Ways of Seeing
It seems such an insubstantial volume now, and yet it had a huge impact on me when I bought it, an impact that has lingered on in the perspectives I apply to so many things. It’s a small book, a Pelican Original, just 165 pages long. The cover has yellowed a little. It’s well read, and there are a couple of places marked with an insert – a Qantas boarding card for one place where there is a discussion of Rembrandt self-portraits; and a receipt from a shop in Willunga, South Australia for a place in another chapter, presenting a collection of advertising photographs. Studying it now, I realised I haven’t read it carefully for a few years. Is it still as impactful and important as it was? It was just over 50 years ago when John Berger’s Ways of Seeing appeared, a book to complement the television series. It left a lasting impression, but perhaps some of that impact will seem dated now. Yes, it’s time to read it again.
Even the cover was meant to be read. My edition includes a reproduction of Magritte’s The Key of Dreams. Berger uses that reproduction to make a slight but pointed joke – underneath the image it reads ‘The way we see things is affected by what we’. Above, he sets out the central thesis of his book “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which our seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact we are surrounded by it. The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
What is that saying? Remember ‘do the right thing at the right time’? That was about action but I have a rather a different perspective (since ‘doing’ is not necessarily one of my strengths). It is ‘read the right thing at the right time’. In 1972, I was still recovering from one major impact on my worldview, brought about by changing course at university in 1964. Prior to then, I’d been a science nerd, assuming I would spend the rest of my life as a geologist. The next eight years were coming to terms with the fact that the world wasn’t just subject to scientific methods and theories: in fact, it was people who grabbed my attention, and for some time I revelled in learning more about cultures, motivation and behaviour. I’d become interested in phenomenology, and the work of theorist Merleau-Ponty in particular. Ideas about how our ways of seeing were ‘socially constructed’ made a great deal of sense: however the texts were dense, and the phenomenological perspective was hard to understand beyond a superficial grasp of concepts and ideas. Then I bought John Berger’s book.
Right there, on the cover of Ways of Seeing, he stated “seeing comes before words”. In addition to trying to come to grips with phenomenology, I had started reading Wittgenstein. In his Philosophical Investigations, he argued that language was fluid, always changing based on how we were interacting with the world, where its use is more important than its ‘truth’. The way we use language shapes reality, and in the 21st Century that lesson is well understood: “words are how you use them”. Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists were a tough read, hard to understand, but John Berger wasn’t. He showed how words both mask and reveal ways of seeing. It is heady stuff, and extraordinarily enough, not offered through a weighty analysis in a 400-page tome, but in a very accessible BBC television series together with the accompanying and relatively brief guide, Ways of Seeing, published by Penguin
In a ‘Note to the Reader’, Berger explains Ways of Seeing comprised seven essays: “They can be read in any order. Four of the essays use words and images, three of them use only images … None of the essays pretends to deal with more than certain aspects of each subject: particularly, those aspects thrown into relief by a modern historical consciousness. Our principal aim has been to start a process of questioning” (he had four collaborators in the project). I am happy to admit I was hooked almost before I started!
On page 12, we see reproductions of two works by Frans Hals. They were the last two major paintings he completed, living at that time on charity. One of the paintings shows the Governors of an alms-house for old paupers in Haarlem, and the other is of the Governesses. He includes some comments from an authoritative 2-volume work on Hals, a review which explains the ‘harmonious fusion’ of each canvas, their ‘breadth and strength’, and the author’s warning not to be seduced into believing we can ‘know the personality traits and even the habits of the men and women portrayed’. Let’s be clear, the un-named author tells us, this is a visual composition, nothing more.
Berger makes it clear it is not merely a composition, it is a confrontation, a confrontation between a destitute painter and the members of the charity who are supporting him. The first time I read this, I remember the impact. After all those years at school listening to teachers talking about composition, perspective and illumination, I realised I was being encouraged to look at people as the artist saw them, really saw them, an extraordinary perspective, only to be fundamentally changed once photography came along. I was in Holland the next year, and went to look at some of Rembrandt’s paintings, especially his self-portraits. To say that, at last, I appreciated them, would be an understatement: what a dry-eyed view of himself.
Berger’s discussion that begins with the two Hals paintings quickly moves on to the place of art from the past for us today. Individual works are reproduced, in catalogues, art books, student texts but also in films, advertising, and so many other places. Berger suggests there was a time when art existed within a specific ‘preserve’. In part that preserve was magical or sacred, especially for religious art. However, it was essentially physical: art could only be seen in the place, the gallery, museum, palace or even the cave where it was placed. The importance, the ‘authority’ of the art was shaped by where it was held, and by whom.
Reproduction has changed that, and “images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.” If the art of the past no longer exists as it did, Berger argues, then in its place is a language of images, asking us questions about who uses them and for what purpose. Berger makes it clear; we no longer look at art from the past as people once did.
An unrepentant Marxist, Berger was concerned with the exercise of power. In one of the chapters of Ways of Seeing, he explores what this means in terms of relations between men and women. He introduces this by a blunt comment: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Blunt, but not overwhelming. Well into his analysis, he examines what he calls “an exceptional painting of nakedness’. It is Rubens portrait of his young second wife, Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat. Helene is caught turning, the coat about to slip off her shoulders. It is rather like a photograph, a moment in time. But it is more than that. Berger suggests the image was ‘banal’, “It is this which distinguishes between voyeur and lover. Here such banality is to be found in Ruben’s compulsive painting of the fat softness of Helen Fourment’s flesh, which continually breaks every ideal convention of form and (to him) continually offers the promise of her extraordinary particularity.”
Later in the same chapter, he shows how in modern art the nude, and particularly the nude woman, no longer presents women as surveying themselves, ‘their own femininity’. He illustrates this by contrasting two painting: one is by Titian, The Venus of Urbino, from 1576; the other Manet’s Olympia, from 1883. In Titian’s painting the woman is presented in a traditional role, to be looked at and knowing she is being looked at. In the Degas, the woman is defiant, not passive, not presented for a man’s admiration. Re-reading Ways of Seeing recently, I wondered if even this perspective is rather dated: at the end of the chapter Berger suggests that the essential ways in which women’s images are used have not changed: by and large, women are depicted in quite a different way from men. Today, that comment is harder to sustain, and he might see it differently yet again.
Later in Ways of Seeing, Berger explores another category of oil paintings from between 1500 and 1900, and these are paintings of things – especially houses and their contents. There are thousands (yes, thousands) of paintings showing rooms in palaces and ancestral mansions, and in many of these, the walls are covered with paintings (paintings of paintings!). It is bad enough going to a gallery, where the number of paintings rapidly becomes overwhelming. What is this fascination with quantity? Obviously, it is about wealth. The actual artworks aren’t important, but possession of them, in large numbers, speaks to social status. As Berger points out, you might go to one of these houses and find, almost bewilderingly, that some really exceptional works are among those on display but they are surrounded by, and drowned out by, all the other second-rate art that sits alongside them.
In an earlier blog on John Carroll, I included a brief description of his account of Holbein’s fascinating painting The Ambassadors. Like Berger, Carroll explained this study portrayed two dominating men, surrounded by the evidence of their importance. However, Carroll took the symbolism of the painting apart, with that weird anamorphic skull a central and disturbing element in the picture. These men are atheists, their world rooted in the present, but as that skull makes clear, there’s more to this than first meets the eye! Berger also comments on that skull and added an important insight. He points out that if the skull, which is generally considered a ‘memento mori, a reminder of inevitable presence of death’, had been painted like the rest of the objects in the painting, its implication would have been lost. Instead of referring to a metaphysical commentary, a conventional skull would have just been another object in the painting of no special significance.
In another section, Ways of Seeing offers a telling commentary on William Blake. We learn that Blake’s paintings seldom used oil paint, and he was very careful in making many of his figures “lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate from one another, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects”. It was, Berger tells us, a deliberate intention to transcend the ‘substantiality of oil paint’, to offer an insight into what was seen, an aspect that being too substantial would miss. Incidentally, this is also a good illustration of Berger’s approach. As he explains to the reader at the beginning of Ways of Seeing, he sees his task as to make comments like this, and then leave it to the reader to think about what he has said, and the illustrations he has included.
I can’t help but feel that towards the end of Ways of Seeing, John Berger lost some of his analytical cool. As he explores advertising imagery, he looks back to consider the (historically recent) invention of glamour: “Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, among other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerless ness, dissolves into recurrent daydreams.”
I suppose it isn’t surprising to see that Ways of Seeing finishes with a commentary on publicity, something which he identifies as being both eventless, and focussed on a future ‘continually deferred’, which ensures it never becomes something, always aspirational and yet offers nothing more than the importance of acquisition. As he observes, “Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream. Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.”
John Berger began working as a painter, but soon focussed on art criticism. As he made clear in Ways of Seeing, his perspective was Marxist, and he wasn’t shy to offer political critiques: indeed, an early collection of essays was published under the title Permanent Red. Not just a critic, but a provocateur. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, is an account of the disappearance of Janos Lavin, a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and the discovery of his diary. It came out in 1958, where it proved too much for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded anti-communist propaganda group based in West Germany. Their pressure ensured his book was withdrawn by the publisher a month after its publication. Perhaps this was one of the incidents that led Berger to abandon his home in England. He moved to Quincy in France’s Haute Savoie, in 1962.
He was also a novelist, and the same year as Ways of Seeing appeared, so did G, an ‘extraordinary romance’ set in Europe in 1898, a novel that subsequently was to win him both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His later novels include To The Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis, and King: A Street Story, a novel about homelessness and shantytown life told from the perspective of a stray dog. (In the case of King, I read Berger initially insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits.) From France, his activities expanded. He made a series of three films, as well as a number of documentaries. However, much of his later work appeared in essays. He wrote about photography, art, politics, and memory.
I have read many of John Berger’s essays, all his novels, and various other bits and pieces he published before he died when he was 90 years old (in 2017). It’s a wonderful, thought-provoking collection. However, nothing can compare with the impact that slight volume, Ways of Seeing, had when I bought it. It really was ‘the right book at the right time’. It would be no exaggeration that he ‘opened my eyes’ in 1972: I was looking at things, but I wasn’t seeing. Did he make me a Marxist? Not a Marxist, but, like Berger, I suspect, I have found a Marxist framework helpful and persuasive. Marxist or not, he was active in supporting in his critiques and funding critical initiatives. In comparison, I am an armchair critic, observing and thinking, occasionally writing, but, overall, enjoying the armchair too much: a wimp, armchair lolling, sort-of but not quite Marxist – but at least a thinker!
