Landscapes. John Berger
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26.The Historical Function of the Museum
27.The Work of Art
28.1968/1979 Preface to Permanent Red (1960)
29.Historical Afterword to the Into Their Labours Trilogy
30.The White Bird
31.The Soul and the Operator
32.The Third Week of August 1991
33.Ten Dispatches about Place (June 2005)
34.Stones (Palestine, June 2003)
35.Meanwhile
Notes
Acknowledgements
WHAT DOES IT mean for a piece of writing to be on or about art? This book’s companion volume, Portraits, was one answer, assembling the variety of approaches John Berger has taken to individual artists. A timeline structured by dates of birth and death made space for evaluations and re-evaluations of lives and works by the light of different written forms, and changed historical and personal contexts.
Their structure meant excluding texts such as ‘The Moment of Cubism’ (1966–8), in which Berger argues that, though there might be individuals we associate with developments in art between 1907 and 1914,
Cubism cannot be explained in terms of the genius of its exponents. And this is emphasised by the fact that most of them became less profound artists when they ceased to be Cubists. Even Braque and Picasso never surpassed the work of their Cubist period: and a great deal of their later work was inferior.
This extract is about art in the sense that the author is trying to reveal what circulates and forms it – searching for the conditions from which it arises, or the climate into which it was received. Berger came to intellectual maturity in a post-war London subculture of refugees from European fascism, and the pieces of writing in which he looks beyond England and processes the thought of Brecht, Lukács, Benjamin, Frederick Antal, Max Raphael, Rosa Luxemburg and James Joyce are other omissions from Portraits.
Another aspect of the relationship between ‘The Moment of Cubism’ and art is that, by documenting a startlingly fertile period of history in which ‘there was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general’, Berger inaugurated such a period in his own work.
The essay appeared in the March–April 1967 edition of New Left Review. Later that April, it was followed by an extract in New Society from A Fortunate Man – a new book, made with the photographer Jean Mohr, which described the life of a GP in the Forest of Dean through a series of fictionalised case histories. As a work somewhere between biography and portraiture, A Fortunate Man shares an outlook with ‘No More Portraits’, the August 1967 New Society essay in which Berger announced: ‘We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place.’
At the time, Berger was also writing G. (1972), a novel about modernism, published at the moment of postmodernism. The work turned this insight into a motif, repeated throughout the book: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.’
Berger repeated entire chunks of text from G. in his most famous book and TV series about art, Ways of Seeing. The title announced a pluralistic approach, and reflected the collaborative way in which it was made (with Mike Dibb, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox and, in the episode on the male gaze, Eva Figes, Barbara Niven, Anya Bostock, Jane Kenrick and Carola Moon). At the end, part-way between soliciting disagreement and pre-empting it, Berger expressly shows the book and series to be a meeting of makers and audience: ‘I hope you will consider what I arrange, but please, be sceptical of it.’
Berger was again trying to live up to what he had identified in ‘The Moment of Cubism’: a ‘new scientific view of nature which rejected simple causality and the single permanent all-seeing viewpoint’. This struck him as an encouragement to greater self-reflexivity: ‘The Renaissance artist imitated nature. The Mannerist and Classic artist reconstructed examples from nature in order to transcend nature. The Cubist realised that his awareness of nature was part of nature.’
All the way through his writing life, Berger has written texts that take this broader, more synoptic approach to an historical period, past or present. Landscapes suggested itself as an obvious title around which to organise them. Like Portraits, it seeks sympathy with the tenor of Berger’s technique, because it is an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid definition (some texts could have argued their way into either book, not least because it is so often artists who teach us how to look at art). It frees us to consider texts across genres. There are poems here as well as uncategorisable prose. And though this second volume can be read alongside the first, a landscape can be more than simply the backdrop, or ‘by-work’, of a portrait.
The word landscape is also, like many of the texts in this book, a record of the horizons of writing being broadened. The Oxford English Dictionary records various ‘landschap’ and ‘landskip’ forms being adopted from Dutch in the 1590s, before the spelling ‘landscape’ arrived in 1605. At that point, John Barrell points out,1 it was a piece of jargon specific to painting. But though Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) wrote of ‘Valleys, groves, hills and fields’ as apparently autonomous units of land, by the 1630s John Milton (1608–74) could write in ‘L’Allegro’:
Streit mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the Lantskip round it measures.
Russet Lawns, and Fallows Gray,
Where the nibling flocks do stray.
In Landscape and Memory (1995), Simon Schama argues that ‘landscapes are culture before they are nature – constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock’. The best place to explore this in Berger’s work is the discussion of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (1727–28) in Ways of Seeing. Here, Berger made the painting pivot between the traditions of portraiture and landscape as part of a broader argument that oil painting became a dominant form because it corresponded to a certain phase of capitalism – a way of turning the visible world into tangible property. Again with an eye to plural ways of seeing, Berger packed a variety of different perspectives into this description. Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art (1949) provided him with a quote weighing up two of Gainsborough’s opinions on the painting of landscape, from a famous letter about ‘being sick of portraits and wishing to take his Viol de Gamba and walk off to some sweet village where he can paint landscips’ to another in which the painter writes:
Mr Gainsborough presents his humble respects to Lord Hard-wicke, and shall always think it an honour to be employed in anything for His Lordship; but with regard to real views from Nature in this country, he has never seen any place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude.
In the TV version of Ways of Seeing, the director Mike Dibb superimposed a ‘Trespassers Keep Out’ sign on the tree above the heads of Mr and Mrs Andrews, emphasising Berger’s point that the couple wanted to be painted in the land they owned because it defined their gentility. Only those with property could vote, and the poachers on their land could be deported.
Berger’s conclusions raised varied criticisms. The book incorporated the artist and art historian Lawrence Gowing’s written objections to Berger imposing himself between the ordinary art lover ‘and the visible meaning of a good picture’:
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