this becomes crucial as I shall try to show later.

The task of a scientific art history is to examine any picture, to identify its visual ideology and to relate it to the class history of its time, a complex history because classes are never homogeneous and consist of many conflicting groups and interests.

The traditional schools of art history are unscientific. He examines each in turn. The first treats art history as if it were no more than a history of great painters and then explains them in psychological, psychoanalytical or environmental terms. To treat art history as if it were a relay race of geniuses is an individualist illusion, whose origins in the Renaissance corresponded with the phase of the primitive accumulation of private capital. I argue something similar in
Ways of Seeing
. The immense theoretical weakness of my own book is that I do not make clear what relation exists between what I call ‘the exception’ (the genius) and the normative tradition. It is at this point that work needs to be done. It could well be the theme of a conference.

A second school sees art history as part of the history of ideas (Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Panofsky, Saxl). The weakness of this school is to avoid the specificity of the language of painting and to treat it as if it were a hieroglyphic text of ideas. As for the ideas themselves, they tend to be thought of as emanating from a
Zeitgeist
who, in class terms, is immaculate and virgin. I find the criticisms valid.

The third school is that of formalism (Wölfflin, Riegl) which sees art as a history of formal structures. Art, independent of both artists and
society, has its own life coiled in its forms. This life develops through stages of youthfulness, maturity, decadence. A painter inherits a style at a certain stage of its spiral development. Like all organic theories applied to highly socialized activities — mistaking
history
for
nature
— the formalist school leads to reactionary conclusions.

Against each of these schools Hadjinicolaou fights as valiantly as David, armed with his sling of
visual ideology
. The proper subject matter of ‘art history as an autonomous science’ is ‘the analysis and explanation of the visual ideologies which have appeared in history’. Only such ideologies can explain art. ‘Aesthetic effect’ — the enhancement that a work of art offers — ‘is none other than the pleasure felt by the observer when he recognizes himself in a picture’s visual ideology.’ The ‘disinterested’ emotion of classical aesthetics turns out to be a precise class interest.