Selected Essays of John Berger (23 page)

There is a constant undercurrent in Goya which connects sex with violence. The witches are born of this. And so, partly, are his protests against the horrors of war. It is generally assumed that he protested because of what he witnessed in the hell of the Peninsular War. This is true. In all conscience he identified himself with the victims. But with despair and horror he also recognized a potential self in the torturers.

The same undercurrent blazes as ruthless pride in the eyes of the women he finds attractive. Across the full, loose mouths of dozens of faces, including his own, it flickers as a taunting provocation. It is there in the charged disgust with which he paints men naked, always equating their nakedness with bestiality – as with the madmen in the madhouse, the Indians practising cannibalism, the priests awhoring. It is present in the so-called ‘Black’ paintings which record orgies of violence. But most persistently it is evident in the way he painted all flesh.

It is difficult to describe this in words, yet it is what makes nearly every Goya portrait unmistakably his. The flesh has an expression of its own – as features do in portraits by other painters. The expression varies according to the sitter, but it is always a variation on the same demand: the demand for flesh as food for an appetite. Nor is that a rhetorical metaphor. It is almost literally true. Sometimes the flesh has a bloom on it like fruit. Sometimes it is flushed and hungry-looking, ready to devour. Usually – and this is the fulcrum of his intense psychological insight – it suggests both simultaneously: the devourer and the to-be-devoured. All Goya’s monstrous fears are summed up in this. His most horrific vision is of Satan eating the bodies of men.

One can even recognize the same agony in the apparently mundane painting of the butcher’s table. I know of no other still life in the world which so emphasizes that a piece of meat was recently living, sentient flesh, which so combines the emotive with the literal meaning of the
word ‘butchery’. The terror of this picture, painted by a man who has enjoyed meat all his life, is that it is
not
a still life.

If I am right in this, if Goya painted the nude Maja because he was haunted by the fact that he imagined her naked – that is to say imagined her flesh with all its provocation – we can begin to explain why the painting is so artificial. He painted it to exorcise a ghost. Like the bats, dogs and witches, she is another of the monsters released by ‘the sleep of reason’, but, unlike them, she is beautiful because desirable. Yet to exorcise her as a ghost, to call her by her proper name, he had to identify her as closely as possible with the painting of her dressed. He was not painting a nude. He was painting the apparition of a nude within a dressed woman. This is why he was tied so faithfully to the dressed version and why his usual powers of invention were so unusually inhibited.

I am not suggesting that Goya intended us to interpret the two paintings in this way. He expected them to be taken at their face value: the woman dressed and the woman undressed. What I am suggesting is that the second, nude version was probably an
invention
and that perhaps Goya became imaginatively and emotionally involved in its ‘pretence’ because he was trying to exorcise his own desires.

Why do these two paintings seem surprisingly modern? We assumed that the painter and model were lovers when we took it for granted that she agreed to pose for the two pictures. But their power, as we now see it, depends upon there being so
little
development between them. The difference is only that she is undressed. This should change everything, but in fact it only changes our way of looking at her. She herself has the same expression, the same pose, the same distance. All the great nudes of the past offer invitations to share their golden age; they are naked in order to seduce and transform us. The Maja is naked but indifferent. It is as though she is not aware of being seen – as though we were peeping at her secretly through a keyhole. Or rather, more accurately, as though she did not know that her clothes had become ‘invisible’.

In this, as in much else, Goya was prophetic. He was the first artist to paint the nude as a stranger: to separate sex from intimacy: to substitute an aesthetic of sex for an energy of sex. It is in the nature of energy to break bounds: and it is the function of aesthetics to construct them. Goya, as I have suggested, may have had his own reason for fearing energy. In the second half of the twentieth century the aestheticism of sex helps to keep a consumer society stimulated, competitive and dissatisfied.

1964

The crooked houses, narrow streets and leaning door-frames of Colmar do not look picturesque. They are just old, unchanged and outdated. Apart from the square and the cathedral, there is one other landmark: a tall chimney belching out black smoke from the very centre of the town. This is the boiler of the public bath-house. Private baths are a modern luxury.

Thus, in its own peculiar way, Colmar prepares the visitor for the Grünewald altarpiece. The town hints at a different age, with different expectations of life. Unless the visitor takes this hint, he will get no further than the cliché that Grünewald’s
mystic
genius was
timeless.

The altarpiece, now housed in the town’s museum, consists of ten separate panels, of which the most memorable are the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Temptation of St Anthony. The Crucifixion, now one of the most famous ever painted, is always being referred to in discussions on Expressionism, Germanic cruelty and religious ecstasy. Its true significance seems to me to be much more precise. It is one of the very few great paintings concerned with disease, with physical sickness.

The altarpiece was originally commissioned by an Antonite hospice at Isenheim just outside Colmar, and Grünewald worked there from 1510 to 1515. This hospice was famous for its care and treatment of the sick, especially those suffering from the plague and syphilis. In the second half of the fifteenth century the plague was probably as common as influenza is today. In 1466, for example, 60,000 people died of it in Paris alone. Syphilis was also sweeping across Europe on an unprecedented scale. The uncertainty of life as a result of disease was at least as great as the uncertainty experienced by men in the front line in either of the two World Wars.

When a new patient – although the word
patient
is already too modern – when a new
recruit
arrived at Isenheim, he was taken, even before he
was examined or washed, to be shown Grünewald’s Crucifixion. Confronted with such evidence of physical suffering he became a little more reconciled and so easier to treat, if not cure.

So much and no more is known from the records. There is also a report that later Grünewald died of the plague himself. But so far as his own attitudes are concerned we have to guess. The longer I looked at the Colmar altarpiece, the more convinced I became that for Grünewald disease represented the actual state of man. Disease was not for him the prelude to death – as modern man tends to fear: it was the condition of life.

All the evidence around him suggested that he lived in an infected world. Like Jeremiah he cried out: Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? And the
it
represented all that made disease possible and incurable: the shifting insecurity of the world, the apparent indifference of God, the ignorance. He was obsessed with physical disease because it seemed to him to express the most far-reaching truths he had yet discovered about the healthy.

Church and State, as he knew them, were corrupt and merciless. (He was later a follower of Luther and a supporter of the peasants in the Peasants’ War.) All authority, like an epidemic, was arbitrary and terrible. Everything, as the medieval world broke up, decreed that life was cheap.

I am not, of course, suggesting that this Crucifixion is only about disease and not about the New Testament What I am suggesting is that its images and content have been taken straight from the medieval lazar-house. Christ’s body is a corpse from Isenheim, covered with sores, swollen, infected. The feet are gangrenous, the hands suffer a paralysing cramp. The whole is tallow-coloured.

The Virgin Mary topples like a struck tree against St John’s trailing arm. Both of them are as dumb as wood – which is what makes them the most poignant and haunting survivors in the history of art. But, by the same token, it is clear that they were not imagined as figures in a historical religious tragedy. On the contrary, they were minutely observed bereaved at the hospice. And the fact that Grünewald knew that Christ in reality suffered at the hands of men only emphasizes how he saw disease as the epitome of the inhumanity of his world.

It is the same in other panels. The monsters who surround St Anthony represent the traditional sins only in a nominal way. What they really represent is disease, fever, infection. This is a painting of a man on his sick bed. Once consider it in this way, and it becomes obvious. The text at the bottom reads:
Where wert thou, Holy Jesus? Why wast thou not there to heal my wounds?

In the Resurrection, Christ ascends to heaven, white and pallid as a corpse – whenever Grünewald uses white it has this connotation of the pallor of death, it is never a positive, pure colour. His winding sheet forks
like lightning; and the soldiers, far from sleeping, writhe in convulsions as though poisoned.

Even in the happier scenes the same fatality is implicit. In the Virgin and Child, the swaddling cloth is the same tattered (infected?) rag which serves as loin-cloth for the crucified Christ. In the Annunciation, the angel bursts in upon and dwarfs the Virgin with his promise, to which she reacts as to the news of an incurable illness.

I want now to mention a highly personal and idiosyncratic motivation which Grünewald’s work appears to reveal and which perhaps supports this argument of mine, but which I have not seen previously discussed.

In the Temptation of St Anthony, amongst all the grotesque, invented monsters, there is one passage which is painted with scrupulous accuracy. Its very literalness makes it outstanding. It is the passage concerned with the feathers of the mythical sparrow-hawk. It has clearly been painted by a man for whom feathers had a special significance: for whom feathers
in themselves
were as charged as all the apocalyptic details which surround them.

One can also find (in other panels) evidence of a similar special significance for Grünewald attached to feathers. The wing feathers of Gabriel in the Annunciation have no connection whatsoever with the rest of the figure; they are like the severed wings of a bird mysteriously held in space above the angel’s shoulders. In the Angels’ Concert, there is the inexplicable feathered one – a kind of prophecy of Papageno in
The Magic Flute.
He wears a crown of feathers and is also clothed in them. As he plays, his expression suggests aspiration and longing.

Even where feathers are not introduced directly, Grünewald insists again and again on textures and forms which are feather equivalents: palm trees against the sky like tail feathers, and the plaited palm robe worn by St Paul to keep himself warm: the ribbed, padded tunic of a soldier, each segment of cloth curving like a feather: the spires of a coronet worn by an angel.

It is hard to say nearly 500 years afterwards what exact significance feathers may have had for Grünewald, especially as it was almost certainly an unconscious one. But in general psychological theory, feathers are a symbol of power, of aspiration and the ability to transcend (or escape from) material reality. The feathers of the sparrow-hawk probably emphasize the incomprehensible power of his aggression. The feathered angel in the Angels’ Concert may well represent the ‘flight’ of human imagination.

The point of this observation about the feathers is that it may explain a little more about the great, mysterious figure of Christ in the Crucifixion. The lacerated body is unique: no other painter ever depicted Christ on the cross like this. The literal explanation of the lacerations is that the body has been scourged and scratched by thorns – some of the thorns,
broken, are still in the flesh. The circumstantial explanation is that the lacerations resemble the sores of the sick – in the bottom left-hand corner of the Temptation of St Anthony there is a man suffering from syphilis who is pock-marked in a somewhat similar way.

Yet the uniformity of the marks over the entire body makes both these explanations rather unconvincing.
Surely the overall appearance of Christ’s body is more than anything else suggestive of a bird that has had its feathers plucked?
Surely here Grünewald was being obedient to an imaginative compulsion, emotionally charged beyond the possibility of all narrative logic? Surely here he was saying: Christ, like the victims of Isenheim, dies in agony without the slightest comfort of hope because all his spiritual power has been drawn out of him by the degree of his suffering – because he has been stripped naked unto death.

1963

Lowry was born in a Manchester suburb in 1887. He was a vague child. He never passed any exams. He went to art school because nobody was very convinced that he could do anything else. At the age of about thirty he began to paint the industrial scene around him: he began to produce what would now be recognizable Lowrys. He continued for twenty years with scant recognition or success. Then a London dealer saw some of his paintings by chance when he went to a framer’s. He inquired about the artist. A London exhibition was arranged – it was now 1938, and Lowry began slowly to acquire a national reputation. At first it was other artists who most appreciated his work. The public gradually followed. From 1945 onwards he began to receive official honours – honorary degrees, Royal Academician, freedom of the City of Salford. None of this has changed him in any way. He still lives on the outskirts of Manchester: modest, eccentric, comic, lonely.