Sheep magazine Archive 3: issues 18-24

stillness of his rooms which the light fills like water a tank?” And of the
French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard, “What was his color for?”
Berger’s questions, while simply put, are not obvious. He often answers
them by inhabiting the artist’s perspective, tracing back to her initial
gestures, “invisible to us but imaginable,” like Rembrandt looking in
the mirror while painting himself. Or, sometimes, Berger conjures the
moments that inspired an artist to create, like JMW Turner observing the
froth building in the sinks of his father’s barbershop, manifesting later
as painted, violent waves. These accounts have not been verified, but
that didn’t make them any less true for Berger.
His keen interest in the process of making art, and the artist’s
commitment to sharing a new way of looking at the world, was informed
by Marxism. This is especially clear in the first essay I quoted by him, “The
Production of the World,” where he finds reality “confirmed” in Vincent
van Gogh’s paintings. For Berger, they “imitate the active existence — the
labor of being — of what they depict.” “When he painted a road,” he
confidently speculates of van Gogh, “the roadmakers were there in his
imagination.” The artist, in his “endless yearning for reality,” is at work to
produce and communicate it.
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Berger, who started off as an artist himself, was familiar with the labor of
art. In an essay about drawing his father in his coffin, he describes how
each successive line on the page carries with it its own moment in time.
A drawing is a summary of acts of looking, of being with your subject. For
Berger, the portrait offered “a door through which moments of a life” —
his father’s — “could enter.” It transferred his father’s being more than
any photograph or material object could.
FEBRUARY 2017