seeing berger

MODERN ART: Letter To Fuller / March 18, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award:

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

SEEING BERGER: LETTER TO FULLER

Mike Dibb, the director of John Berger’s film, ‘Ways of Seeing’ takes issue with Peter Fuller on his attack in NEW SOCIETY on Berger.

Mike Dibb directing Peter Fuller and David Hockney

Dear Peter,

Having been out of the country for several weeks, it was strange and sad to come back and read your assault (New Society, 29 January) on Ways of Seeing and John Berger’s bitterly ironic riposte. As the producer and director of Ways of Seeing among other films with Berger, as well as several films in collaboration with you, I want to tell you why I dissociate myself from your argument.

Clearly the bitter breakdown of your once close relationship with Berger has further distorted your reading of Ways of Seeing. If you feel that we were disingenuous in our references to Clark and Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, it is as nothing compared with the disingenuousness with which you treat the detailed text of both the television series and subsequent book.

To suggest, as you do, that Ways of Seeing, with its different and trenchant critiques of, among other things, the materialist obsessions of European culture, of the objectification of women, of the values of advertising, can now be seen as a Trojan horse of Thatcherism, is ludicrous. We never said that ‘advertising was the modern version of art.’

What we did try to suggest was that many of the pictorial codes of European painting now find a regular if more degraded place within advertising, with colour photography even more than oil painting providing a means for rendering the physical world ever more tactile and desirable.

We admitted that the essays touched only on certain aspects of each subject, that our principal aim was to start a process of questioning, that the survey of European oil painting was very brief and therefore very crude. We emphasised that there were important distinctions to be made between the experience of seeing the original painting and its reproduction, and between great works and the average ones, and so on and so on - all of which you slide over in your quest to get Berger as once you had used Berger to get Clark.

Reading your article made me go back to your first review of the series back in 1972, written for the radical weekly, Seven Days. It was also the first time we met. EJnder the heading ‘Berger’s anti-Clark lecture’ you celebrated the series at the expense of the ‘rubbish’ epitomised by Civilization, concluding with praise for the programme on women ‘which crashes through as many cultural myths in half an hour as Clark managed to fabricate and reinforce in the whole of his interminable series’.

Maybe today you want to vilify Berger as once you vilified Clark. But don’t you think it’s time you grew out of this need to have heroes and villains, to mix love and hate?

I noted R.B. Kitaj’s warning letter to you in Modern Painters: ‘I think the best art writing is about what the writer truly loves ... Personal hatreds will leave a stain, not the distinctive mark I hope you will leave ... be partisan of course, but there is no useful place for malevolence in art where there are precious few eternal truths.’ What I have always liked in the work we have done together is the fact that it has drawn only on your positive insights and analysis. We have never found space for abuse.

So in retrospect I rather regret that Ways of Seeing made any direct reference to Clark at all. There were only two references, but for those brief moments it personalised the argument leading to the possibility of the kind of crude oversimplifications of which I think you were guilty in 1972 and still are today (though in reverse).

Ways of Seeing was not conceived and mounted as a polemical riposte to Kenneth Clark. But because it appeared in the backwash of Civilization it was, I think, experienced and enjoyed as its antidote. As the director of the series, my main interest was in conceiving a form in which all the assumptions and conventions surrounding films about painting could be taken apart and re-examined. The first film was an attempt to give the dense text of Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a playful and dramatic form. The theme of the last film on advertising emerged only during the making of the series.

The thinking behind the two essays on women and the European oil painting had existed in other forms well before Civilization was broadcast. Indeed your attack stimulated me to dig out the very first drafts of the scripts (in so many ways different from the finished films). Interestingly, there were no references to Clark whatsoever or to Mr and Mrs Andrews. I might even have been partly responsible for encouraging John to address this painting in the programme; certainly I will plead guilty (though I feel no guilt) to pinning the ‘Trespassers Keep Out’ sign on the tree behind them. (One viewer even wrote in that he had never noticed the sign before!)

And when you say that predictably Ways of Seeing has not given rise to any alternative art appreciation, I would point immediately to, among much else, important new work subsequently done on the representation of women, and on the analysis and decoding of advertisements.

Ways of Seeing, despite its sometimes overassertive simplifications, unlocked a whole spray of ideas to be argued over and refined by others. And frankly I cannot believe that art teachers and their students could seriously be undermined by it. It is not a sacrosanct book, just one to be used, together with much else.

And here I would like to tell you a little story. During my recent trip to Mexico I spent a short time in Tijuana, the fast growing border city just a few miles from the USA. It’s an amazing place, a surrealist and bizarre cornucopia where weekly waves of American tourists descend on and devour the kitsch end of Mexican popular culture. While I was there I went to an exciting exhibition. There was one young painter whose work I particularly liked. His subject matter was, among other things, the relationship between Mexico and the United States and he used every means at his disposal to express it: sensuous colours, collage, erotic shapes, an old gramophone, photographs, references to popular art, feathers transformed into fighter planes, and so on and on. It was full of wit and intelligence, political awareness and huge love of his medium - even when talking to me in a bar he doodled continuously.

I asked him about influences and he replied immediately, Ways of Seeing. It was a moment to reflect on when that same series is being burdened with spawning the reactionary postures of Gilbert and George. But it becomes clear to me that by blaming Berger for Gilbert and George, you can conveniently, in one hurtful and surprising paradox, appear to kill two birds with one stone. But I’m afraid I’m not convinced. Writing in a spirit of revenge may feel sweet to you, but it sours your argument and saddens me.

You see, like you, I value the films on which we have collaborated, but, what may seem odd to you, find no contradictions between our most recent film Naturally Creative and Ways of Seeing. Each used a different means, for a different end, at a different historical moment.

And just for a moment consider the range of John Berger’s own writing about art. His essay, ‘The white bird’, could have been a text for Naturally Creative. And a few years after Ways of Seeing he wrote one of his best and most moving essays connecting the act of drawing with the death of his father. It inspired me to embark on what became the two hour film, Seeing through Drawing. In that film (minus Berger), I tried to demystify and open up the significance of drawing, but using techniques completely different from Ways of Seeing. The two projects were for me complementary, the one polemical, the other reflective and discursive.

In filming with you and in films with others, I always try to connect areas of thought often kept separate by the institutionalised divisions of academic discourse, taking art away from the specialised preserve of the art historian, and ideas out of the confines of the university seminar, seeing where they touch psychoanalysis, politics, history, science and people’s everyday experience of living and working.

The richness of the films is a product of the richness of the synthesis which film allows. This in turn depends on our ability to use images mechanically reproduced, detached from their original context. As we said in Ways of Seeing: ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums.’ Let me quote once more: ‘We are not saying original works of art are now useless. Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeates the actual material, the pain, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.’

I don’t believe Ways of Seeing argues against looking at original works of art, any more than the vivid reproductions in Modern Painters pre-empt the need or desire of your readers to see the exhibitions on which many of the articles are based. But don't let’s have any illusions, either about the extent to which reproduction, and photography, in general, has changed our relationship to painting, or indeed about how the form, style and price of your new quarterly journal of the fine arts will mean it reaches one kind of audience and not another.

But enough is enough. Please heed Kitaj’s advice.

(New Society 22.4.88)

MODERN ART: Overweening Treachery, and Suchlike / March 13, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

John Berger was my father’s most influential mentor as an art critic. Berger has been internationally recognized as one of the few leading art critics in Europe throughout the 20th Century and a significant figure in the story of Modern Art. I had the opportunity to speak with him on several occasions and he had a profound affect on me too. I was taken back by the both the depth of his compassion and at the same time the strength of his integrity. When I was 13 after his speech at The Peter Fuller Memorial Lecture he hugged me with tears in his eyes and told me if there was anything I needed from him I should call him. Fifteen years later I did and he gave me his blessing to move forward with the Peter Fuller Project. In 2017 I traveled back to London to digitize and read the letters between John Berger and my father at the TATE archive. The letters were some of the most touching and beautiful correspondences I have ever read.

OVERWEENING TREACHERY, AND SUCHLIKE

by Peter Fuller, 1988

A few weeks ago I launched a new quarterly journal of the Fine Arts, Modern Painters. After twenty years of writing for other people’s magazines, I felt there was space for a different sort of contemporary art journal, one which celebrated the critical imagination; stood up for aesthetic values and had a particular focus on British art. I was determined that Modern Painters would question the conduct of the modern art establishment and speak out against undeserved reputations inflated by institutional or commercial interests. Modern Painters has sold nearly 10,000 copies.

Its success, however, has not been welcomed by the journals of the left. New Society, Time Out and The New Statesman have all published stories about Modern Painters which are not only hostile and inaccurate, but, in the latter two cases, downright malicious. Indeed, a columnist for the New Statesman, Francis Wheen, actually went so far as to accuse me of having betrayed all my ideals and at least one of my friends, John Berger; and according to Wheen and the gist of an article by Sarah Kent, art critic of Time Out, the new magazine demonstrates that I have allowed myself to be clasped to the bosom of the New Right. The evidence Wheen published was as conclusive and unanswerable as that which, in another context, was offered against John Stalker; Wheen pointed out that I arrived at the Tate Gallery for the celebrations heralding the opening of the Bomberg exhibition in a chauffeur-driven limousine - my father-in-law’s, actually. Sarah Kent’s evidence is even more damning. I must be a Thatcherite’ because I have declared my belief in aesthetic values and I have set myself against those things which she, personally, so greatly admires.

But what are those things? Herein, I think, lies a tale from which more can be salvaged than my reputation. Take the case of Julian Schnabel. I have long maintained that Schnabel is a buffoon who possesses neither touch, skill, imagination nor sense of tradition. For the first issue of Modern Painters, I commissioned an article from Robert Hughes which argued - more eloquently than I was capable of doing - along similar lines: Schnabel’s ‘cack-handedness’, Hughes claimed, was ‘not feigned, but real’; he had never learned to draw because his development had been smothered by his ‘impregnable self-esteem’.

Now it so happens that not long ago, Ms Kent informed the readers of Time Out that Julian Schnabel was ‘probably the most important painter since Picasso’. As will become clear in a moment, I am not among those who believe that it is at all easy to correlate aesthetic preferences with political positions; but the fact is that it is merely perverse for Kent, Wheelan and Co to try to characterise all those of us who oppose artists like Schnabel as belonging to the ‘New Right’.

After all, Schnabel was the Yuppies’ choice, par excellence, and it is hardly a secret in the art world that Schnabel’s reputation in Europe was largely fabricated by the man without whom the English New Right might never have risen from their tubular-steel arm-chairs: Charles Saatchi himself. En passant, it is worth noting that Mr Saatchi’s views about Modern Painters are almost identical with Ms Kent’s. He delivered himself of them to me for a full half-hour when, a while ago, we met by chance in the basement of a London gallery. I gathered that Mr Saatchi did not like my suggestion that his collection should be ‘transformed or eradicated’. I believe Saatchi has been a catastrophe for art in Britain. I am not saying this because of Saatchi’s wealth, nor even because of the politics with which he has chosen to associate himself (which I don’t like either), but rather because, as far as art is concerned, Saatchi has no taste or discrimination - one reason why he prefers to buy works of art by the baker’s dozen.

Perhaps I should have expected all this, for the article in Modem Painters, which definitively demolishes the reputation of Gilbert and George is by none other than Roger Scruton, whom everyone on the left loves to hate, whatever he says - even when he is opposing the country’s most prominent Thatcherite ‘artists’. The interest and irony of this juxtaposition were entirely lost upon the bigoted brains of many critics, but Roger Scruton’s courageous text merely confirms what has long seemed self-evident to me: that there is no easy or necessary continuity between a person’s economic, political and aesthetic beliefs. There have been many commentators, and not a few practitioners, who have wanted to argue that the modern movement (and more recently, postmodernism) ought to be acknowledged as being somehow the honorary house-style of the left; but in order to maintain this position, a considerable distortion of history had to take place. One had, for example, to ignore the fact that most of the great early modernist poets, for example, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, were men of the right, or worse. Modernism also provided the house-style not only for the ideologically OK avant-garde in the USSR, but also for Mussolini’s Rome and for the Rockefeller Centre in New York and the Hilton Hotel chain.

There is, I think, little to be concluded from this except that you can’t deduce someone’s politics from their taste, any more than you can deduce their taste from their politics. Although I despise those who are forever rehearsing their political ‘positions’, these, for what they are worth, are some of mine: I think that the expansion of the market creates more social problems than it solves. I prefer concepts of co-operation to those of competition; far from being a right- wing radical, I dislike the policies of the present government because it seems to me that it wishes to conserve almost nothing I would like to see conserved, for example, the Welfare State, which, I think, should provide health, educational and cultural facilities for all. I am convinced that contemporary means of production are polluting and destroying the environment, perhaps irrevocably; I am convinced that both morality and national security are better served by the shedding of nuclear weapons than by their accumulation. I despise the shallowness, imperial ambitions and commercialism of‘The American Way’. And I don’t like restraints on the freedom of the Press, apartheid, corporal or capital punishment. I am well aware that these views hardly make me ‘a man of the barricades’, but they are not usually those associated with the New Right either.

I also know, and respect, a great many intellectuals like Roger Scruton - a good friend of mine - who disagree with me on some or all of these issues. If I have changed at all, politically, since the heady days of the 1960s, it is in an ever-widening eclecticism, and a growing contempt for those who are convinced that their own political opinions and intuitions are something more than that. We ought not to try to escape the obligation which social life places upon us to make political and economic choices. So I still support the Labour Party, although admittedly without much enthusiasm; for the other options, I have none at all. Equally, however, since this is an area of human life in which the only certainty is doubt and uncertainty, I subscribe to the pious platitude that we should learn to attend to those with very different views from our own.

One of the great errors of the 1960s was the spread of the belief that the intellectual was, or ought to be, engage, in a party political sense; worse still, that, by reason of being an intellectual, he or she stood in some special ‘vanguard’ relationship to truth. Fortunately, in the absence of God, we have little choice but to leave ultimate decisions to the democratic processes themselves; but I have no respect for those bigots of the left or the right who claim to know ‘the only role European intellectuals can now adopt’; or who fail to understand that their own views are, as it were, but a part of a wider argument, and that even those who disagree with them may have some grasp upon aspects of truth.

Only fools and fanatics really believe that a man’s or woman’s political beliefs are most the interesting or significant aspects of their character. An individual’s ethical, spiritual and aesthetic beliefs are, self-evidently, of greater consequence and interest than his or her declarations of political preference at least up to a point. The point is over-stepped when the latter are of such a kind as grossly to distort the former. For those who like labels, pigeon-holes and bibliographies, i.e. for academics, all this is perhaps another way of saying that, intellectually, I owe more to Ruskin than to Marx. Indeed, I agree with Maurice Cowling when he writes, ‘Marxism is not so much untrue as, for certain purposes and in limited respects, true and unimportant’.

It is perhaps because I think this way that I see no great difficulty in making common cause on aesthetic issues with those with whom I may well disagree about politics and economics. (Despite - or more likely as a result of - growing up intellectually in a New Left milieu, I no longer believe that any c,ie, not even Perry Anderson, will ever arrive at a Correct Political Understanding of all the problems in the world. Indeed, I now think that such a project is just absurd; unsurprisingly, Anderson has ended up, it seems to me, being intelligently wrong about almost everything.)

For example, I do not think one has to be a monarchist - although like D.W. Winnicott, I am - to support Prince Charles’s attack on modern architecture; indeed, as I have discovered since publishing the full text of the speech in Modern Painters, support for the Prince’s initiative involves a range of political bed-fellows running from Professor Scru- ton to the architectural correspondent of the New Statesman and beyond on either side. Equally, the fact that I published Grey Gowrie’s outstanding study of Lucian Freud’s paintings does not mean that I will necessarily vote for Mrs Thatcher at the next election, nor that I have been converted to free market economies.

I see nothing odd or inexplicable about this. Politics certainly matter; but, given certain minimum conditions, they are not the only things that matter, nor do they necessarily matter more than anything else. Men and women with similar social goals often opt to pursue them through very different political means. This should hardly surprise us. Nobody, after all, would even raise an eyebrow if they discovered articles about John Ruskin and William Morris in the same art magazine today. We think of Ruskin and Morris as having similar ideas (whether we agree with them or not). Morris always spoke with profound respect about his debt to Ruskin; yet, in political terms, Ruskin was a High Tory, who was sceptical about democracy itself, whereas William Morris was a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist. I admire them both - although I recognise that, his politics notwithstanding, Ruskin was by far the greater and deeper thinker.

I have no doubt that some with different tastes and ethical beliefs from mine will squawk and squeal and try to make out that, despite what I have been arguing, the real differences between us are political. They will claim, as they have done so many times before, that I am slipping and sliding down the path that leads to the mire of right-wing reaction, whereas they are uncompromised men, or women, of the Left, marching along on the side of Progress, Light and the Socialist Future ... entirely forgetting, of course, that their own anaesthetic preferences involve climbing into avant-garde or post-modern beds with partners who are less than ideologically perfect, e.g. such philistines of the far right as the Saatchis, environmental thugs like Palumbo, or wallies like Gilbert and George. For it is not only aesthetic traditionalists like myself and Roger Scruton who enter into politically improbable alliances.

The fact is that, when it comes to art, among my modernist and post-modernist opponents, taste is a more powerful pull than political affiliation - just as they (rightly) point out that it is for me.

And this brings me to my last point: the case of John Berger. I have never, Francis Wheen notwithstanding, ‘denounced’ Berger as a Thatcherite. What I did argue in a recent article in New Society was that Berger’s Ways of Seeing in many ways anticipated the anti-aesthetic policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Governments - despite their political differences. I remain convinced that this is so. For Ways of Seeing is hostile to the very idea of aesthetic value; it sets out to oppose any notion of spirituality in art, of art as a channel of grace. Ways of Seeing attacks the right of museums to exist, arguing that they should ‘logically’ be replaced by children’s pin-boards of reproductions; Ways of Seeing appears to prefer photography to painting and presents ‘publicity’ or advertising, as the inevitable extension of the Western tradition of oil painting.

Of course, I did not ‘betray’ John Berger: what did happen I explain at some length in Theoria, my book published by Chatto and Windus, 1988, in which I describe how I grew out of his ideas. Briefly, as a young man, I was deeply impressed by Berger’s theories. But, unlike Berger, who departed these shores to live out his pastoral idyll elsewhere, I had every opportunity to observe what was actually happening to art and aesthetic life in Mrs Thatcher’s England. No one could accuse Mrs T. of clinging on to the values espoused in Kenneth Clark’s Civilization; but, give or take a few differences of political rhetoric, Ways of Seeing could easily have provided her Ministers with everything they felt they needed to know about art. For while Berger was milking his peasants in the Haute Savoie, Mrs Thatcher’s Government was shutting down Fine Art courses and her officials were arguing that the visual arts should serve material and industrial processes, rather than spiritual and aesthetic needs. The great museums were increasingly squeezed for resources and we witnessed the fostering of a philistine ‘culture’ in which figures like Saatchi dominated not only advertising but what was left of the Fine Arts as well.

I soon came to doubt whether the ideas contained in Ways of Seeing were quite so wonderful as I had once believed - and I found that many artists and teachers of art, up and down the country, agreed with me.*

While this tragic ‘modernisation’ (i.e. destruction) of Fine Art education was taking place in this country, Berger continued to do nicely from the reprinting of Ways of Seeing, but he said not a word about the Government’s anti-art policies. And so, quite frankly, I changed my mind. Berger never forgave me for this. Suffice to say, it was he, and not I who conclusively brought our friendship to an end.

But perhaps this was inevitable; for I had come to the view that, more than any other single book, Ways of Seeing helped to foster the unholy, anti-aesthetic alliance forged by some intellectuals of the radical left with others of the radical right.

Ways of Seeing, for example, is cited as an inspiration at the beginning of Sandy Nairne’s book The State of the Art, which celebrates the collapse of all aesthetic values into the quagmire of Saatchi-style post-modernism. The point is really this: there is no way in which the defence of the aesthetic dimension of life can be definitively rooted in a particular political stance; and yet many of us, myself included, believe that the social defence of this dimension matters as much as, if not more than, many of the political differences which understandably divide us. Ways of Seeing began as a diatribe against Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, with its affirmation of humane spiritual values and a continuing European tradition. But I have come to believe that Berger’s book is really a dated and dangerous tract which provides the justification for philistinism of whatever political colour. Clark offers at least a better starting point for the aesthetics of those of us who are socialist - as he himself was, and I remain - or, indeed, for those who are not.

{Art Monthly 116)

MODERN ART: Goodbye to all that! / March 12, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT!

by Peter Fuller, 1988

In 1970, I was an obscure and penurious critic writing for art magazines and the underground press; John Berger (whom I had never met) chanced upon an article I had written attacking the machinations of the art market under the pseudonym ‘Percy Ingrams’ in the Trotskyist paper, Red Mole. Berger sent this to Paul Barker, then editor of New Society, with a note suggesting that he should seek out Percy and get him to write something. My first piece for this magazine, ‘The £sd of Art’, appeared under my own bye-line on 9th July 1970.

Over the years that followed, Paul Barker gave me as much space as I wanted to work out my changing aesthetic ideas in public; he encouraged me to write about anything that interested me from a new interpretation of the Venus de Milo, to conceptual art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the origins of creativity in our species. This was a generous and risky thing to do - and I will always be grateful for it. Then, there were very few non-specialist British journals which made the space for serious articles of any length about the visual arts. Today there are fewer; and tomorrow there will be none.*

From my point of view, all this makes it sad and ironic that the last few months of New Society’s life should have been marked by a contretemps between Berger and myself, arising out of the article I wrote about Ways of Seeing last January. Much has been said here, and elsewhere, about my motives in publishing this. I therefore wish to close my contribution to New Society by explaining how my ideas about art have changed over the last two decades, and why I feel a radically different approach is now necessary.

Inevitably, in my early years as a critic, I was deeply influenced by Berger whom I met soon after the appearance of that first New Society article. The following month he sent me a letter in which he outlined what he saw as three elements comprising a ‘viable critical stance’. First and foremost was the assault on the art market and ‘the turning of works of art into commodities’; the exposure of this process, he told me, ‘takes us far into the economic and ideological workings of capitalism’. He wrote that whenever there was a chance of such revelation, ‘the critic should take it: without necessarily having to assess the creative value of the works in question.’ The second arose from ‘the use by a certain number of artists to pose and investigate a whole series of new social and philosophical schemes, kinetics, etc. The critic should take an interest in such work and ‘enter the questions posed’ in the understanding that the ‘answers ... must lie outside the works’ and that they were ‘more important than any “quality” of the works-in-themselves’. Many such questions, he wrote, ‘were about art in the hope of transcending art’. Thirdly, he recommended a sociological critique of the use of the ‘“professional” life of artists as a life-style of maximum freedom’.

For ten years, Berger was a constant source of support and encouragement. He had, of course, left England to live in a village in the Haute Savoie, but he wrote to me regularly, commenting on my articles in detail. ‘I liked your piece on Oldenburg - except for the last paragraph ...‘ ‘I thought the T.L.S. piece was excellent ... And Hamilton of course is all nostalgia ...‘ We visited each other frequently and I developed a sense almost of complicity with him, which was both flattering and exciting for a young and inexperienced critic. In 1975, he wrote ‘Within the art world we are alone’.

The following year he sent me a drawing of two men driving a stake into the ground with alternate blows of their hammers. ‘If we hammer away like this, we may dent something.’

I looked back over my blows of the hammer before I wrote this piece. In that very first New Society article, my ‘line’ was an all-out attack on the art market and the improbable assertion that the most interesting work in the future world, in any event, be unsaleable. ‘The art experience’, I wrote, ‘has come to lie in the interaction between the object and the viewer, far more than in any “value” inherent in the object itself.’ The article was spiced with asides on art with purely aesthetic goals, and noises of encouragement to a ‘new generation of artists’ who were starting ‘to create a new, articulate, genuinely revolutionary art detached from object slavery’. It is nothing like as eloquent as Berger; but it has all the hall-marks of the work of a devoted disciple.

This was not a role in which I felt comfortable for very long. For one thing, I was becoming increasingly worried about the direction ‘we’ were taking; for another, Paul Barker, the most perceptive editor for whom I have ever written, used to take me aside and hint that the purpose of criticism was to develop a vision and a voice of one’s own.

Gradually, I came to realise that ‘we’ were not at all alone; on the contrary, the critical stance which Berger had presented as being so radical that only he and I were pursuing it was in fact part and parcel of a new orthodoxy. For example, in 1972, there was a major exhibition of ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward Gallery; it consisted of words, processed information, conceptual pieces, etc., by artists including Gilbert and George, posing exactly the sorts of ‘questions’ Berger had told me the critic ought to enter. The show was introduced by Anne Seymour who praised these artists’ ‘eschewal of aesthetic mumbo-jumbo’, and argued that the artist could now ‘work in the areas in which he is interested - philosophy, photography, landscape, etc. - without being tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate’.

I found I was bored to tears by this sort of thing. I derived from it none of the pleasure and excitement which was what had attracted me to painting and sculpture in the first place; nor did it provide, by way of compensation, any more intellectual stimulation than could be wrung out of a children’s book or an amusement arcade. But, for much of the 1970s, there was hardly an artist under thirty who did not believe that this was the way in which he or she ought to be working.

What worried me was that I came to see the ‘justification’ for fashionable anti-art in the ‘viable critical stance’ Berger had outlined towards the art world and, more significantly, in his influential book and television programmes, Ways of Seeing. For, despite all that he and Mike Dibb have recently written, the undeniable fact remains that Ways of Seeing was designed to encourage the view that an interest in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of art is somehow bogus, and that oil painting is the ‘bourgeois’ art form par excellence and is somehow inherently corrupted by its ‘special relationship’ with capitalism.

It is true that Berger wrote essays elsewhere which had little to do with his general theory as put forward in Ways of Seeing. When he produced those marvellous studies of Grtinewald, Poussin, Vermeer, Courbet, Millais, Monet or Bonnard his writing was always reflective and evaluative; he never wasted time reminding his readers that these artists had, first and foremost, produced ‘portable capital assets’, and, as far as I can remember, he himself had nothing to say about the need for the art of such great painters to ‘transcend’ itself and to be absorbed into other anti-aesthetic forms of life and work. The problem - as I came to see it - was that, of all Berger’s books, Ways of Seeing had an overwhelming influence year in, year out, on generation after generation of art students. It still does ... And they have been encouraged to despise aesthetic experience; to ignore tradition; to abandon painting and sculpture; and to believe that there is nothing to be learned from a museum that they cannot as easily pick-up from a colour supplement.

Sometime during the 1970s, I began to feel that I wanted a theory of art which was derived from - rather than at odds with - my own deepest responses to works of art. Inevitably, I found myself drawn back to the traditional concern of aesthetics i.e. the quest of ‘the beautiful’, and to ideas about imagination, talent, genius, tradition - and the particular formal possibilities of the various arts. I came to realise that, although I was interested in paintings as social documents, that had little to do with the roots of my responses to them. What excited my passion, or on occasions my hate, was the success, or failure, of a painting as art. To use an analogy from another sphere of life, if I love someone, I certainly want to know everything I can about them; but such knowledge can never ‘explain’ my love.

In trying to make sense of my own responses to pictures, I found myself drawn ever further away from the narrow economic and sociological preoccupations that pervade Ways of Seeing-, I began to read traditional aesthetics, to study psychoanalytic and even biological ideas about imagination and illusion, and to become much more knowledgeable than I had been about the materials and techniques the painter and the sculptor use and their peculiar expressive possibilities. Inevitably, I found myself drawn into the aesthetically conservative and yet profoundly radical universe of Ruskin; and, it was through reading him that I rediscovered Kenneth Clark, and came to realise that there were many more ‘viable critical stances’ than I had previously imagined.

In 1980 I published Art and Psychoanalysis exploring some of these new ideas; I also wrote the paper Seeing Berger. Berger wrote to me immediately, expressing his agreement. ‘I have read the essay and I think it very good. Its arguments are just and clear, and they correct what is false in Ways of Seeing, as well as going beyond it. I never considered Ways of Seeing an important work. It was a partial, polemical reply - as you say. But I was worried that your essay might miss this process, and so become too textually attached to a test that was not important enough. My worries were quite unnecessary because you situate the questions you discuss marvellously. Reading you, we are back in the world.’ He ended with a characteristic image: ‘Strange how we work - and walk - the two of us. Sometimes it seems to me that we are each a single leg of some other being who is striding out’.

But then, equally suddenly, it was all over; it was as if either I had to be Berger’s other leg, or his deadly enemy. In public, he said nothing about my criticisms of Ways of Seeing, but, the following year, I expressed some disagreement about his reading of Picasso in New Society, drawing on the theories I had been putting forward in Seeing Berger. He wrote an angry letter to the magazine, which was published, accusing me of ‘parricidal intentions’. This was the only comment he has ever made about any of my writings in print, until the bitter tirade of his Confession published on 12 February 1988.

Inevitably, our personal relationship withered to nothing; throughout the 1980s, there had been many occasions on which - to put it mildly - I have found his conduct less than comradely. No doubt he has often felt the same. But, Mike Dibb notwithstanding, I cannot accept that I have come to hold my present views about Ways of Seeing because of the breakdown of my personal relationship with John Berger; if anything, it is the other way around. My relationship with Berger broke down because I came to disagree with the theory of art he had proposed in Ways of Seeing.

Today, I find myself unrepentant concerning my assertion that, give or take a few differences of political rhetoric, the policy towards the arts implied in Ways of Seeing is uncomfortably close to those programmes implemented by the present Government. The Director of the National Gallery recently compared Thatcher’s policy towards the museums with the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. All this is perhaps not so surprising as it appears. Marxists and monetarists after all have at least one thing in common: they both believe that ethics and aesthetics are, or ought to be, determined by economic forces, ‘in the last instance’.

The ideas that John Berger put forward in Ways of Seeing have become the ruling ideas in the art world today. I do not question what he says when he claims that, elsewhere and on other occasions, he has put forward other views of art. ‘The transcendental face of art’, he wrote in a 1985 essay, ‘is always a form of prayer’. But the students who are given Ways of Seeing to read year in, year out, never get to hear of such remarkable qualifications. And they go on to read books like State of the Art by Sandy Nairne, Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which pays hommage to Ways of Seeing and then proceeds to argue that there is no such thing as aesthetic quality in art and that more or less everything in art is as good or as bad as everything else.

This week 22-28 May 1988 has been declared ‘British Art Week’. The television is full of the stuff. Any one who watches will become aware of just how widely the sorts of ideas put forward in Ways of Seeing are accepted by young artists and not so young arts administrators today. You won’t hear many voices - except, dare I say it, my own - raised on the television discussions in favour of ‘connoisseurship’ or ‘spirituality’ in art. The rhetoric of yesterday’s ‘radicalism’ is nowhere so cosily ensconced as in today’s art establishment.

Ways of Seeing was not, of course, the cause of all this; but it has done nothing to help resist the onslaught of the institutional philistines. Today, by and large, they are still calling the agenda for the discussion about art. In order to counteract this depressing orthodoxy, I started Modem Painters. If, as Berger’s ironic Confession implies, he now shares my views about this orthodoxy, then perhaps he would care to write for us. After all, with the death of New Society, where else are serious articles in defence of the aesthetic dimension going to appear? He might begin by explaining what, if not those put forward in Ways of Seeing, he does feel to be the ‘important’ ideas for the creation and understanding of art. Do they, perhaps, have something to do with its ‘transcendental face’ after all?

1988

MODERN ART: Against Internationalism / March 11, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

John Berger and Peter’s relationship was fascinating spanned decades and was built on the foundations of true art criticism lived out in an emotional and personal dynamic. Their correspondences remain the most passionate, compelling, engage and moving letters I have ever read. This essay Seeing Berger for obvious reasons signaled a change in their relationship as the son took aim at the father.

Seeing Berger: Against Internationalism

by Peter Fuller, 1988

No exhibition has angered me more than the 1988 Hayward Annual. No sooner have we shaken off the thraldom in which New York has held British art for three decades, than we are invited to subsume our cultural identity once again ... this time in European decadence and neo-dadaism. Behind this invitation, of course, lies the conventional art-world wisdom that British art is, in Frances Spalding’s words, ‘essentially provincial’, and that ‘provincialism’ is a vice which needs to be dispelled by something called ‘internationalism’. Here, however, I want to argue a contrary view. As John Ruskin once said, ‘All great art, in the great times of art, is provin- ciaT. If we cannot easily grasp this, it is perhaps because we do not live in a great time of art.

Art historians often stress the modernity of the generation of British artists who began to achieve maturity in the 1930s - Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, David Bomberg and Graham Sutherland, among them. But, in retrospect, it is easy to see that this modernity was of a peculiar kind. Before allying themselves to ‘The Modern Movement’, these artists belonged, first and foremost, to an indigenous British tradition, which they sought to revive, honour, and extend. And a strength of this indigenous tradition was that, in many ways, it was profoundly conservationist; the achievement of these great artists was as much a product of their refusal of modernism, as of their acceptance of it. Edward Mullins is not often right; and yet he is certainly on to something when he says, ‘Generally speaking, British art has been conceived either in self-conscious relation to Modernism or in stalwart rejection of it, but always in the knowledge that whatever Modernism might be, it belonged elsewhere.’ One of the problems with today’s generation of artists is that they see themselves as belonging to The International Art World Inc. before they conceive of themselves as contributing to a uniquely British tradition, which has always involved resistance to modernity.

In 1833, Lord Lytton published a book called England and the English, in which he wrote, ‘We should seek the germ of beauty in the associations that belong to the peculiar people it is addressed to. Everything in art must be national ... Nothing is so essentially patriotic as the arts; they only permanently flourish amongst a people, when they spring from an indigenous soil’. Such sentiments, if expressed today, would produce only outrage, and protestations about the ‘universality’ of art. But one contemporary of Lytton’s, at least, seems to have lived his artistic life along the lines the good Lord suggested, to considerable effect. I am referring, of course to John Constable. In 1938, with his usual perspicacity, Kenneth Clark remarked that Constable was not just ‘the most English’ of our painters; he was also ‘the most universal’. Though Constable admired and sought to emulate the highest achievements of the European tradition, he refused to follow those who urged the pursuit of contemporary French and Italian models. Indeed, it might be said that he eschewed ‘internationalism’ in favour of an almost belligerent ‘provincialism’, in which he indulged his ‘overweening affection, for the banks of the Stour and the scenes of his childhood. And even Roger Fry, who was no friend of British painting, nor indeed of any aesthetic based on natural form, had to admit that Constable electrified Paris ‘with a new revelation of natural colour which held the key to the later developments of European art’. Nor, of course, was Constable just an isolated instance: Vermeer, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard may not have been British, but they were all devoted to their provincial perspectives.

John Constable: Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden

In that 1938 essay, Clark warned, ‘the temptation to use the picture-making formulas of continental schools is as strong today as it was in Constable’s youth’. He argued that any young painter who would resist it must have something of Constable’s courage and determination. ‘The attitude to nature implicit in his work,’ Clark wrote, ‘remains fundamentally true. We can no longer accept a doctrine of naive imitation, but we can, and must, accept nature as the material means through which pictorial emotion can be expressed.’ Clark was surely right, for if the British art of the 1930s manifests a weakness, it may be described as too great an obsession with ‘international’ forms and varieties of modernism. Moore was at his most feeble when he moved furthest from the English landscape, and closest to the anonymous stringed foibles of the modern world. Ben Nicholson was at his most vacuous when he was most removed from William Nicholson. But Clark almost certainly realised he was writing at the beginning of the great Neo-Romantic revival in British art, when, briefly, artists rediscovered the provincial vision, and produced work of a calibre which had not been seen in Britain for many decades. Indeed, it was only with the onset of war, the departure of many of the international ‘avant- gardists’, and what Grey Gowrie once called ‘England’s return to her own romantic tradition’, that the achievements of this talented generation reached their fullest expression. This replenishment of a national tradition helped to heal the rift between the artists and a wider public, too. For the rise of ‘Neo-Romanticism’ saw an upsurge of enthusiasm for a contemporary art, which sprang out of a common culture and a shared tradition. It was, of course, exactly this attitude to nature which the modern movement and ‘The International Style’ sought to deny.

Samuel Palmer: Pastoral with Horse Chestnut Tree.

The paradox which today’s ‘post-modernists’ - with the possible exception of Therese Oulton - do not understand is that if our artists really want to aspire to the ‘universality’ of a Constable (or of a Cezanne) they will have to become very much more blinkered and British in their outlook. They will have to develop a sense of belonging to a national tradition which is at least stronger than any sense of being part of an international avant-garde, trans-avant-garde, or post-avant- garde. A genuinely ‘universal’ art in the late 20th century can only begin with what Clark called a ‘profound intimacy’ with particular places, persons and traditions. It is more likely to spring out of visits to Kew Gardens, the Lake District, or Wales than from trips to Diisseldorf, SoHo, or the Sydney Biennale.

Take the case of Graham Sutherland. In 1960, that fastidious and most European-minded of connoisseurs, the late Douglas Cooper, wrote a monograph on Sutherland which is a tour deforce, and ought to be made compulsory reading for every art student. Cooper stressed that there were none whose ‘sensibility and inspiration’ were so ‘unmistakably and naturally English’ as Sutherland’s; and yet Cooper argued not only that Sutherland was ‘the most original English artist of the mid-20th century’, but also that he was ‘recognised in European artistic circles as the only significant English painter since Constable and Turner’. What is beyond doubt is that, in his formative years, Sutherland did not travel abroad, nor did he look out, or around, at what was happening in the European or American art scene. Rather he looked back to the work of Samuel Palmer. Later, in the 1930s, when Sutherland progressed from printing to painting, his vision was transformed by his experience of the brittle landscape of Pembrokeshire, where he found vivid natural and spiritual metaphors for a world sliding into the catastrophes of war. There are many who believe that Sutherland’s most ‘universal’ paintings are those which he produced in this most blinkered, British, and provincial phase of his development.

But in the 1950s, ‘Neo-Romanticism’ was squeezed on the one hand by the die-hards of the Royal Academy, and on the other by a shabby social realism, followed by Pop, and the succession of American styles. A watershed in Sutherland’s own development was undoubtedly the hostile reception accorded to his fine portrait of Winston Churchill, which was quickly followed by ‘avant-garde’ infatuation with American abstract expressionism. Sutherland’s interest in British cultural life understandably seemed to diminish. He began to imitate Picasso and Matisse, and he spent more and more time in France. Predictably, this ‘internationalism’ eroded his art, which, in the 1960s, seemed to flounder and lose direction. It was only after 1968, when he revisited Pembroke once again, and re-discovered the roots and sources of his inspiration, that he began to produce work which not only rivalled, but, in my view, came close to surpassing his finest achievements of the 1940s.

Of course, we have to be careful here. I am not suggesting that art is best served by ignorance or xenophobia. I am however arguing for an informed provincialism which looks for immediate meaning in local forms, and finds its larger sense through affiliation to a national tradition. Indeed this is the best stance - perhaps the only stance - from which ‘international’ influence can be successfully assimilated. One of the many tragedies of recent art education is that it has done nothing whatever to foster such a sensibility. How many students are encouraged to study Constable as an English painter - rather than as the ‘precursor’ of French Impressionism? In the literary departments of our universities, we rightly have no inhibitions about reaching English literature; and the same ought to be true of painting and sculpture. But in how many art schools is British art history taught as such? How many art students are encouraged to see themselves as the heirs of Moore, Piper, Sutherland, Nicholson and Hepworth, let alone of Reynolds, Constable or Turner? And yet we wonder why our national tradition appears so enervated.

There is no need to record again here the tragic effects which American influence had upon British art in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that the dust is thick upon almost everything that ‘Situation’ and the New Generation produced, everyone realises how little was gained through subservience to Manhattan’s and Washington’s fashions. Robyn Denny’s plastic Rothkos cannot be compared with the real thing; all that is worthwhile in Caro was derived not from David Smith, Clement Greenberg, or Kenneth Noland, but from Henry Moore. And yet the case of Patrick Heron remains salutary.

In the 1950s, Heron began to emerge as perhaps our finest colourist. At first, he fed eagerly from Bonnard, Matisse, and Braque; like Sickert and Steer before him, he readily assimilated those aspects of French painting which enabled him to develop and extend his very English vision. But, like Roger Fry’s and Nikolaus Pevsner’s, Heron’s criticism revealed a fatal tendency to denigrate the British visual tradition. He never really saw just how much many of the artists whom he admired - like Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, and Bryan Wynter - owed to English Neo-Romanticism. Predictably, in the 1950s, Heron became a tendentious ‘internationalist’, and began to identify increasingly with American painting. As is now well known, this stance tragically backfired. On the far side of the Atlantic, the Americans relentlessly plagiarized St. Ives painting; at home, the artists of ‘Situation’ and ‘The New Generation’, imitated those plagiarisms. What is perhaps less fully understood is the distorting effect all this had on Heron’s own work. In the 1970s, his ‘wobbly-edged’ pictures often seemed to want to prove a point to the Americans. But today Heron appears to have come to recognise that the significant sources of inspiration and nurture for his own art had always been close to home - in, say, the British decorative tradition, so vividly expressed in the finest Cresta Silks, or the beautiful gardens which surround his home at Eagle’s Nest, in Zennor, near St Ives, in Cornwall. This recognition, with its implicit repudiation of internationalism, comes at a time when Heron is painting more beautifully than ever in his distinguished career.

I believe that the British tradition has something specific to contribute to the ‘post-modern’ world. George Santayana says somewhere that of all modern peoples, it is the English who provide the best example of a people in harmony with their environment. This may not be true. What is true, however, is that, in Britain, cultural tradition, climate, and environment, alike, have conspired to emphasise the value of seeking an imaginative and spiritual reconciliation between man and nature. In the days when the ethic and aesthetic of ‘Modernism’ were rampant, this British contribution seemed like a ‘sentimental’ or ‘nostalgic’ refusal of modernity. Today, in the ‘post-modern’ era with all its ecological and ‘green’ emphases, this is no longer the case. By being true to their native traditions, British artists may be able to make a unique contribution to the new, emerging ‘structure of feeling’, which would appear to be essential for the survival of the world as a whole.

(Art Monthly 100)

MODERN ART: Seeing Berger / February 20, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

The arts across the world are under attack right now, the telling comments by the likes of Rishi Sunak that artists should ‘re-train’, clearly show the administration’s priorities when it comes to supporting the arts at this time. I know that my father would have had a great deal to say about this. So you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during lockdown! I will be posting regularly.John Berger and Peter’s relationship was fascinating spanned decades and was built on the foundations of true art criticism lived out in an emotional and personal dynamic. Their correspondences remain the most passionate, compelling, engage and moving letters I have ever read. This essay Seeing Berger for obvious reasons signaled a change in their relationship as the son took aim at the father.

SEEING BERGER
by Peter Fuller

In their recent polemic against Ways of Seeing, the authors of Art-Language write, ‘It might be argued that Ways of Seeing has already been dispensed with, that it is obvious to anyone worth talking to that it is a bad book.I can only suppose that I am not worth talking to. Ways of Seeing has had a decisive and continuing effect on my development as a critic. The book and programmes taken together had, I think, a greater influence than any other art critical project of the last decade.

Ways Of Seeing by Mike Dibb starring John Berger — *Ways Of Seeing* by Mike Dibb starring John Berger

Of course, I am not trying to project Berger beyond criticism. But before I outline my reservations concerning Ways of Seeing, I want to say something about the relationship of my work to Berger’s.2 Berger once wrote of Frederick Antal, the art historian: ‘More than any other man (he) taught me how to write about art.’3 What Berger said of Antal, I can say of him: more than any other man, he taught me how to write about art. It is as simple and as complex as that. I have never been Berger’s pupil in any formal sense nor did I study his work and extract from it any theory, formula, or ‘method’. Rather Berger taught me how to learn to know and to see for myself.

Today, the art world pullulates with self-acclaimed ‘political’ practitioners. It is not easy for us to imagine what things were like in 1951 when Berger began to write his weekly column in the New Statesman. This was the time of the Cold War, of anti-Marxist witch-hunts and hysteria. By bearing witness as a Marxist commentator on art, Berger invited vilification which he received in no uncertain measure. Stephen Spender, for one, unforgivably compared Berger’s first novel, A Painter of Our Time, with Goebbel’s Michael.4 Today, of course, Berger is criticised from his ‘left’ as much as from the right. Art-Language'?, incoherent and illiterate tirade against Berger sneers again and again at his ‘sensitivity’ (as if that were some sort of crime) and accuses him of ‘anti-working class poesy’, ‘immanently empty apologetics for the dominance of bourgeois pseudo-thought’, and so on, and so forth, through 123 barren pages. I respect Berger, however, because he has borne consistent testimony to a possible future other than a capitalist one, and to the fact that great art, authentic and uncompromised art, can contribute to our vision of that future by increasing ‘our awareness of our potentiality’.5 This testimony, however, is not always easily reconcilable with some of the central theses of Ways of Seeing.

Ways of Seeing is really the only one of Berger’s books in which he spells out anything approaching a ‘theory of art’, and also provides an overview of the Western tradition. The bulk of Berger’s contribution on art is neither aesthetics, nor art history, but practical criticism, i.e. his evaluative reflections upon his experience of specific works of art. What then are the central theses of Ways of Seeing! Well, firstly that European oil painting involved a way of seeing the world that was indissolubly bound up with private property. The painting, for Berger, is first and foremost a thing that can be owned and sold; post-Renaissance pictorial conventions and connoisseurship are derivatives of the oil painting’s status as property. Although traditional aesthetics have in fact been rendered obsolete by the rise of the new mechanical means of producing and reproducing imagery, he argues, they are still perpetuated because of the painting’s continuing function in exchange and as property.

Now it should be said straight away that, in part, the value of Ways of Seeing was polemical - and that it therefore suffers from the limitations of polemics. Berger was consciously offering an alternative conception of art history to that promoted by Kenneth Clark in his book and television series, Civilization. Berger raised a series of ‘uncivilized’ questions about the social and economic functions of art which Clark studiously evaded. Berger did not accept that Western art history could be legitimately portrayed as a succession of isolated men of genius. He showed that by attending to what has been called ‘the totality of the average’, the tradition of painting since the Renaissance could be revealed as being pervaded by class specific and ideological elements, deriving from bourgeois social and property relations.

Peter Fuller

In the early 1970s, these were original and contentious emphases, the more so since they were elaborated not within the enclaves of the art world or the left, but through an award-winning television series and an eminently readable, popular, paperback book. But within the art world at least, the raising of such questions became more commonplace as the decade wore on. The impact of Ways of Seeing itself certainly had something to do with this. Whatever the causes, much officially sponsored art practice, an influential school of art history, and a great deal of art criticism, tended to reduce art to ideology, tout court. Today, therefore, I think it is more important to defend a materialist version of the kernel of truth within ‘bourgeois’ aesthetics than to support the rabid left idealism purveyed by many of those who are either monstrous off-spring of Ways of Seeing, or at least products of the same cultural, common ancestors.

But before I engage in such a defence, I want to stress that one central argument of Ways of Seeing has been established beyond question: from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, some sort of ‘special relationship’ existed between art and property. This ‘special relationship’ becomes almost self-evident when one attends to the tradition as a whole, and not just to its exceptional works. No one has ever refuted this argument - and Berger may therefore be said to have delivered an historic blow to the self-conception of ‘civilized’ man. He has confirmed his own assertion: ‘We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is.’6

As it happens, I think that some of the ways in which Berger describes and defines this ‘special relationship’ will require modification and revision. Berger is, of course, largely concerned with works painted before the beginning of this century; even so, I do not think he gives sufficient weight to what has been in recent years a real movement of works of art from the private to the public domain. Nonetheless, the problematic relationship persists. I came to realise just how strong it still is when, in 1975, I assisted Hugh Jenkins, then Minister of Arts, in his struggle to ensure that the proposed universal Wealth Tax was applied to works of art - with special arrangements for those works on public exhibition. Such a measure would have greatly increased access to what is often called (by those who wish to keep it to themselves), ‘The National Heritage’. In pursuing these goals, I was, of course, strongly influenced by Ways of Seeing. The sort of hysterical, irrational opposition which I encountered from the dealer-collector lobby, led by Hugh Leggatt, Denis Mahon, and Andrew Faulds, M.P., was quite unlike that provoked by any of the aesthetic battles in which I have been involved. These events confirmed for me the truth of the central argument of Ways of Seeing. Berger’s insights into the ‘special relationship’ between art and property should not be relinquished until that relationship has itself been dissolved through the historical process.

Having said this, however, I must add that I do not think this political-economic dimension provides the only, or even the most rewarding, avenue of approach to works of art of the past. And, indeed, it is not that ‘special relationship’ which forms the subject of this critique of Ways of Seeing. My own view is that art practice and aesthetics, even in the grand era of oil painting, were not mere derivatives or epiphenomena of the work of art’s function as property. Indeed, the greater the work of art, the less it seems to be reducible to the ideology of its own time. Paradoxically, I believe that Berger’s practice as a critic, both before and after Ways of Seeing, simply assumes this point - even though Ways of Seeing (despite the fact that it attempts an overview) offers no explanation of it. Thus Berger has written numerous essays, of great brilliance, on painters from Vermeer to Monet which have not assumed that the fundamental fact of the artist’s vision and practice was a relationship to property. This should, perhaps, have caused one to question some of the arguments of Ways of Seeing. But to make this point more clearly, we now have to turn to the text itself.

Early in the book, Berger discusses the way in which learned assumptions people hold about art concerning concepts like beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc., mystify the art of the past for them. Thus he puts the constituent elements of bourgeois aesthetics into the wastepaper basket. They mystify, he says, because ‘a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms.’7 Thus bourgeois aesthetics are no longer of value because, the argument goes, the original authority of oil paintings (which had to do with their uniqueness and particular location) has been shattered by the development of a new technology: the various mechanical means of reproduction. (This is what I call elsewhere the 'mega-visual tradition’.8) But before he explores the effects of the rise of photography and mechanical reproduction on the way we see oil paintings, Berger gives a specific example of this process of anachronistic mystification.

He cites the way a typical academic art-historical scholar discusses Hals’ last two major paintings which portray the Governors and Governesses, respectively, of an alms house for old paupers. Berger reminds us that these were official portraits made when Hals, over 80 years old, was destitute. Those who sat for him were administrators of the public charity upon which he depended.

I want to scrutinise Berger’s discussion here. Although the academic art historian recorded the facts of Hals’ situation, he also insisted that it would be incorrect to read into the paintings any criticism of the sitters. There is no evidence, the academic says, that Hals painted them in a spirit of bitterness. He then goes on to say that they are remarkable works of art and explains why. Basically, for the academic, it is compositional elements that count. He stresses such things as the ‘firm rhythmical arrangement’ of the figures and ‘the subdued diagonal pattern formed by their heads and hands’. Berger complains that the art historian’s method transfers emotion provoked by the image from the plane of lived experience to that of disinterested ‘art appreciation’. Insofar as the art historian refers to the relationship between Hals’ painting and experience beyond the experience of art, it is in terms of Hals’ enrichment of ‘our consciousness of our fellow men’ and the close view which he gives of ‘life’s vital forces’. This says Berger is mystification: ‘One is left with the unchanging “human condition”, and the painting considered as a marvellously made object.’

Against such a reading, Berger poses what he describes in a revealing phrase as ‘the evidence of the paintings themselves’, which, he argues, renders unequivocally clear the painter’s relationship to his sitters. What is that evidence for Berger? Through reproductions he isolates the faces of three of the sitters: their expressions are allowed to speak for themselves. The academic, too, was aware of the power of these expressions, but he denied what they said. Thus he wrote about the way in which 'the penetrating characterisations’ almost ‘seduce’ us into believing that we know the personality and even the habits of the men and women portrayed. But, Berger retorts, what is this ‘seduction’ but the paintings working upon us?

How do the paintings work upon us? Berger explains:

They work upon us because we accept the way Hals saw his sitters. We do not accept this innocently. We accept it in so far as it corresponds to our own observation of people, gestures, faces institutions. This is possible because we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values.

Thus Berger says Hals examines the Regent and Regentesses ‘through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e. must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper’. This rather than the juxtaposition of white and flesh tones, he says, is the ‘unforgettable contrast’ which provides the drama of these paintings.9

Here we have two opposed ways of accounting for essentially the same judgement, i.e. that these are powerful paintings which have a profound effect upon us if we attend to them. The bourgeois academic stresses the importance of formal, aesthetic and compositional elements and also the relationship between the work and culturally constant elements of human experience - ‘life’s vital forces’. Berger stresses historically specific ‘meaning’ and the fact that the painting has been constituted through particular signifying practices - observations of gesture, faces, institutions, etc., meaningful to us only because we share comparable social relations.

Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, Frans Hals — *Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House,* Frans Hals

One reason why I am no longer prepared to decide as unequivocally in favour of Berger as I once was is that in order to refute the ‘mystifications’ of the academic’s bourgeois aesthetics he appeals convincingly to the authority of the paintings themselves, which he reveals through reproduction of photographic details. Yet it is precisely this authority which, he maintains, modern mechanical means of reproduction - like photographs of details in art books - have shattered. Berger seems aware of this contradiction. He argues that the authority of the Hals paintings is not absolute or trans-historical. These pictures are accessible to us only because we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values. Hals was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism. We, of course, still live in a capitalist society and so the meaning of these works is accessible to us.

But there is a serious contradiction here, too, because Berger goes on to argue that ‘today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.’ Ways of Seeing claims that later capitalism, monopoly capitalism, has so transformed perception that it is quite unlike that to which the old bourgeois aesthetic and art practice appealed. But if this is the case, then it is no use also saying that we can appreciate Hals’ paintings because our socially conditioned ‘ways of seeing’ are very much the same as those of the artist.

Clearly there is something missing from Berger’s account. Similarly, although it is of course pervaded by ideology, I do not think the academic’s account is reducible to ideology: by treating it as such, Berger comes close to throwing out the baby with the bath-water. One of the strengths of what the academic says is his attendance to the material facts of the way in which the picture has been painted. Indeed, through such attendance the academic was propelled towards conclusions at odds with the ideological preconceptions he brought to the work. That, surely, is why he reports a feeling of ‘seduction’, of the paintings working upon him, and why he feels the need to engage in all the special pleading to ‘prove’ that one of the good bourgeois governors was not drunk.

Peter Fuller

Berger says that the paintings work upon us directly through Hals’ way of seeing. There were probably many beggars in 17th century Haarlem who, if invited to paint portraits of these governors and governesses, would have seen them much as Hals did. But one is entitled to doubt whether many, if any, could have painted them anything like as well. A way of seeing is not, of itself, a way of painting. This is not a trivial or insubstantial quibble, nor just a matter of words. Berger really has nothing to say about Hals’ way of painting at all. But the bourgeois academic, albeit in a mystified fashion, recognises painting as a material process.

Of course, the academic’s ideology inhibited him from a full response to what he experienced as the paintings’ ‘seduction’. He falls back on the beauty of the paintings as objects in a way which elides that which they signify. But he does not talk about these works in complete isolation from experience beyond the experience of art. He speaks about their power in relation to what he assumes to be an ahistorical human condition. Berger dismisses this position, but perhaps there is more in it that he allows. As we saw, Berger suggested the ‘expressions’ in Hals were accessible to us because we, too, lived in a capitalist society. How then are we to explain, say, our powerful responses to the sculpture of the Laocoon, or Griinewald’s crucified Jesus? There are many works of art which come from societies where quite different ‘social relations and moral values’ prevail but which nonetheless move us powerfully and are expressive for us.

I do not think it is enough just to brush aside talk about ‘life’s vital forces’, or whatever. We have rather to stand such idealism on its head and reveal its material basis. And the kernel of truth embedded within it is that, despite historical transformations and mediations, there is a resilient, underlying ‘human condition’ which is determined by our biological rather than our socio-economic being, by our place in nature rather than our place in history. As the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro, has said, ‘cultural continuity’ through which, as Marx observed, we feel so near to the poetry of Homer, has been rendered possible, among other reasons, by the fact that man as a biological being has remained essentially unchanged from the beginnings of civilization to the present and those sentiments and representations which are closest to the biological facts of human existence have changed little.11

A significant component in the capacity of the Hals’ paintings to move us derives from the way in which they are expressive of such ‘relative constants’ as old age (manifested through loosening of the flesh, thinning of the lips, hollowing of the eye-sockets, etc.) and the physical manifestations of power, drunkenness, arrogance and disdain. Such things are not peculiar to the emergent capitalism of the 17th century Holland, nor, I suggest, will they be unknown under socialism. This observation does not negate Berger’s reading that Hals shows us the new characters created by capitalism.

Elsewhere in Ways of Seeing Berger seems to recognize the significance of this relatively constant underlying human condition when he writes that in non-European traditions, for example in Indian, Persian and Pre-Columbian art, female nakedness is ‘never supine’ as he considers it to be in the Western fine art tradition. Berger says that if, in the non-European traditions, ‘the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other’. Now Berger of course comes from a society in which ‘social relations and moral values’ are quite distinct from those prevailing in, say, ancient Persia. However he is able to make this judgement on the ‘evidence’ of the three works of art he illustrates because (whatever he says in the section on Hals) he in fact assumes an underlying human condition, embracing definite characteristics and potentialities, in this case the potentiality for reciprocal sexual love, which is not culture-specific; moreover he also appears to recognize that widely diverse sets of artistic conventions, e.g. those of Persian miniature painting and Pre-Columbian sculpture, can nonetheless be expressive of this, same area of experience in ways which are immediately accessible, indeed transparent, to those who live in a modern capitalist society.

Mithuna Couple, 1340 — *Mithuna Couple*, 1340

The problem with Berger’s account of the Hals paintings is that he lacks a fully materialist theory of expression. I see expression as involving the imaginative and physical activity of a human subject who carries out transforming work upon specific materials (in which I include both historically given pictorial conventions and, of course, such physical materials as paint, supporting surface, etc.). Expression through painting is thus in itself a specific material process: indeed, it is only through this process that the artist’s way of seeing, and beyond that of course his whole imaginative conception of his world, is made concretely visible to us. We know nothing of his way of seeing apart from that process. Max Raphael grasped this when he wrote:

Art is an ever-renewed creative art, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man’s creative powers in crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.

This is a long way from the kind of ‘signifying practices’ approach which Berger deploys in relation to the Hals paintings; indeed, it has more in common with the bourgeois academic’s emphasis on composition and ‘life’s vital forces’. But I do not think that Raphael’s formulation betrays his position as either Marxist, materialist or empiricist.

Enough of Hals paintings. It could be said, however, that the remainder of Ways of Seeing is a sustained assault on the validity of the bourgeois academic art historian’s approach and on the bourgeois aesthetics he espouses. Berger’s argument is that aesthetics based on attendance to ‘beautifully made objects’ and the ‘unchanging human condition’ are of no value because ways of seeing have been utterly changed by the development of mechanical means of producing and reproducing images. Thus he contrasts the way in which perspective tended to make the world converge on a human subject with that process of decentering seemingly initiated by the camera, which demonstrated how ‘What you saw depended upon where you were and when. What you saw was relative to your position in time and space.’14

The invention of the camera, Berger claims, ‘also changed the way in which men saw paintings painted long before the camera was invented’. The camera destroyed the way a painting belonged to a particular place. ‘When the camera reproduces a painting’, he writes, ‘it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.’15

The academic art historians mystify because they act as if that change had not come about - even when they themselves make use of the new means of production and reproduction, for example through popular art books or television. Thus Berger calls them, ‘the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline’, not before the proletariat, but before the new power of the corporation and the state. Berger turns a blow torch upon that tenuous but central category of bourgeois aesthetics: authenticity. This, he argues, is an obsolete category in an era of mass reproduction. ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place is a language of images.’ This is because, ‘In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored.’16

In this situation, Berger argues, it is no longer what a painting’s image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is. And what is it? Certainly not for the Berger of Ways of Seeing a crystalline suspension of creative powers. Berger insists, ‘before they are anything else, (paintings) are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. Unique objects.’ Objects whose value depends upon rarity and is ‘affirmed and gauged’ by market price.17

And so, Berger says, the attempt to erect spiritual values upon works of art is quite bogus. It is a by-product of the high market price of the painting as unique object - nothing more. Thus he reduces the notion of ‘authenticity’ to that authentication, or identification on behalf of the market - the sort of thing carried out by Sotheby’s assistants. ‘If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.’18

So, for Berger, the art of the past does not exist any more as it once did: instead, there is on the one hand, the world of bourgeois aesthetics which mystifies its concern with art-as- property into a wholly bogus religiosity; and, on the other, this ‘language of images’ created by the new means of reproduction. What matters now, Berger argues, is ‘who uses that language’ and ‘for what purpose’.19

Now I hope you will see why I placed so much emphasis on the lacunae in Berger’s account of the power of the Hals paintings. His lack of a materialist theory of expression leads him to talk about meaning slipping in and out of paintings in the way that an image slips on (or off) a light-sensitive film. Indeed, Berger uses the word ‘image’ to refer both to paintings and to photographs: but this disguises the fact that they are very different sorts of thing.

Photography is much closer to being a mechanical record of a way of seeing than painting. The photographer can freeze a moment of vision with the suddenness with which the window cut off the shadow of Peter Pan. Photography is merely process, a true medium. The image slides into the camera as the spirit is supposed to slip into a medium during a spiritualist seance. But painting is not like this at all. It requires a prior imaginative conception, which is not given, but made real, through the exercise of human activity, i.e. transforming work upon materials, conventional and physical. A painting is constituted, not processed. A painting is thus the material embodiment of an artist’s expressive activity in a way which a photograph is not. The Victorian view that photography, whatever it is, is not an art is by no means as silly as the photographic apologists like to make out.

And so when we make a photographic reproduction of a painting, the nature of the original is not wholly assimilated into the copy; nor can we regard the original, as Berger seems to do, as just a drained residue from which all that is of value, other than commercial value, has been detached. The reproduction refers back to an absent original. Aspects of the worked human object remain visible through the passivity of the photographic process. In New York recently I saw an exhibition of Rockefeller’s technically ‘perfect’ reproductions of his painting collection. You could buy, for example, Picasso’s Girl with Mandolin for $850, a reproduction, that is, in Cibachrome.20 But the contradiction between the flat, synthetic smoothness of the surfaces, and those of originals, reminded me that chemical and mechanical processes in and of themselves are neither imaginative nor expressive, however well (or badly) they may be able to reproduce products of the creative activity of human subjects.

Of course, we can look at reproductions assuming that they are the same sort of thing as originals. The mega-visual tradition of monopoly capitalism conditions us towards this way of seeing; one can even view originals made long before the advent of monopoly capitalism in this way. Many late modernist artists actually produce paintings or other ‘works of art’ which are in fact like reproductions.21 But I would argue that this occlusion of aesthetic sensitivity is itself ideologically determined; it involves capitulation to a reductionist way of seeing peculiar to the culture of the prevailing economic order.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: La Grande Odalisque

In certain respects Ways of Seeing may be infected by this way of seeing. Through the concept of a ‘language of images’ the book effectively equates photographs and paintings. This is underlined by poor reproductions - much poorer than the average popular art book - in which few of those aspects of originals I have described are even remotely discernible. For example, Berger juxtaposes the expression on the face of an Ingres nude with a detail from a modern pin-up, glamour photo.23 On the page, the equation looks just. Now I am no great admirer of Ingres. Nonetheless, Ways of Seeing leaves out of account, visually and verbally, the radical differences between the two images. I would not dispute that Ingres’ paintings often contain elements of sexism. But the painstaking, imaginative and constitutive activity involved in the production of his odalisques cannot be reduced to the cynical, commercial voyeurism of glamour photography. Ingres did not pose his models and click the shutter. Even when the images are roughly equivalent, a painting, or drawing, of a naked woman implies a greater respect towards her, as a person, than a photograph. If Berger had juxtaposed his pin-up with the original, or even beside a good reproduction of Ingres, this would have been evident. Whatever our judgement on Ingres, we travesty him if we suggest that he was simply producing aids to masturbation.

Berger is unwittingly guilty of a kind of left idealism, a dissolution of painting into a chimerical world where images have no existence apart from an ideological existence. This is reflected in his view of the nature of the original after its meaning has been, according to his argument, stripped from it through the new means of mechanical reproduction. Berger sees the original as being only a social relation, i.e. a piece of property: spiritual or aesthetic values are, in his view, just a sort of golden halo, or monetary after-glow, wholly determined by a work’s property status. Thus he attacks the oil-painting medium as such for its inherent materialism, which he equates with bourgeois proprietorial values. He says that in Western oil-painting, ‘when metaphysical symbols are introduced... their symbolism is usually made unconvincing or unnatural by the unequivocal, static materialism of the painting method.’24 This he says is what makes the ‘average religious painting of the tradition appear hypocritical’. The claim of the theme is made empty by the way the subject is painted.

As an example, he reproduces three paintings of Mary Magdalene. He says that the point of her story is that she repented on her past and came to accept the mortality of flesh and the immortality of soul. But, for Berger, oil paint ‘contradicts the essence of this story’. The method of painting is incapable of making the renunciation she is meant to have made. Berger says, ‘She is painted as being, before she is anything else, a takeable and desirable woman. She is still the compliant object of the painting-method’s seduction.’251 have no wish to exonerate that sickly, Christian voyeurism which often enters into paintings of the Magdalene. However, Berger gives no weight whatever to the way the painting method demystifies the Magdalene story, it reveals, if you like, that her repentance was not what she took it to be, because immortality of the soul is not possible for us fleshy mortals whose being is limited by natural conditions, including the absolute finality of an inevitable death without resurrection. There was, if you like, a truthfulness inherent within the painting method which ruptured the religious ideology of the theme. More generally it might be said that oil painting played a significant part in the extrication of man’s selfconception from mystifying religious ideologies.

The Bathers, Gustave Courbet — The Bathers, *Gustave Courbet*

Take the case of Courbet. Perhaps to a greater degree than any other painter, he manifests the materialism and concrete sensuality of this medium. But it is worth reminding ourselves how abrasive Courbet’s paintings were to prevailing bourgeois ‘visual ideologies’. Similarly, although the fat, naked woman in The Bathers is so corporeal that one can almost feel the smothering weight of her flesh, she is neither takeable, nor desirable - nor was she intended to be either. Writing about Courbet outside Ways of Seeing, Berger has convincingly related the intense physicality of his paintings to his peasant perceptions. There is no simple or necessary correlation between materialism, oil painting, and bourgeois attitudes towards property.

The realism of Western oil-painting was, however, certainly one of the ways in which men and women began to conceive of themselves in their own image, rather than God’s. Ways of Seeing castigates the materialism of this new world view: but I see it as having been historically progressive, and not only in the sense that it formed part of the ideology of what was then a historically progressive class.27 However, I am certainly not advocating a mechanical realism, or vulgar verism, as such. I would suggest that, in its very sensuality, oil painting helped to initiate an unprecedented form of imaginative, creative, yet thoroughly secular art which (though initiated by the bourgeoisie) represents a genuine advance in the cultural structuring of feeling and expressive potentiality.

Ways of Seeing makes no mention of the great romantic painters, nor yet of post-impressionism, nor of any abstract painting. But now can Delacroix, oauguin, or Rothko be accommodated within its theses? It is not just that paintings like these are so manifestly not reducible to their reproductions: their spiritual and aesthetic values too are clearly not just penumbra of their value in exchange. Man had mingled his emotional and affective life in his religious projections: oil painting was part of the process of his return to himself, or his first finding of himself. With that first finding came the emergence of a secular spirituality, based on growing awareness of the nature of the human subject and imaginative experience. The identification of the category of the aesthetic as such in the 18th century was not an ideological lie, or a fraud: it was part of this process. In his essay on Surrealism, Walter Benjamin once remarked, ‘the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration ,..28 Profane illumination! A materialistic, anthropological inspiration! These are resonant phrases. They accurately describe what I value in Gauguin, Bonnard, or Natkin. I would suggest that any adequate ‘demystification’ of bourgeois aesthetics, having completed its discussion in terms of ideology, property values, sexism, etc. must retain an emphasis upon this vital, positive residue of sensuous mystery. This remains accessible to us as viewers through that mingling of imaginative and physical expressive work upon the surface, that material transformation by a specific human subject, which decisively and concretely differentiates the work of art from mechanically produced images. To hark back to Max Raphael, you just cannot say that the photograph, as photograph, holds man’s creative powers in crystalline suspension.

It is perhaps predictable that Ways of Seeing has nothing to say about sculpture. But if we think about sculpture for a moment the point I am making becomes clearer. Sculpture just will not disappear without residue into that ‘language of images’; a photograph of a sculpture unequivocally refers back to an original other than itself. Nor can anyone pretend that an eight inch soap-stone maquette of a great Greek marble provides anything even approximating the experience to be derived from the work itself. Marble, clay, steel and bronze are even more inherently materialist than oil paint. Yet who would contend that sculpture is a peculiarly bourgeois practice? The value of sculpture derives from elements of human being and experience which are, as it were, below ideology. Sculpture relates to our existence in a physical world of concrete, three dimensional objects in space; and to the fact that we live within the natural constraints of that relative constant of human being - the body with its not unlimited potentialities. Although painting involves a greater ideological component than sculpture, the condition of painting is more like that of sculpture than, say, photography.

Henry Moore: Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 2.

I do not want to travesty Berger’s argument: there are moments in Ways of Seeing when he recognizes the disjunc- ture between oil painting and photography. For example, in the first chapter, he writes: ‘Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is.’ He points out that, ‘the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures’, and then suggests that this ‘has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.’ I agree. And yet, in Ways of Seeing, this critical observation is no more than an aside, which seems not to fit in with the main argument.

The question of the exceptions, or masterpieces, further illuminates the weakness of that argument. Berger’s central thesis is that: ‘A way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual form.’ The oil painting, for Berger, is ‘not so much a framed window open to the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited’. And yet, having said this, Berger argues that certain exceptional artists in exceptional circumstances broke free of the norms of the tradition and produced work that was diametrically opposed to its values: thus he does not - and this is important - reduce the best of Vermeer, Turner, Rubens, or Goya to ideology.

But what is the relationship of these ‘transcendent’ masterpieces to the tradition within which they arise? How do they make the decisive and transforming if oil painting is, as Berger claims, a by-product of the bourgeois way of seeing the world? It is no use looking to Ways of Seeing for an answer to these questions. In a 1978 article, Berger wrote that the ‘immense theoretical weakness’ of Ways of Seeing was that he had failed to make clear ‘what relation exists between what I call “the exception” (the genius) and the normative tradition’. He added, ‘It is at this point that work needs to be done.’

Two years later, this problem is still clearly haunting Berger. In a review he wrote in 1980 of a book about paintings of the rural poor, Berger asks ‘Poussin relayed an aristocratic arcadianism, yes, but why was he a greater painter than any considered here?’ I think that if we re-insert materialism in the sense that I have tried to understand it in this paper, we can at least begin to talk in terms of where to look for an answer. Acknowledgement of the ‘relative constancy’ of the bodily being and potentialities of human subjects and of the fact that painting and sculpture are specific material processes (including biological processes) involving imaginative and physical work on both conventional and substantial materials allows us to establish a more secure basis for a genuinely materialist theory of artistic expression.

But, in the light of such a theory, I am sure that the over-sharp distinction between transcendent masterpieces which leap beyond ideology, and examples of the normative tradition which remain blinkered by it will be seen to be much too dualistic. Again, Berger himself seems recently to have recognised this. In the 1978 article from which I have already quoted, Berger writes, ‘The refusal of comparative judgements about art ultimately derives from a lack of belief in the purpose of art.’32 He goes on to acknowledge that there are values in art which stand apart from ideology, and furthermore that these can be weighed by a process of preferential judgement, of qualifying ‘X as better than Y’. But once you admit this, of course, you are sneaking aesthetics in by the back-door, even if you first booted them noisily out of the front door. This process of judging X better than Y just cannot be confined to labelling which are the masterpieces, and which examples of the normative tradition. The everyday tasks of criticism involve discrimination between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements in ‘average’ works, and between often unexceptional paintings relatively evenly matched in terms of quality. There is an infinite gradation between inept hack work, say by a Stockwell sculptor like Peter Hide, and the masterpiece, by, say, Michelangelo. Comparative judgements, aesthetic judgements, can be made all the way along this incline. In effect, the making of such judgements is the continuing search for authenticity of expression: although it has often been corrupted by base commercial motives, and distorted by overt and covert commitments to specific visual ideologies, I nonetheless refuse to allow that this way of looking is - to use Berger’s phrase - ‘ultimately determined by new attitudes to property’. Indeed, its material basis seems to me to be of a kind which will, one hopes, endure beyond the abolition of property. The making of such judgements is integral to the nature of the experience which painting and sculpture have to offer in a secular society. It is precisely this experience which I am seeking to defend. I can see no reason why, as a socialist, I should prefer the mechanical visual media, with their very different potentialities and limitations.

But here we must pause. I am saying that painting and sculpture are expressive of areas of experience and potentiality which are long-lasting in human history. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that painting and sculpture are threatened today. In recent monopoly capitalism, the mega-visual tradition (of advertising, cinema, mass-reproduction, colour printing, etc.) proliferates: its media, processes and spectacles have tended to displace or to subsume the very different kinds of practice possible through painting and sculpture.331 do not think this is merely a technical question. The occlusion of painting and sculpture involves the eclipse of significant values. I am interested in conserving these traditional media and those values.

However, there are many commentators on the left who go to Ways of Seeing and condemn it for what they perceive as its residues of bourgeois aesthetics. That is why Art- Language derided Berger for his residual ‘sensitivity’. Other ‘left’ critics have criticised Ways of Seeing for refusing to carry through the logic of the ‘language of images’ approach to the point where the distinction between the photograph and the painting disappeared entirely into discussion of technique; and for retaining the residue of a qualitative distinction between the masterpiece and the rest, and so forth. In these sorts of reading, Berger is characterized as a sort of simple-minded, proto-structuralist, with unfortunate ‘unscientific’, anachronistic elements which have now been dispensed with in the streamlined, fully ‘scientific’ systems of Victor Burgin and Nicos Hadjinicolau.

And indeed there is a sense in which Hadjinicolau’s book, Art History and Class Struggle, can be read as a more rigorous (or perhaps ‘insensitive’) Ways of Seeing. Hadjinicolau claims to have dispensed with aesthetics and value judgements altogether and to have cast them into ‘oblivion’. He explains away aesthetic effect as being merely the mirroring between an artist’s visual ideology and the ideology of a viewer. He even goes so far as to argue that there is no such thing as an artist’s ‘style’ because pictures produced by one person are not centred upon him; at least, not in any sense which is significant for art history. For Hadjinicolau, ‘the essence of every picture lies in its visual ideology’. He sees his task as that of relating visual ideologies to the particular class sectors from which they sprang - no more and no less.34

I have commented on Hadjinicolau’s position elsewhere.35 Here it is only necessary to repeat that he, and those like him, think that they are radicals, hard-headed socialists producing a devastating critique of bourgeois art. In fact, however, they are merely theorising with a left gloss that way of seeing which is so characteristic of late monopoly capitalism. I have demonstrated that Hadjinicolau looks at paintings as if they were advertisements. In the advertisement, the artist’s style has indeed been eliminated since the image is corporately conceived and mechanically executed. It lacks any stamp of individuality. In advertisements, the imaginative faculty is prostituted and aesthetic effect reduced to a redundant contingency. The advertisement is constituted wholly within ideology; moreover, advertising is the form of static visual imagery, par excellence, of contemporary monopoly capitalism.

Understandably, when he saw Hadjinicolau’s book, Berger was troubled. In his review of it, he mentions that it took him more than six months to come to terms with his reactions to it.36 It was in this review that Berger found it necessary to point to the ‘immense theoretical weakness’ of Ways of Seeing, to reaffirm the value of making comparative judgements about paintings, and to quote Max Raphael’s empiricist theory of art. In Hadjinicolau’s theory, Berger wrote, ‘the real experience of looking at painting has been eliminated’:

When Hadjinicolau ... equates the visual ideology of Madame Recamier with that of a portrait by Girodet, one realises that the visual content to which he is referring goes on deeper than the mise-en-scene. The correspondence is at the level of clothes, furniture, hair-style, gesture, pose: at the level, if you wish, of manners and appearances!

... But no painting of value is about appearance: it is about a totality of which the visible is no more than a code. And in the face of such paintings the theory of visual ideology is helpless

It is true that, six years before, Berger argued that the power of those Hals paintings derived from the fact that Hals enabled us to know his subjects; nonetheless, Berger explained this by something very similar to Hadjinicolau’s reduction of aesthetic effect into ideological mirroring. He claimed that we were able to appreciate these paintings only because we lived in a society of 'comparable social relations and moral values’.

Berger now warns that the path pursued by Hadjinicolau and his colleagues appears ‘self-defeating and retrograde’, leading back to a reductionism not dissimilar in degree to Zhdanov’s and Stalin’s. He points out that Hadjinicolau’s theory has elements in common with advertising in that both ‘eliminate art as a potential model of freedom’. But did not Ways of Seeing itself greatly over-stress the continuity between the Western oil painting tradition and modern advertising? After all, advertising produces no exceptions, no Rembrandts, no masterpieces, no works of genius: no advertisement ever exulted anyone, or made them aware of any but their most trivial of potentialities. Advertising, and not original painting, is always inauthentic.

In the course of this review, Berger asks what it is about certain works of art which allows them to transcend the moment in which they were made, ‘to “receive” different interpretations and continue to offer a mystery’. He adds that Hadjinicolau would consider the last word - ‘mystery’ - unscientific, but says that he does not. The problem with Ways of Seeing, however, was that it dismissed bourgeois aesthetics as ‘mystification’ and expelled its concerns - i.e. the material process of painting and composition and the relationship of art to ‘life’s vital forces’ - from the terrain of permissible left discourse about art. But, when Berger gazed into the grey reductionism of Hadjinicolau, it was precisely these ‘mystifications’ which he sought to re-introduce. Thus, in this review, he approvingly cites Max Raphael’s view that the power of historically transcendent paintings should be sought in the process of production itself: the power of such paintings, as he put it, ‘lay in their painting’. Similarly, Berger writes of the ‘incomparable energy’ which comes from this process of working the materials. Works of art, he goes on to say, ‘exist in the same sense that a current exists: it cannot exist without substances and yet it is not itself a simple substance.’38 Clearly, that bourgeois academic was not so foolish in his concerns.

The point I have been stressing throughout is that it is not enough to refuse to engage with bourgeois aesthetics, to dismiss them as if they were ideological figments and nothing else. One has rather to do to them what Feuerbach did to Christianity: reveal their material basis in the imaginative activity of an embodied human subject who realizes his expression through transforming work which he exercises to greater or lesser effect upon definite conventional and physical materials; that is, through a so-called ‘medium’ which possesses an identifiable history and tradition. In this way, I think we can begin at least to talk coherently about what Berger refers to as the scientific ‘mystery’ of a great painting, or what Benjamin might have called its ‘profane illumination’, or ‘materialistic anthropological inspiration’. Such things, I would suggest, may be reproduced through, but cannot be reduced into, the proliferating means of mechanical reproduction.

Why did Berger not see this when he worked on Ways of Seeing? He was after all a painter himself. This makes it even harder to understand the reductionism of this text. In part, I think this derives from the symbiotic relationship between Ways of Seeing and Clark’s Civilization-, the whole Ways of Seeing project insists (and rightly so) on what Clark ignored. But it fails to take on board in a materialist fashion the positive theses of Civilization. One small example: Ways of Seeing makes no mention of the fact that, in Christopher Caudwell’s phrase, ‘great art ... has something universal, something timeless and enduring from age to age’.22 Yet, of course, this is something which Civilization stuffs down our throats on page after page. But there was a much more significant influence on Ways of Seeing than the negative effects of ‘the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline’. I am referring, oT course, to Walter Benjamin whose picture is reproduced at the end of the first chapter of Ways of Seeing, and particularly to his well-known essay, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

Benjamin was a fine critic and a great writer, but he was also a man of contradictions. His thought manifested what has been called a ‘two-track’ cast.39 Susan Sontag has pointed out how, in Benjamin’s work, ‘mystical and materialist motifs were distilled into separate writings, whose precise inter-relationship remained enigmatic, often exasperatingly so, to his secular and religious admirers alike’. Today, Benjamin is acclaimed as an ancestor by both talmudic mysticists and structuralists. As Sontag points out, it is not that there are two distinct phases in Benjamin’s work; when he became a Marxist and a historical materialist, there was no inward rupture with his earlier mysticism.

Similarly, in Benjamin’s attitudes to art there was a peculiar schizophrenia. In his ‘materialist’ writings, he welcomes the destruction of the aura of the work of art by modern technology. Yet, in fact, he was an aesthete, and a compulsive collector who frequented the great auction houses.

When we are considering any part of Benjamin’s work, I think we have to relate it to this uneven and eccentric whole. One way of talking about him is to say that his materialism was not sufficiently deep. Precisely because he knew that aesthetic (and religious) phenomena could not be explained in terms of economics and ideology alone, his writing tends to be pocketed with fascinating mystical enclaves, where that which is not explicable through historical materialism (as he understood it) continues to reside in its raw, numinous, mystical or aestheticist form. To adapt his own phrase, Benjamin developed his ‘profanity’ (through his Marxism); retained his religious ‘illumination’ but failed to progress to ‘profane illumination’. It is only if one’s materialism extends down to the biological level (and not just to the socioeconomic) that one can hope to approach an adequate account of the relatively ‘ahistorical’ aspects of the spiritual (i.e. aesthetic, religious, musical, and imaginative) life of man. Benjamin, however, over-relativized the somatic, for example when he exaggerates the effects of short-term ‘historical circumstances’ on ‘human sense perception’ and effectively ignores the relative constancy of the human perceptual apparatus. Because his materialism lacks a ‘ground floor’ in physical and biological reality, Benjamin (being ‘sensitive’ rather than ‘insensitive’) retains the old idealist categories of spirit in, as it were, sealed-off compartments.

The problem is that his followers in left aesthetics tend either to internalize this contradiction (as Berger does, for example, through the contrast between Ways of Seeing and the review of Art History and Class Struggle) or they go for the ‘profanity’ alone - that is for the ‘materialism’ which does not go deeper than the socio-economic level, and reject the rest altogether. Thus commentators like Victor Burgin copy (although they do not always acknowledge) Benjamin’s castigation of those who insist on the distinction between painting and photography as holding a ‘fetishistic and fundamentally anti-technical concept of art’. But really one can only understand the status of such comments in Benjamin if one realizes that, having written them, Benjamin turned once more to those first editions, baroque emblem books, and original antiques, which he acquired in great quantities, and which preoccupied him almost to the point of distraction. There was, of course, absolutely no question of Benjamin himself making do with photographic reproductions.

Benjamin began as an aesthetic philosopher who mourned the ‘passing of old traditions’, as they were displaced by modern technology and mass society. But later Benjamin came simply to identify aura, or the ‘aesthetic nimbus’ surrounding a work of art, with property. Mechanical reproduction, however, came to stand for him unequivocally on the side of proletarianisation. But clearly, Benjamin was also aware that something was lacking in these new media. He would suddenly revert to an old ‘aesthetist’ position, as if acknowledging that he had never been able to produce a true synthesis of the two.

Stanley Mitchell has pointed out how Benjamin’s attitude to the newspaper exemplifies this contradiction.44 In his well- known essay, ‘The Storyteller’, about the Russian writer, Leskov, Benjamin contrasts the self-containing powers of the story, that most ancient bearer of wisdom, with the mere giving-out of information that is par excellence the role of the newspaper. But, in his major article, ‘The Author as Producer’ - probably written before ‘The Storyteller’ - Benjamin describes the contemporary Soviet newspaper as ‘a vast melting-down process’ which ‘not only destroys the conventional separation between genres, between writer and poet, scholar and popularizer’ but ‘questions even the separation between author and reader’. The place ‘where the word is most debased’ - that is to say, the newspaper - becomes the very place where a ‘rescue operation can be mounted’ , Thus Benjamin saw ‘technical progress’ as the basis of the author’s ‘political progress’.46 He also liked to use the image of an ‘incandescent liquid mass’ into which the old bourgeois literary, musical and artistic forms were streaming, and out of which the new forms would be cast.

Well, the new forms which Benjamin anticipated have, of course, emerged. On the one hand, we have seen since the last war a profusion of mixed media objects and activities in such things as conceptualism, performance, environmental art, etc. All this has failed to produce a single work of stature, let alone a masterpiece. It can now be said with confidence that the claims made for such innovations were, at best, vastly exaggerated. More significantly, we have also seen the development of spectacular new devices for image-making in the mega-visual tradition. Think, say, of the hologram which allows for the creation of something quite unprecedented: a fully three-dimensional image in space.46 But the development of such techniques has not fulfilled Benjamin’s prophecy. It is not just that they have proved entirely consonant with, and readily exploitable by, a monopoly capitalist culture which seeks to distort and extinguish free imaginative and creative activity on the part of those who live within it. (Guinness, for example, was deeply involved in the funding of the development of holograms: no doubt one of the first commercial uses we will see of this technique will be 40 foot high, three-dimensional Guinness bottles suspended above the Thames.) Beyond that, the very process of making a hologram does not allow for the admission of a human imaginative or physically expressive element at any point. The representation is not worked; it is posed and processed. Hence the hologram remains a peculiarly dead phenomenon when compared with the painting. I am suggesting that if Benjamin had had a more thoroughly materialist theory of expression he would have foreseen this too. The ‘incomparable energy’ of the painting is bound up with the way it is I believe that, in this situation, it is the Benjamin who defended the storyteller, Leskov, who has most to teach us. Perhaps Berger now realizes this too. Ways of Seeing, you will recall, begins with a statement which says, ‘The form of the book is as much to do with our purpose as the arguments contained within it.’ That form used such techniques as al lvisual essays, unjustified type, ‘out-of-copyright’ text, arguments in images as well as words, etc. It was close to the form of certain books - The Medium is the Message, and War and Peace in the Global Village - which Marshall McLuhan published about the same time.48 Berger’s most recent book, however, is Pig Earth49 which consists of some faultlessly told stories about the life and experiences of peasants in France. Formally, these stories are not innovative: they draw upon the traditional skills of the ‘self-preserving, self-containing powers of the story’. But there are several stories in the book which I would describe as masterpieces. I do not think the aesthetic value or political significance (for reasons which are made clear in the ‘Historical Afterword’) of the collection is in doubt. Indeed, I think they confirm my conviction that there is no more significant writer working in English today than John Berger. And personally I do not look forward to the day in which the distinction between such greater writers and their public has been thoroughly dissolved into a press which is no more than an extended reader’s page (as Benjamin envisaged it). Nor do I look forward to the day when the museums which house the finest examples of the traditions of painting and sculpture have been replaced by pinboards of reproductions - which is what Ways of Seeing suggests should ‘logically’ happen.

Notes

1. Art-Language, Vol. 4 No. 3, October 1978.

2. This is something often commented upon by my polemical opponents: for example, Janet Daley has written of my alleged ‘unlimited adulation for John Berger’, ‘Letters’ Art Monthly, No. 12, November 1977 and Suzi Gablik has described me as ‘a disciple of John Berger’s’, ‘Art on the Capitalist Faultline’, Art in America, March 1980.

3. Selected Essays and Articles: the Look of Things, Harmond- sworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p.64. And see also, ‘In defence of art’, New Society, 28 September 1978, p.702.

4. For further discussion of the reception of A Painter see my article, ‘Berger’s Painter of Our Time', in Art Monthly, No. 4, February 1977, pp. 13-16. Here, I discuss the withdrawal of this book by its publishers, Seeker & Warburg, who were also publishers of the CIA backed magazine, Encounter, which ran a hostile attack upon A Painter. Berger often failed to get the support he deserved from those who published him: in the introduction to a new edition of Permanent Red - which consists largely of his New Statesman articles from the 1950’s - Berger writes of fighting for each article, ‘line by line, adjective by adjective, against constant editorial cavilling’, London: Writers & Readers, 1979, pp.8-9.

5. Permanent Red, p. 16.

6. Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. p. 109.

7. Ibid, p. 11.

8. ‘Fine Art after Modernism’, New Left Review, No. 119, January- February, 1980, pp.42-59.

9. Ways of Seeing, pp. 11-16.

10. ‘Timpanaro’s Materialist Challenge’, New Left Review, No. 109, May-June, 1978, pp.3-17.

Seeing Through Berger

11. On Materialism, London: New Left Books, 1975, p.52.

12. Ways of Seeing, p.53.

13. The Demands of Art, Princeton, 1968, p. 187.

14. Ways of Seeing, p. 18.

15. Ibid. p. 19.

16. Ibid. p.24.

17. Ibid. p.21.

18. Ibid. p.23.

19. Ibid. p.33.

20. The Nelson Rockefeller Collection, New York, 1978, Cat. No. 57.

21.1 have discussed this in my ‘Where was the art of the 1970’s?’ in Beyond the Crisis in Art, London: Writers & Readers, 1980.

22. This is not, of course, to posit aesthetics, as such, as a transhis- torical category, but rather to suggest that the aesthetic constitutes a historically specific structuring of relatively constant, of long- lasting, elements of affective experience. For example, it seems to me that prior to the 18th century, much of that which we designate as aesthetic experience was conflated with the numinous in religious experience. But this is not, of course, to say that the affective potentialities which inform the aesthetic are reducible to the ideology of religion, nor that they can be, or ought to be, swept away with secularization. Thus I disagree with Berger when he writes, ‘The spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society neither of these is a living force, the art object, the “work of art”, is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity.’ The material basis of the ‘spirituality’ of works of art is not so easily dissolved. I think that it may lie in their capacity to be expressive of ‘relative constants’ of psycho-biological experience, which, however they may be structured culturally, have roots below the ideological level.

23. Ways of Seeing, p.55.

24. Ibid. p.91.

25. Ibid. p.92.

26. In my article, ‘The Arnolfini Image’, New Society, 3, November 1977, p.249,1 examine one of the earliest of all oil-paintings in this light. It is perhaps worth stressing here that most culturally signifi

Seeing Through Berger 51

cant, post Second World War, late modernist paintings have not been painted in oils, but in fast-drying, more transparent, acrylic paints which allow for instantaneous, insubstantial, transparent and accidental effects - as in the painting of Morris Louis - which oils do not. Such works, however, (even though they may well reflect the prevailing idealism of monopoly capitalist ideology and epistemology) have proved, if anything, more, rather than less reducible to values which are merely reflections of market value. (Acrylic lays itself open to being used as a process - i.e. in pouring and staining techniques - rather than as a genuine aesthetic- expressive medium.) This is another reason why we should suspect Berger’s hostility to the materialism of oil paint, as such.

For example, Berger cites what he calls ‘the exceptional case’ of William Blake, who, according to Berger, ‘... when he came to make paintings .... very seldom used oil paint and, although he still relied upon the traditional conventions of drawing, he did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects.’ Berger claims that Blake’s wish ‘to transcend the “substantiality” of oil paint derived from a deep insight into the meaning and limitations of the tradition’: Ways of Seeing, p.93. Now as it happens I too enjoy the imaginative vision of Blake - although I perhaps do not think he was such a great painter as Berger suggests. Nonetheless, the way Blake painted, and the techniques he used, had much to do with that particular area of experience with which he was concerned. I think that essentially he was exploring inner or psychological space through religious imagery, much as a good abstract painter now explores it through the conventions of abstraction. (Cf. my comments on Robert Natkin’s painting in Art and Psychoanalysis, London: Writers and Readers, 1980.) Such explorations have, of course, no more resistance of being treated as pieces of property than have ‘materialist’ oil paintings. But if we set up Blake’s achievement as an epitome, or exemplar, we will certainly miss the progressive character of that escape from religious ideology, cosmology and iconography to which the main tradition of oil painting bore effective witness, at least in part because, as Berger points out, of its

Seeing Through Berger

‘materialism’.

27. Cf. Sebastiano Timpanaro: ‘The great realist art of the (19th) century (with its “verist” developments, which were not altogether a step backward) and the great science contemporary to it, with its Englightenment and humanitarian impetus, were not a mere “fraud”. Rather they possessed a positive force precisely because of the continued existence within the 19th century bourgeoisie of motifs related to the struggle against the right, and, at the same time, because of the continued existence of a measure of autonomy among progressive intellectuals in relation to the immediate class interests of the bourgeoisie.’ On Materialism, London: New Left Books, p. 125.

28. One Way Street, London: New Left Books, p.227.

29. Berger in fact introduces two photographs of sculpture - one Pre-Columbian, the other Indian - on p.53. It is noticeable that he compares these with Western oil paintings without commenting on the radical disjuncture between the two media. This is but another example of Ways of Seeing's disregard for the material process of making art.

30. Ways of Seeing, p. 109. My arguments at this point are informed by the perceptive and penetrating criticisms of Ways of Seeing made by Anthony Barnett as long ago as 1972. (See, ‘Oil Painting and its Class’, New Left Review, No. 80, July-August 1.973, pp.109- 11) This review is reproduced as an appendix to this pamphlet. It must, however, be pointed out that in a text of this brevity, Barnett had no space to elaborate a materialist theory of expression.

31. ‘In defence of art’, New Society, 28 September 1978, p.702.

32. Ibid. p.703.

33. For further discussion of these points see my article, ‘Fine Art after Modernism’, New Left Review, No. 119, January-February, 1980, pp.42-59.

34. Art History and Class Struggle, London: Pluto Press, 1978.

35. See note 21.

36. ‘In defence of art’, p.703.

37. Ibid. p.704.

38. Ibid. p.704.

39. One-Way Street, p.31.

40. Illuminations, London: Collins Fontana Books, 1973, p.224.

Seeing Through Berger

As Timpanaro comments, ‘I think that one can see how every failure to give proper recognition to man’s biological nature leads to a spiritualist resurgence, since one necessarily ends by ascribing to the “spirit” everything that one cannot explain in socioeconomic terms.’ On Materialism, p.65.

41. One-Way Street, p.241 Cf. Victor Burgin’s view, ‘Conceptualism ... disregarded the arbitrary and fetishistic restrictions which ‘Art’ placed on technology - the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud, the chipping apart of rocks and the sticking together of pipes - all in the name of timeless aesthetic values.’ In ‘Socialist Formalism’, Two Essays on Art, Photography and Semiotics, London: Robert Self, 1976.

42. Any one who doubts this should read the ending to ‘Unpacking My Library’, in Illuminations, and also Hannah Arendt’s introduction to this volume.

43. See ‘Introduction’ by Stanley Mitchell to Understanding Brecht, London: New Left Review Editions, 1977, p.xvii.

44. Ibid. pp.xvi-xvii.

45. Understanding Brecht, p.90.

46. See my article, ‘The light fantastic’, New Society, 26 January 1978, p.200.

47. Interestingly, Dennis Gabor, the inventor of the hologram, did not believe that his invention had rendered art obsolete. On the contrary, in his essay, ‘Art and leisure in the age of technology’, he writes, ‘Modern technology has taken away from the common man the joy in the work of his skilful hands; we must give it back to him. ’ He argued that although machines should be used to ‘make the articles of primary necessity’, the rest should be made by hand. ‘We must revive the artistic crafts, to produce things such as hand-cut glass, hand-painted china, Brussels lace, inlaid furniture, individual bookbinding,’ etc. In Jean Creedy, ed., The Social Context of Art, London: Tavistock, 1970, pp.45-55.

48. Of course, I do not intend to suggest that the ideas and arguments of Berger are as ephemeral as those of these books, nor yet that new forms in book-making can never be effective, or convincing. Berger’s study, made with photographer, Jean Mohr, of European immigrant workers, A Seventh Man„Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975, remains an exemplary achievement. The danger

Seeing Through Berger

arises when technical innovativeness is put forward as the only model of ‘political progress’ in literature or the arts.

49. London: Writers and Readers, 1979.

50. Ways of Seeing, p. 30.