The letters of John and Yves Berger on the nature of the art – and the art of nature

Halfway through YouThe painter Yves Berger recounts a meeting with university students interested in his creative process. Reunion, he believes, was a “failure”, partly because of the insufficient visual aid-photographs of three of his works at various stages of completion. The photographs “gave the impression of a linear process, as if the weather was an arrow, while the true experience we have made them of folds and folds inside the folds, sometimes touching.”

YouA collection of letters exchanged by Yves and his father between 2015 and 2016, artist and art critic John Berger (1926-2017), is close to giving us “the real experience” of time. In its pages, the paintings of different historical periods (all reproduced usefully in color) are called one to each other: Albrecht Last‘s Shabby (1508) “Wink (s)” at Max Beckmann Columbine (1950); Vincent Van Gogh Still life with the Bible (1885) responds to Rogier Van der Weyden The Annunciation (c. 1440); And the own watercolor of John Berger makes a head of the head to Andrea Della Robbia Madonna with four angels (c. 1480-1490). Throughout the book, the images are integrated into the letters. But towards the end, the words disappear, giving way to a visual test – a form that would be familiar to the readers of the famous book by John Berger of 1972 Ways. The visual test consists mainly of the alternating drawings of the two letters, which serve as a continuation of the conversation that the father and the son had between them and with the painters of yesteryear. The book, it seems, plans to demonstrate that “in the kingdom of the visible, all the eras coexist and are fraternal”, to borrow from the test of John Berger in 2001 “Steps towards a small theory of the visible”.

Another important principle of “little theory” is that a painting was born from a “meeting between painter and model – even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles” (81). In To you, The father and the son take this idea to heart, listening strongly to what the subjects of the paintings, whether animated or inanimate, have to say. Giorgio Morandi’s “Jugs and Bricks”, writes Yves, are in “conversation”; The landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and Zhu Da, according to John, philosophize on the possibility of “eternity”; And John’s white rose, luminous against darkness, “like some figures in Caravaggio’s painting”, delivers “a confirmation message:” what is held forever “.

The letters therefore do not try to interpret to animate the paintings, to make them speak with the spectator and with the world. If his father’s watercolor Rose reminds Yves the works of Caravaggio, certain details in the works of Caravaggio – such as ”

However, the impossibility of the image can be precisely the point: to an unusual degree for a book on visual art, You Damiles on the without form and the invisible, on painting as “the recovery of the invisible”. The sentence occurs first during John’s discussion on Foam roses in a vase (1882). In his interpretation, the still life of Edward Manet is not yet at all: “In glass, natural forms (…) are broken down. They become non -figurative. We look through the glass to the previous raw material. ” This reads as a declaration on the prehistory of the work of art – on what it had been before it becomes a work of art. But John goes even further: what fascinates him and his son is “all that precedes and follows existence”.

This fascination is obvious in the frequency to which water –widely thought out have set up the first forms of life–infiltrates the conversation. The water is not only in the manet’s vase or (metaphorically) in the caravan painting. He also shines with a train window where Yves writes one of the letters; It takes place under the bridge of his childhood memories; He swallows meditation on the act of painting, when Yves compares the appeal of art to the appeal of the depths of the sea (as mentioned in Luc Besson’s film The big blue).

Like the continents, the paintings of the book are linked by these oceanic currents, appearing as fruits fewer individual creative geniuses than of nature itself. (Indeed, the way the book uses water to connect paintings and the natural world reminds me of how Jeff Wall connects nature and photography in his test “Liquid photography and intelligenceAs well as the perceptual reading of Kaja Silverman of this essay in The miracle of analogy.) For some images of the book, this is almost literally true: in the visual test, among the drawings of the father and the son, we meet an impression of a honeycomb and a photograph of a outline drawn by Yves on a snowy bench – a rabbit with a wooden knot for a eye.

But nature also collaborates with the two artists in a more subtle way, and the descriptions of this collaboration are among the most memorable passages in the book. John remembers how, as a student in art, he mixed painting using cobalt powder, whose dazzling blue “was) before any eye has evolved.” While preparing titanium white, Yves realizes “(a) a fresh texture similar to honey”, then lets her eyes walk on the hives visible through an open window. Painting – and writing on painting – is celebrating vital concrete.