Is it still possible to write more words about him? I think of those already written, mine included, and the answer is “No.” If I look at his paintings, the answer is again—for a different reason—“No”; the canvases command silence. I almost said plead for, and that would have been false, for there is nothing pathetic about a single image he made—not even the old man with his head in his hands at the gates of eternity. All his life he hated blackmail and pathos.
Only when I look at his drawings does it seem worthwhile to add to the words. Maybe because his drawings resemble a kind of writing, and he often drew on his own letters. The ideal project would be to draw the process of his drawing, to borrow his drawing hand. Nevertheless I will try with words.
In front of a drawing, drawn in July 1888, of a landscape around the ruined abbey of Montmajour near Arles, I think I see the answer to the obvious question: why did this man become the most popular painter in the world?
The myth, the films, the prices, the so-called martyrdom, the bright colors, have all played their part and amplified the global appeal of his work, but they are not at its origin. He is loved, I said to myself in front of the drawing of olive trees, because for him the act of drawing or painting was a way of discovering and demonstrating why he loved so intensely what he was looking at, and what he looked at during the eight years of his life as a painter (yes, only eight) belonged to everyday life.
I can think of no other European painter whose work expresses such a stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them, in some way, without referring to salvation by way of an ideal which the things embody or serve. Chardin, de la Tour, Courbet, Monet, de Stael, Miró, Jasper Johns—to name but a few—were all magisterially sustained by pictorial ideologies, whereas he, as soon as he abandoned his first vocation as a preacher, abandoned all ideology. He became strictly existential, ideologically naked. The chair is a chair, not a throne. The boots have been worn by walking. The sunflowers are plants, not constellations. The postman delivers letters. The irises will die. And from this nakedness of his, which his contemporaries saw as naivety or madness, came his capacity to love, suddenly and at any moment, what he saw in front of him. Picking up pen or brush, he then strove to realize, to achieve that love. Lover-painter affirming the toughness of an everyday tenderness we all dream of in our better moments and instantly recognize when it is framed…
Words. Words. How is it visible in his practice? Return to the drawing. It’s in ink, drawn with a reed-pen. He made many such drawings in a single day. Sometimes, like this one, direct from nature, sometimes from one of his own paintings, which he had hung on the wall of his room whilst the paint was drying.
Drawings like these were not so much preparatory studies as graphic hopes; they showed in a simpler way—without the complication of handling pigment—where the act of painting could hopefully lead him. They were maps of his love.
What do we see? Thyme, other shrubs, limestone rocks, olive trees on a hillside, in the distance a plain, in the sky birds. He dips the pen into brown ink, watches, and marks the paper. The gestures come from his hand, his wrist, arm, shoulder, perhaps even the muscles in his neck, yet the strokes he makes on the paper are following currents of energy which are not physically his and which only become visible when he draws them. Currents of energy? The energy of a tree’s growth, of a plant’s search for light, of a branch’s need for accommodation with its neighboring branches, of the roots of thistles and shrubs, of the weight of rocks lodged on a slope, of the sunlight, of the attraction of the shade for whatever is alive and suffers from the heat, of the mistral from the north which has fashioned the rock strata. My list is arbitrary; what is not arbitrary is the pattern his strokes make on the paper. The pattern is like a fingerprint. Whose?
It is a drawing which values precision—every stroke is explicit and unambiguous—yet it has totally forgotten itself in its openness to what it has met. And the meeting is so close you can’t tell whose trace is whose. A map of love indeed.
Two year later, three months before his death, he painted a small canvas of two peasants digging the earth. He did it from memory because it refers back to the peasants he painted five years earlier in Holland and to the many homages he paid throughout his life to Millet. It is also, however, a painting whose theme is the kind of fusion we find in the drawing.
The two men digging are painted in the same colors—potato brown, spade grey, and the faded blue of French work clothes—as the field, the sky and the distant hills. The brush strokes describing their limbs are identical with those which follow the dips and mounds of the field. The two men’s raised elbows become two more crests, two more hillocks, against the horizon.
The painting is not of course declaring these men to be “clods of earth,” the term used by many citizens of that epoch to insult peasants. The fusion of the figures with the ground refers fiercely to the reciprocal exchange of energy which constitutes agriculture, and which explains, in the long term, why agricultural production cannot be submitted to purely economic law. It may also refer—by way of his own love and respect for peasants—to his own practice as a painter.
During his whole short life he had to live and gamble with the risk of self-loss. The wager is visible in all the self-portraits. He looks at himself as a stranger, or as something he has stumbled upon. His portraits of others are more personal, their focus more close-up. When things went too far, and he lost himself utterly, the consequences, as the legend reminds us, were catastrophic. And this is evident too in the paintings and drawings he made at such moments. Fusion became fission. Everything crossed everything else out.
When he won his wager—which was most of the time—the lack of contours around his identity allowed him to be extraordinarily open, allowed him to become permeated by what he was looking at. Or is it that wrong? Maybe the lack of contours allowed him to lend himself, to leave and enter and permeate the other. Perhaps both processes occurred—once again as in love.
Words. Words. Return to the drawing by the olive trees. The ruined abbey is, I think, behind us. It is a sinister place—or would be if it were not in ruins. The sun, the mistral, lizards, cicadas, the occasional hoopoe bird, are still cleaning its walls (it was dismantled during the French Revolution), still obliterating the trivia of its one-time power and insisting upon the immediate.
As he sits with his back to the monastery looking at the trees, the olive grove seems to close the gap and to press itself against him. He recognizes the sensation—he has often experienced it, indoors, outdoors, in the Borinage, in Paris, or here in Provence. To this pressing—which was perhaps the only sustained intimate love he knew in his lifetime—he responds with incredible speed and the utmost attention. Everything his eye sees, he fingers. And the light falls on the touches on the vellum paper just as it falls on the pebbles at his feet—on one of which (on the paper) he will write Vincent.
Within the drawing today there seems to be what I have to call a gratitude, which is hard to name. Is it the place’s, his, or ours?
John Berger is the author of many books, including Ways of Seeing, Pig Earth, and King. He lives in France and is a consulting editor to The Threepenny Review.
