{"title":"Berger in Picasso’s Red Period","authors":"Matthew Holman","doi":"10.1111/criq.12706","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12706","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"122-130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44945041","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}
{"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}
{"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}
{"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}
{"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}