Titian

Preface

Letters

A Note on the Authors

Also by John Berger

Also Available by John Berger

The first regular money I earned – I was a painter at the time – was working for the Worker's Education Association in London. Three evenings a week I would take the tube to Edgware and talk with London Transport bus drivers and conductors about art. I was younger than any of them and had (for the epoch) outrageously long hair.

Some of the bus people painted as a hobby and would show me their work; others, for different reasons, were curious about how paintings are made and why. I think they put up with me because I seemed to them improbable. At the same time, they didn't disbelieve me. And so they accepted me as a kind of expert of the unexpected.

‘You gave us a surprise last week,' they'd say. ‘What have you got up your sleeve tonight?' I brought books with me and, drinking cups of tea and eating the cakes which one of the conductresses had baked, we turned the pages …

I received more from them than they did from me. I began to learn something about the space in their lives – and for each one it was slightly different – which they hoped their experience of art might fill. I began to see dimly how life can welcome art.

Years passed, and I became a writer. Some of the books I wrote were about painting and artists. My work owed a lot to certain philosophers and art historians – to Wölfflin, Antal, Max Raphael, Klingender, Ortega y Gasset, Hauser, Berenson, Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and others. Yet I'm no art historian. I am too impatient, and I live too much in the present.

When I want to get closer to works from the past, I do drawings from them. (As I have done drawings from Titian's paintings.) This is, however, a gestural approach, not an historical one. In drawing, you try to touch, if only for an instant – like playing tag – the master's vision.

What still intrigues me most is the question I first faced during those evenings in Edgware. How does a work of art, once created, re-enter life? Promising what?

About this there are still stories to be told and, as with any story, they have to be followed rather than invented.

Katya, my daughter, grew up surrounded by a lot of art books. Later she travelled and would visit museums and send me postcards. We didn't talk much about painting – far more about places, films, animals, language. When she sent me
the first card from Venice, I replied hoping that she would reply. She did, and this story began.

John Berger

PS Katya's letters were written in French, which is her first language; mine were in English. Much later, Katya translated my letters into French, and I did the same with hers into English. We have used my English translations for this book.

As long as I can remember, I have been used to looking at paintings. Without any fuss, a monograph on Caravaggio or the catalogue of a Poussin exhibition was dumped on my knees, and I was left alone to turn the pages. By a flaring paraffin lamp – this was in a decrepit, out-of-the-way farmhouse in Provence where I spent the most luminous moments of my childhood – I started, as I looked at these books, to dream – a bit like one of those figures in a Chagall painting crossing the sky above the roofs of churches.

Stories were prompted by the contours of an angel playing a musical instrument. Others came panting from the clenched bodies of
The Rape of the Sabines
. Soon yet others were being whispered from between fruits in a still-life, from the borders of a colour, from the scratches of a texture.

Several years later – this was when I was earning my first wages working evenings at a McDonald's – I realised how there's no communication more total than that between an object (preferably a work of art) and the one watching it. That painting over there, that story, that melody, but also that hairstyle or that expression – each took me by the hand and led me into its forest. Many things stayed hidden, others spoke to all my senses. It was as if my own gaze took on flesh from contact with the thing seen and then blew on it with warm breath which was almost visible, as when one breathes into frozen air.

At about the same time, I came to understand that I was never more alive than when I was able to give myself, even if only partially, to such an exchange. The capacity to join myself to what I was looking at – and particularly if it was something which had been created – offered me nothing less than immortality – for I left in this thing, destined to outlive me, some scrap of what I had lived.

A river painted by Courbet, containing something of my own experience of water flowing, of wetness, of the visible, was more intensely and permanently alive than I could ever be. And, what is more, it conferred upon me a little of its own immortality. It went beyond me and tugged me into the universal. A prelude by Bach, taking the same path as one of my dreams, but surpassing it in solidity and precision, would then miraculously lend my dream, retrospectively, its own grace.

At this age, too, I came upon my dearest wish: The best thing that might happen, I decided, would be to become
entirely a painting, a novel, a quartet. Not as a protagonist, whose own life was built into art, but in a more diffused way, to become the under-canvas for a portrait of a gentleman, to become the recurring rhyme of a poem, or to become a description of people dancing at a ball. Thus I would breathe onto such creations and be materialised in them for ever.

At first, I invented a god who lived in the sky, surrounded by a committee of those who were timeless and who looked through a telescope to direct the story of my life! Later, my narcissism pared away by the years, I found enough comfort in the idea that with or without a telescope focused on me, a simple movement of a human face (mine or somebody else's) could be the equivalent of a work of art, and that it was the quality of seeing – and, equally, the power of the invitation to look – which offered that feeling of cosmic harmony which I had discovered when a painting welcomed me into its forest.

I started to hunt everywhere for promises of this magic, a magic which is both permanent and ephemeral, inimitable and universal. And so it was that I was led, with the passage of time, to become a film critic, still searching for this sudden solidity and swift incarnation which we call
meaning
.

The Rape of the Sabines
, which I had goggled at long ago by the flaring paraffin lamp and which, for a fraction of a second, surrounded the whole world with its frame, had little by little shown me how art with its miraculous eye – an eye which both fixes and liberates – can seize the essential.

When in 1990 I went to the Titian exhibition in Venice, I saw the old painter coming towards me, and I saw myself spread out in paint on a scrap of canvas. This is what made me want to start a dialogue with John: he who had hinted to me how life welcomes art, he who knew, as well as I do, that everything still escapes us.

Katya Berger Andreadakis

‘That's purity,' he said,

‘It is the same on the slopes as in your entrails.'

And he spread his hands as would

an old experienced God creating clay

and heavenliness together.

Odysseus Elytis

PIAZZA SAN MARCO, VENICE

John
,

What do I think about Titian? In one word on a postcard: flesh.

Love, Katya

AMSTERDAM

Kut
,

All right, flesh. First, I see his own, when he's old. Why do I immediately think of Titian as an old man? Out of solidarity – given my own age? No, I don't think so. It's to do with our century and the bitterness of its experience. It's always searching for rage and wisdom rather than harmony. Late Rembrandts, late Goyas, Beethoven's last sonatas and
quartets, late Titians … Imagine the élan of a century whose old master was the young Raphael!

I think of the self-portraits painted when he was in his sixties or seventies. Or himself as the penitent Saint Jerome, painted when he was in his eighties. (Perhaps it's not a self-portrait; it's only my guess, but I feel he was thinking intensely about himself when he was painting it.)

What do I find? A man who is physically imposing and has considerable authority. You can't take liberties with him. With the late, decrepit Rembrandt it would have been easy. This one knows how power works, and he has exercised his own. He has turned the trade of being a painter into a profession – like that of a General or an Ambassador or a Banker. He's the first to do this. And he has the confidence that goes with it.

And also a painterly confidence. In his late works, he is the first European painter to display – rather than hide or disguise – his manual gestures when putting the pigment onto the canvas. Thus he makes painting physically confident in a new way – the act of the painting hand and arm becomes expressive in itself. Other artists like Rembrandt or van Gogh or Willem de Kooning will follow his example. At the same time, his originality and boldness were never foolhardy. His attitude to everything in Venice was realistic.

And yet, yet… the more I look at the way he painted himself, the more I see a frightened man. I don't mean a coward. He doesn't take risks, but he has courage. He does not normally
show his fear. But his brush can't help but touch it. It's most evident in his hands. The're nervous like the hands of a money-lender. Yet his fears could not, I think, have been concerned with money.

A fear of death? The Plague was rampant in Venice. A fear leading to penitence? A fear of judgement? It may have been any of these, but they are too general to help us understand him or to get closer to him. He lives to be a very old man. The fear lasts a long time. And long-drawn-out fear becomes doubt.

What provoked this doubt in him? I suspect it was intimately connected with Venice, with the city's special kind of wealth and commerce and power. All of which, as you say, had to do with the flesh.

Love, John

GIUDECCA, VENICE

John
,

Several times whilst I was wandering through the exhibition, I crossed paths with, was followed by, lost sight of, and then again found myself beside, an old man. He was alone and muttering to himself.

The first time I saw him, he was coming back from one of the last rooms and very decidedly making for the
painting
Christ Carrying the Cross
. And there at my side he stopped.

‘One uses painting', he suddenly said, ‘to clothe oneself, to keep warm …'

At first, I felt put out and scowled at him, but he went on, as if nothing had happened.

‘Jesus carries his cross and, me, I carry the art of painting, I wear it like something woollen.'

He had won me over.

Now he was making for the
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
. In some way, I must have annoyed him, for he appeared to be angry, spitting out disconnected words.

‘The fur, ough! The fur of my painting… stuff, stuff …'

By
The Portrait of a Man
, he spoke directly to the sitter, poking his nose towards the painted nose.

‘First I painted you all dressed up, then I did a whole painting of an animal's skin!'

He didn't need to turn round to know that I was following him, and as we passed a group of visitors who were listening to their guide, he said to me out of the corner of his mouth, as if it were a joke, ‘Dogs, rabbits, sheep, they all have their fur to keep them warm and, me, I want to imitate them with my brushes!'

When he next spoke, not without a little pride, I wasn't sure whether he was referring to the portrait of a Cardinal or to the
Portrait of a Man
.

‘Nobody else has painted men's beards like that!' he said. ‘They're soft as monkey's hair.'

I lost sight of him. A little later, the gallery's alarm siren started up. Given that my friend (we had by now smiled at each other) obviously knew little about the rules and routines of modern art exhibitions, I immediately thought of him. No sooner had I done so, than I saw a uniformed official remonstrating with the old man and indicating the statutory distance which must be respected before each canvas. The old man was saying ‘You must surely see, velvet, you must see, velvet is my favourite material, and I can't resist its touch!'