<p>In 1972, Berger wrote his well-loved essay on Turner. First printed in the Parisian magazine <i>Réalités</i>, it appeared in a number of Berger’s collections, the last of which, <i>Portraits</i> (2015), includes an angry preface from its author. ‘I have always hated being called an art critic’, it begins, linking the job to the art market, and ends with an attack on colour reproductions of paintings, which belong ‘in a luxury brochure for millionaires’ (<i>Portraits</i> was published by Verso, with the reference images reproduced in black and white).<sup>1</sup> For Berger, to write on art was to be an ‘outlaw’.<sup>2</sup> In each ‘portrait’, a polemic was made for what counted as art and what did not. Early attacks on Henry Moore and Francis Bacon, accused respectively of formalism and mannerism, were as violent as Berger’s praise for so-called Kitchen-Sink painters like John Bratby was fulsome. Art was not only an aesthetic matter but a moral and political one; a perennial concern was the artist’s relationship to history – what Berger called elsewhere ‘the unprecedented events of the period.’<sup>3</sup> Or at least that is how the portraits are usually remembered.</p><p>The essay opens with the claim that it was Turner who best represented the character of the British nineteenth century; hence his popular appeal during his lifetime, which exceeded that of Constable and Landseer. ‘Turner was expressing something of the bedrock of their own varied experience’,<sup>4</sup> Berger writes, referring to members of the art-going public. This experience was ineffable, inexpressible in words – Berger uses the word ‘dumb’.<sup>5</sup> Then he provides a short biography, where emphasis is placed on Turner’s early history in London: a father who owned a barbershop in Covent Garden (where, by the way, the pictures Turner painted as a child often occupied pride of place); an uncle who was a butcher; and an early exposure to the Thames, from which he developed his passion for water: coastlines, seascapes, rivers. ‘(The painter’s mother died insane),’<sup>6</sup> Berger adds, as if this were literally parenthetical – Turner’s mother is mentioned only once in the essay, and nothing is made of what it might have felt like to grow up in her shadow.</p><p>Although he admits that it was not possible to know what early visual experiences affected Turner’s imagination, Berger develops an analogy between his painting and the experience of the barbershop run by his father, which acts as one of the fulcrums upon which the essay turns. Addressing the reader directly, he imagines – or confabulates – what the barbershop might have felt and looked like to the boy Turner and how it survived in the work: ‘Consider some of his later paintings and imagine, in the backstreet shop, water, froth, steam, gleaming metal, clouded mirrors, white bowls or basins in which soapy liquid is agitated by the barber’s brush and detritus deposited.’<sup>7</sup> Then, two further images, m
{"title":"Beyond the Barbershop: Berger, Turner and the Inner World","authors":"Rye Dag Holmboe","doi":"10.1111/criq.12707","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12707","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 1972, Berger wrote his well-loved essay on Turner. First printed in the Parisian magazine <i>Réalités</i>, it appeared in a number of Berger’s collections, the last of which, <i>Portraits</i> (2015), includes an angry preface from its author. ‘I have always hated being called an art critic’, it begins, linking the job to the art market, and ends with an attack on colour reproductions of paintings, which belong ‘in a luxury brochure for millionaires’ (<i>Portraits</i> was published by Verso, with the reference images reproduced in black and white).<sup>1</sup> For Berger, to write on art was to be an ‘outlaw’.<sup>2</sup> In each ‘portrait’, a polemic was made for what counted as art and what did not. Early attacks on Henry Moore and Francis Bacon, accused respectively of formalism and mannerism, were as violent as Berger’s praise for so-called Kitchen-Sink painters like John Bratby was fulsome. Art was not only an aesthetic matter but a moral and political one; a perennial concern was the artist’s relationship to history – what Berger called elsewhere ‘the unprecedented events of the period.’<sup>3</sup> Or at least that is how the portraits are usually remembered.</p><p>The essay opens with the claim that it was Turner who best represented the character of the British nineteenth century; hence his popular appeal during his lifetime, which exceeded that of Constable and Landseer. ‘Turner was expressing something of the bedrock of their own varied experience’,<sup>4</sup> Berger writes, referring to members of the art-going public. This experience was ineffable, inexpressible in words – Berger uses the word ‘dumb’.<sup>5</sup> Then he provides a short biography, where emphasis is placed on Turner’s early history in London: a father who owned a barbershop in Covent Garden (where, by the way, the pictures Turner painted as a child often occupied pride of place); an uncle who was a butcher; and an early exposure to the Thames, from which he developed his passion for water: coastlines, seascapes, rivers. ‘(The painter’s mother died insane),’<sup>6</sup> Berger adds, as if this were literally parenthetical – Turner’s mother is mentioned only once in the essay, and nothing is made of what it might have felt like to grow up in her shadow.</p><p>Although he admits that it was not possible to know what early visual experiences affected Turner’s imagination, Berger develops an analogy between his painting and the experience of the barbershop run by his father, which acts as one of the fulcrums upon which the essay turns. Addressing the reader directly, he imagines – or confabulates – what the barbershop might have felt and looked like to the boy Turner and how it survived in the work: ‘Consider some of his later paintings and imagine, in the backstreet shop, water, froth, steam, gleaming metal, clouded mirrors, white bowls or basins in which soapy liquid is agitated by the barber’s brush and detritus deposited.’<sup>7</sup> Then, two further images, m","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"96-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12707","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45493624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p><i>The Success and Failure of Picasso</i> appeared in 1965, three years after John Berger left England for Switzerland. By the time of the move he was established as a combative art critic, but for the next few years he concentrated on writing fiction. His biographer Joshua Sperling describes ‘the quiet of exile’ – ‘projects unfurl with greater patience’, ‘a séance with the past becomes easier’, ‘voices a metropolis would drown out can be heard’.<sup>1</sup> It cannot have been a period of uninterrupted contemplation, though, since Berger and his partner Anya Bostock, employed in Geneva at the United Nations, had two children in 1962 and 1963.</p><p>Written against the background of the early years of parenthood, the book often proceeds in a straightforward, stern manner redolent of the twilit gruffness one feels in the presence of small children and tries hard not to inflict on them. Berger argues that Picasso was a thrillingly rebellious visionary, but only for about ten years of his long life (1881–1973). In 1907, he ‘<i>provoked</i> Cubism’<sup>2</sup> – the italics are Berger’s, indicating his view that the artist was far from being this iconoclastic movement’s architect or philosopher-in-chief. But Picasso exulted in the spirit of the moment, becoming the most energetic driver of ‘a revolution in the visual arts as great as that which took place in the early Renaissance’.<sup>3</sup></p><p>It was in 1907 that Picasso produced <i>Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,</i> an angular and aggressive painting of five naked prostitutes, not exhibited till 1916. Berger describes this large oil as ‘clumsy, overworked, unfinished’, yet acknowledges that its sheer brutality is astonishing. It constituted a ‘frontal attack’ on ‘life as Picasso found it – the waste, the disease, the ugliness, and the ruthlessness’. Berger likens the witchy women in the painting, three of whom glare at the viewer, to ‘the palings of a stockade through which eyes look out as at a death’.<sup>4</sup> This is art as insurrection.</p><p>The next few years, during which Picasso found himself fruitfully participating in a group that included Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and André Derain, were ‘a period of great excitements, but also a period of inner certainty and security’. This was ‘the only time when Picasso felt entirely at home’,<sup>5</sup> and it is when Berger is most at home with Picasso, finding him purposeful, attuned to others’ minds, desires and needs.</p><p>He locates the best of the artist in a work such as <i>Still-life with Chair Caning</i> (1912). This small oval piece may seem an odd choice for high praise, and he misses its playfulness. What he most explicitly admires is its clarity: ‘Nothing comes between you and the objects depicted’, and ‘the substance and texture of the objects is freshly emphasized’.<sup>6</sup> He finds in the painting an invitation to unpick the logic of how we look at it.</p><p>In this context it’s worth noting that Berger dedicated <i>Th
《毕加索的成功与失败》出版于1965年，也就是约翰·伯杰离开英国前往瑞士的三年后。搬到纽约时，他已经成为了一名好斗的艺术评论家，但在接下来的几年里，他专注于写小说。他的传记作者约书亚·斯珀林(Joshua Sperling)描述了“流亡的宁静”——“项目以更大的耐心展开”，“与过去的交流变得更容易”，“大都市淹没的声音可以听到”不过，这段时间不可能是不间断的沉思，因为伯杰和他在联合国日内瓦工作的伴侣安雅·博斯托克(Anya Bostock)在1962年和1963年生了两个孩子。这本书以为人父母的早期为背景，以一种直截了当、严厉的方式进行，让人想起人们在小孩子面前所感受到的那种朦胧的粗暴，并努力不让他们受到伤害。伯杰认为，毕加索是一个令人激动的叛逆的幻想家，但在他漫长的一生中只有大约十年的时间(1881-1973)。1907年，他“挑衅了立体主义”2——斜体字是伯杰的，表明他认为这位艺术家远不是这场反传统运动的建筑师或首席哲学家。但毕加索为当时的精神而欢欣鼓舞，成为“视觉艺术革命的最有力推动者，这场革命与文艺复兴早期发生的革命一样伟大”。1907年，毕加索创作了《亚维农少女》，这幅棱角分明、气势逼人的画描绘了五个裸体妓女，直到1916年才展出。伯杰将这幅巨幅油画描述为“笨拙、过度劳累、未完成”，但他也承认，其纯粹的残忍令人震惊。它构成了对“毕加索所发现的生活——浪费、疾病、丑陋和无情”的“正面攻击”。伯杰把画中女巫般的女人，其中三个瞪着观众，比作“栅栏的栅栏，眼睛透过栅栏向外看，就像在看死人一样”这是作为起义的艺术。在接下来的几年里，毕加索发现自己成功地加入了一个包括乔治·布拉克、弗尔南多·莱姆杰和安德烈·德兰在内的团体，这是“一个非常兴奋的时期，也是一个内心确定和安全的时期”。这是“毕加索感到完全自在的唯一时期”，也是伯杰与毕加索相处最融洽的时期，伯杰发现毕加索目标明确，能理解他人的思想、欲望和需求。他在1912年的《静物与椅子》(Still-life with Chair Caning)中找到了这位艺术家最好的一面。这个小椭圆形的作品看起来似乎是一个奇怪的选择，他想念它的好玩。他最欣赏的是它的清晰:“你和所描绘的物体之间没有任何东西”，“物体的物质和质地被新鲜地强调”他在这幅画中发现了一种打开我们看待它的逻辑的邀请。在这种背景下，值得注意的是，伯杰把《毕加索的成功与失败》献给了三个人:前两位是安雅·博斯托克和他的朋友恩斯特·菲舍尔，后者的坚定马克思主义者《艺术的必要性》两年前被博斯托克翻译成了英文。最后一位献礼者是马克斯·拉斐尔，一位“被遗忘但伟大的评论家”，他于1952年去世。在1969年发表的一篇文章中，伯杰对他从拉斐尔那里吸取的主要思想做了一个引人注目的总结:“艺术作品的功能是把我们从作品中引导到它所包含的创作过程中。”引用拉斐尔死后16年才出版的《艺术的要求》(The needs of Art)中的一段话:“创造性思维的本质是溶解看似坚实的事物，并将世界转变为一个不断变化和创造的世界。”这就是我们如何从事物的多样性中解放出来……我们不再是生物，而是成为创造万物的力量的一部分。伯杰在他的文章《立体主义的时刻》中更专注于从《亚维农的少女》开始的时期，以及它的哲学意义。1967年发表在《新左派评论》(New Left Review)上，两年后又被修订为一本书(《立体主义的时刻和其他散文》)，它承载了自己文化时刻的革命可能性。伯杰正确地指出，从1907年到1914年是技术和科学不断变化的时期。与此同时，“飞机承诺让伊卡洛斯的梦想成为现实”，物理、化学、工程、无线电和电影的发展似乎将改变这个星球。“世界的世俗化进程终于完成了”，人类“在空间和时间上占领了被认为是上帝存在的领域”。一种新的经验句法似乎正在出现。在20世纪60年代末，尤其是在1968年的动荡中，用立体主义批评家和诗人安德烈·萨尔蒙的话来说，人们有一种同样的感觉，那就是“一切皆有可能”和“一切皆有可能在任何地方实现”。 然而，在伯杰写《毕加索的成功与失败》的时候，他并没有那么夸张，书中尖锐地描写了立体派画家希望的火花被扼杀的过程。他认为，他们的“观察方式”——没错，就是这个词——是乐观的:“他们描绘了现代世界的好兆头。11但在1914年，这个组织解体了，因为战争既粉碎了旧帝国，也粉碎了新的从属关系。当它的成员在战后重新团聚时，他们无法恢复之前那种大胆进取的精神。伯杰认为，在战争期间，毕加索“失去了革命的勇气”这在他的芭蕾舞剧《游行》中表现得最为明显。由Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau和lsamonide Massine为Serge Diaghilev的俄罗斯芭蕾舞团创作的这部作品，于1917年5月18日在th<s:1> tre du chtelet剧院首演，就在阿拉斯战役的两天后，这场造成30万人伤亡的战役以僵局告终。它的本意是代表大都市生活的速度、商业主义和机械的不人道。毕加索设计了布景和服装，这本身似乎是对立体派原则的背叛，因为他们认为芭蕾，用伯杰的话来说，是“一种矫情和资产阶级的娱乐形式”。更糟糕的是，《游行》是轻浮的——“不是因为它无视战争，而是因为它假装现实”。正如伯杰所言，这个项目对毕加索来说是一个错误的转折。然而，他又为佳吉列夫设计了三部芭蕾舞剧，这为他树立了一个新的公众形象:一个“异域魔术师”，一个善于发表神谕的表演者。他成为了他想要震惊的人之一——一个名人，fêted。当他最终厌倦了那些时髦的阿谀奉承者时，他陷入了自省。他被自己的精湛技艺所束缚，沉迷于自己惊人的创造力，对别人的想法毫无兴趣，结果他的努力变得越来越空洞和唯我主义，最终在20世纪40年代转向感伤主义。这段带有讣告口吻的叙述，听起来像是艺术成功的危险的典型故事:认可、财富和名声削弱了使之成为可能的创造性敏锐性。我不会随便使用“故事”这个词;伯杰的批判方法是构建一种叙事。尽管他的马克思主义信念不可避免地引起了对美学项目的政治解读，但它至少是由专注和自信所定义的。这个故事很有说服力，因为他从画作中推断出艺术家在工作和思考他的作品的感觉——毕加索玩弄一个想法，唤起他年轻时的记忆，在他所描绘的东西中最充分地看到自己，将高度个人的意象应用于与他没有任何直接关系的主题，品尝失望，模仿自己，而不是简单地做自己。但在出版之时，这本书似乎是对一位既在世又受人尊敬的艺术家的一种跑调评价。最具代表性的是1973年《卫报》的一篇社论，即毕加索去世后的第二天:“从真正的意义上说，毕加索是最后一个文艺复兴时期的人”，“他非常多产，他的天才无处不在。”他的影响永远无法精确地描述，但如果他的摇篮没有在新世纪到来的20年前在巴塞罗那摇摆，世界将会变得不同:建筑、雕塑、剧院设计、海报设计——整个人造环境——都沐浴在太阳王的光芒下。伯杰，我想他会被这最后几句半真半假的话吓到的，他选择从这位艺术家物质财富的细节开始。例如，他指出，毕加索收藏的他自己的作品可能价值高达2500万英镑按今天的货币计算，这可能相当于3.5亿英镑，尽管这个数字可能会让我们觉得低得可笑，因为毕加索已经成为拍卖会上最卖座的艺术家，他的个人作品可以卖到1亿美元以上。然而，这一点是成立的:到2
{"title":"The Success of The Success and Failure of Picasso","authors":"Henry Hitchings","doi":"10.1111/criq.12697","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12697","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>The Success and Failure of Picasso</i> appeared in 1965, three years after John Berger left England for Switzerland. By the time of the move he was established as a combative art critic, but for the next few years he concentrated on writing fiction. His biographer Joshua Sperling describes ‘the quiet of exile’ – ‘projects unfurl with greater patience’, ‘a séance with the past becomes easier’, ‘voices a metropolis would drown out can be heard’.<sup>1</sup> It cannot have been a period of uninterrupted contemplation, though, since Berger and his partner Anya Bostock, employed in Geneva at the United Nations, had two children in 1962 and 1963.</p><p>Written against the background of the early years of parenthood, the book often proceeds in a straightforward, stern manner redolent of the twilit gruffness one feels in the presence of small children and tries hard not to inflict on them. Berger argues that Picasso was a thrillingly rebellious visionary, but only for about ten years of his long life (1881–1973). In 1907, he ‘<i>provoked</i> Cubism’<sup>2</sup> – the italics are Berger’s, indicating his view that the artist was far from being this iconoclastic movement’s architect or philosopher-in-chief. But Picasso exulted in the spirit of the moment, becoming the most energetic driver of ‘a revolution in the visual arts as great as that which took place in the early Renaissance’.<sup>3</sup></p><p>It was in 1907 that Picasso produced <i>Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,</i> an angular and aggressive painting of five naked prostitutes, not exhibited till 1916. Berger describes this large oil as ‘clumsy, overworked, unfinished’, yet acknowledges that its sheer brutality is astonishing. It constituted a ‘frontal attack’ on ‘life as Picasso found it – the waste, the disease, the ugliness, and the ruthlessness’. Berger likens the witchy women in the painting, three of whom glare at the viewer, to ‘the palings of a stockade through which eyes look out as at a death’.<sup>4</sup> This is art as insurrection.</p><p>The next few years, during which Picasso found himself fruitfully participating in a group that included Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and André Derain, were ‘a period of great excitements, but also a period of inner certainty and security’. This was ‘the only time when Picasso felt entirely at home’,<sup>5</sup> and it is when Berger is most at home with Picasso, finding him purposeful, attuned to others’ minds, desires and needs.</p><p>He locates the best of the artist in a work such as <i>Still-life with Chair Caning</i> (1912). This small oval piece may seem an odd choice for high praise, and he misses its playfulness. What he most explicitly admires is its clarity: ‘Nothing comes between you and the objects depicted’, and ‘the substance and texture of the objects is freshly emphasized’.<sup>6</sup> He finds in the painting an invitation to unpick the logic of how we look at it.</p><p>In this context it’s worth noting that Berger dedicated <i>Th","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"75-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12697","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43984721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metaphors of Transcendence in John Berger’s A Seventh Man","authors":"Lamorna Ash","doi":"10.1111/criq.12700","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12700","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"22-30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42691927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>In the introduction to his 1979 novel <i>Pig Earth</i>, John Berger declares, ‘this trilogy has been written in a spirit of solidarity with the so-called “backward”, whether they live in villages or have been forced to a metropolis. Solidarity, because it is such men and women who have taught me the little I know.’<sup>1</sup> <i>Pig Earth</i> is the first of the three novels, collectively known as <i>Into their Labours</i>; together with the other two – <i>Once in Europa</i> (1987) and <i>Lilac and Flag</i> (1990) – the sequence picks up the themes of <i>A Seventh Man</i> (1975), Berger’s documentary account of migrant labourers, but he has taken a different approach, and reimagined his material as fiction. Berger the documentarist and social historian has adopted here the role of the griot or bard, a keeper of a community’s memories, and decided to tell their stories, weaving a rich fabric around certain characters, and following them and their descendants through the vicissitudes and displacements of their lives. The overarching theme of the trilogy is labour: the books’ epigraph (the same in each one) comes from the gospel of St John, ‘Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours.’ (John 4:38). The knowledge that Berger is collecting through his subjects, as he sets out to honour them, is knowledge of survival on the land, in an Alpine valley, as well as knowledge of love, of family and sex, but not only. The books also follow their subjects as they leave for work in the big city and its satanic mills, and vividly recreates the lives of several women.</p><p>There are no women in <i>A Seventh Man</i> (only pin-ups on the workers’ walls and a few glimpses), and almost none in his earlier book, <i>A Fortunate Man</i> (1967). Fiction cleared a way for Berger to bring women into the light; in a novel, he could explain (away) the macho code that prevailed by featuring female characters – luminaries – who defy it and show up its hollowness, often infusing the prose with an erotic charge that’s more familiar from high romanticism. In <i>Pig Earth</i>, the Cocadrille, an outcast figure in an already marginalised community, radiates erotic magnetism; in local lore, the nickname recalls the basilisk, which kills anyone with its stare; she is a Medusa, and witchlike in her unrivalled understanding of natural properties, able to amass a fortune through an unerring nose for mushrooms. She is one of several enthralling and poignant, even tragic figures, around whom Berger arranges anecdotes, fables, horrors, journeys, loves and vendettas. I say <i>arranges</i>, rather than invents, because Berger uses the word to express his approach to an image he is exploring: 'I hope you will consider what I <i>arrange</i>, but please, be sceptical of it.’<sup>2</sup></p><p>The books are categorised as novels, but they are poised in an in-between territory of memory and arrangement. This intermediate genre between memoir and imagination doesn’t presage a
{"title":"John Berger’s Knowledge, or Listening in to the Voice of the (Female) Image","authors":"Marina Warner","doi":"10.1111/criq.12703","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12703","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the introduction to his 1979 novel <i>Pig Earth</i>, John Berger declares, ‘this trilogy has been written in a spirit of solidarity with the so-called “backward”, whether they live in villages or have been forced to a metropolis. Solidarity, because it is such men and women who have taught me the little I know.’<sup>1</sup> <i>Pig Earth</i> is the first of the three novels, collectively known as <i>Into their Labours</i>; together with the other two – <i>Once in Europa</i> (1987) and <i>Lilac and Flag</i> (1990) – the sequence picks up the themes of <i>A Seventh Man</i> (1975), Berger’s documentary account of migrant labourers, but he has taken a different approach, and reimagined his material as fiction. Berger the documentarist and social historian has adopted here the role of the griot or bard, a keeper of a community’s memories, and decided to tell their stories, weaving a rich fabric around certain characters, and following them and their descendants through the vicissitudes and displacements of their lives. The overarching theme of the trilogy is labour: the books’ epigraph (the same in each one) comes from the gospel of St John, ‘Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours.’ (John 4:38). The knowledge that Berger is collecting through his subjects, as he sets out to honour them, is knowledge of survival on the land, in an Alpine valley, as well as knowledge of love, of family and sex, but not only. The books also follow their subjects as they leave for work in the big city and its satanic mills, and vividly recreates the lives of several women.</p><p>There are no women in <i>A Seventh Man</i> (only pin-ups on the workers’ walls and a few glimpses), and almost none in his earlier book, <i>A Fortunate Man</i> (1967). Fiction cleared a way for Berger to bring women into the light; in a novel, he could explain (away) the macho code that prevailed by featuring female characters – luminaries – who defy it and show up its hollowness, often infusing the prose with an erotic charge that’s more familiar from high romanticism. In <i>Pig Earth</i>, the Cocadrille, an outcast figure in an already marginalised community, radiates erotic magnetism; in local lore, the nickname recalls the basilisk, which kills anyone with its stare; she is a Medusa, and witchlike in her unrivalled understanding of natural properties, able to amass a fortune through an unerring nose for mushrooms. She is one of several enthralling and poignant, even tragic figures, around whom Berger arranges anecdotes, fables, horrors, journeys, loves and vendettas. I say <i>arranges</i>, rather than invents, because Berger uses the word to express his approach to an image he is exploring: 'I hope you will consider what I <i>arrange</i>, but please, be sceptical of it.’<sup>2</sup></p><p>The books are categorised as novels, but they are poised in an in-between territory of memory and arrangement. This intermediate genre between memoir and imagination doesn’t presage a","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"131-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12703","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43029131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Escaping the Magic Kingdom: Berger, Bacon, and the Pinocchio Problem","authors":"George Prochnik","doi":"10.1111/criq.12710","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12710","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"105-121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42439532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>The moment pen hovers above paper, the world divides. So recently just one form—a plum, say—it now splits into at least three. There is the plum as perceived by sight. There is the plum the mind anticipates: round, purple, of a certain size and density. And then there is the plum on the page; what the line itself can create and achieve.</p><p>When a mark is made, so too ‘a microcosm’.<sup>1</sup> With each succeeding mark, new laws and dynamics are created: ‘there is air, there is pressure and therefore there is bulk and weight’.<sup>2</sup> In these marks, in their relation: life itself. They generate emotion and personality; they evoke memories, imaginings, and hauntings; they can make ‘a cheek turn, a thumb articulate with a wrist, a breast press against an arm’.<sup>3</sup></p><p>These three worlds—of the eye, of the mind, and of the page—do not cohere. Sometimes they pride themselves on not cohering. Usually we take the world as we see it, and the world as we think we see it, to be interchangeable. But when you set out to draw something, you realise that they are actually in profound opposition. The mind is trying to discount the eye: it is working to make it clear to you that the plum is round and that it would fit in the palm of your hand, when actually, if you were to obey the eye alone, the plum is a triangle, and it is larger than the branches behind it.</p><p>Berger often presents drawing as discovery and exploration. The person drawing is a bird, a pilot, a sailor: navigating and negotiating vast and vacant expanses. They are a bat throwing sonar against the world; a water-diviner in communion with their stick. He also renders drawing as ruthless observation. ‘I say ruthless because an artist’s observation is not just a question of his using his eyes; it is the result of his honesty, of his fighting with himself to understand what he sees’.<sup>4</sup> (In this sense, drawing can almost be a way of life. In an obituary, Geoff Dyer remarked that although Berger did not need a university education, ‘he was reliant, to the end, on his art school discipline of drawing’. In other words, reliant on a mode of engagement, and of presence, that encompassed the practice of ruthless observation – the belief that ‘if he looked long and hard enough at anything it would either yield its secrets or, failing that, enable him to articulate why the withheld mystery constituted its essence’.)</p><p>The eye and the mind must battle, so too the eye and the page. At first, the page is subservient to the eye, wanting only to obey it as best it can. But when it has deviated enough — failed enough — it takes on its own non-negotiable autonomy. This is the inevitable ‘point of crisis’. where the demands of the page overtake, and it is now reality itself that must be subservient – that must bend and retreat in order to obey and make coherent the laws that have been established by the lines on the page.<sup>5</sup></p><p>It is remarkable how many lies a drawi
{"title":"‘To Save a Likeness’: Berger on Drawing & Resemblance","authors":"Anna Hartford","doi":"10.1111/criq.12705","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12705","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The moment pen hovers above paper, the world divides. So recently just one form—a plum, say—it now splits into at least three. There is the plum as perceived by sight. There is the plum the mind anticipates: round, purple, of a certain size and density. And then there is the plum on the page; what the line itself can create and achieve.</p><p>When a mark is made, so too ‘a microcosm’.<sup>1</sup> With each succeeding mark, new laws and dynamics are created: ‘there is air, there is pressure and therefore there is bulk and weight’.<sup>2</sup> In these marks, in their relation: life itself. They generate emotion and personality; they evoke memories, imaginings, and hauntings; they can make ‘a cheek turn, a thumb articulate with a wrist, a breast press against an arm’.<sup>3</sup></p><p>These three worlds—of the eye, of the mind, and of the page—do not cohere. Sometimes they pride themselves on not cohering. Usually we take the world as we see it, and the world as we think we see it, to be interchangeable. But when you set out to draw something, you realise that they are actually in profound opposition. The mind is trying to discount the eye: it is working to make it clear to you that the plum is round and that it would fit in the palm of your hand, when actually, if you were to obey the eye alone, the plum is a triangle, and it is larger than the branches behind it.</p><p>Berger often presents drawing as discovery and exploration. The person drawing is a bird, a pilot, a sailor: navigating and negotiating vast and vacant expanses. They are a bat throwing sonar against the world; a water-diviner in communion with their stick. He also renders drawing as ruthless observation. ‘I say ruthless because an artist’s observation is not just a question of his using his eyes; it is the result of his honesty, of his fighting with himself to understand what he sees’.<sup>4</sup> (In this sense, drawing can almost be a way of life. In an obituary, Geoff Dyer remarked that although Berger did not need a university education, ‘he was reliant, to the end, on his art school discipline of drawing’. In other words, reliant on a mode of engagement, and of presence, that encompassed the practice of ruthless observation – the belief that ‘if he looked long and hard enough at anything it would either yield its secrets or, failing that, enable him to articulate why the withheld mystery constituted its essence’.)</p><p>The eye and the mind must battle, so too the eye and the page. At first, the page is subservient to the eye, wanting only to obey it as best it can. But when it has deviated enough — failed enough — it takes on its own non-negotiable autonomy. This is the inevitable ‘point of crisis’. where the demands of the page overtake, and it is now reality itself that must be subservient – that must bend and retreat in order to obey and make coherent the laws that have been established by the lines on the page.<sup>5</sup></p><p>It is remarkable how many lies a drawi","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"44-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12705","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43383260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor","authors":"Sophie Elmhirst","doi":"10.1111/criq.12709","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12709","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"82-88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42124179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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