Seeing John Berger

 by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet. (Musée d’Orsay.)

When I heard that John Berger had died, an image flashed in my mind of a painting on a vast canvas I had stood captivated before a few years ago in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. A crowd is gathered before a small grave in the jaundiced light of a winter afternoon. The people huddle together in grief, as if braced against a chill wind. The ground is hard, stony. A dog, perhaps the deceased peasant’s, stands at the edge of the pit, mournful eyes trained on the viewer.  The white cliffs of the Jura breach the hazy horizon, marking the place, fixing the point-of-view as finitely as any Google map.

The painting, of course, is Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans. Though Courbet spent six months executing the painting, the scene feels immediate. It also seems as if it took a lifetime to conceive. A death which reveals the life of a poor village, a community knit together across decades of work, joy and tragedy. It is easy to imagine Berger’s body being lowered into such a hand-dug grave, attended by such people and animals, in the weak winter light of rural France.

John Berger wrote the way Courbet painted, only quicker. His writing is direct, naturalistic, as vivid as a conversation between friends or lovers. Berger didn’t explain or explicate the meaning of paintings or photographs. He described his own response to them, a response we related to because we trusted the experience of the voice speaking to us. We trusted Berger’s experience as a living being, a being who had lived and reflected endlessly on the experience of life. Berger didn’t demand that we see art the way he did, but through the lens of our own lives, a lens that he helped to focus.

I met John Berger in 2001 through my old pal Saul Landau. As usual with Saul, our rendezvous spot was an old bar on the edge of Chinatown. The first thing I noticed about Berger were his hands, riven with scars and callouses, nails cracked and embedded with dirt, fingers permanently stained by the ink of fountain pens. These were hands that had worked the ground and the page. Hands as comfortable rooting for truffles as they were assessing sculpted marble, hands that had castrated hogs and penned villanelles.

Our lunch talk ranged widely, from the situation in Gaza to melting glaciers, from the photos of Robert Capa to the paintings of Francis Bacon.  I made a deprecating remark about the paucity of interesting art in a city as wealthy and self-consciously aesthete as San Francisco. Rising from his stool, Berger shot back tartly: “Nonsense, Jeffrey, fresh art is all around you, but apparently you still don’t know where to look. Let’s go see.” He drained his Anchor Steam Ale, slammed the mug on the table and ventured off into the fog, striding toward the Tenderloin, eyes scanning every wall.

[A French version of this note on my encounter with John Berger is included the forthcoming collection Regarde: Berger edited by Michelle Girard and Alain Maubert.]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/02/roaming-charges-seeing-john-berger
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