From letters exchanged by John Berger and his son Yves, collected in Over to You, which will be published this month by Pantheon Books.
Yves,
I send two “postcards.” One is a photo taken by Iona Heath of a terra-cotta by Andrea della Robbia, and the second a watercolor by me of a white rose from the garden. The della Robbia family produced so many tender terra-cottas of Madonnas and angels offering gentleness and consolation to others in the face of the cruelty of life, but this one suffered such cruelty itself, because it was burned in a fire in Berlin in 1945. When Iona sent me her photo, I found it very touching, and put it where I could see it when sitting at my worktable.
Later, Nella said, “Can you do a white rose?” And after a day or two, I made this sketch. After it was “finished,” I noticed the next day that it had a certain echo of the photo of the Madonna. Something a little similar in mood and rhythm. Neighbors on the same table. The rose doesn’t offer consolation but resists by itself the cruelty of life.
And in this “collaboration” between the two images there is a colossal difference of timescales: the drama of della Robbia’s painted terra-cotta spans over five centuries; the drama of the white rose takes place within five days. And perhaps the irrelevance of regular linear time to what our imaginations seize upon has something to do with presenting as an explanation the steps or stages of a work in progress.
Perhaps when we are working, and particularly when we are drawing, we operate not in a present but in a future?
With all my love, John
John,
Yes, to some extent, time makes no difference. The light varies but still falls upon this sheet of paper on which I’m writing, as it did on the white rose you drew, and as it did on della Robbia’s Madonna and Child, when it was still in his studio in Florence over five centuries ago. We, living with the background of darkness, receive in lighted subjects a message of confirmation: “What stands does so forever.”
Day after day, I’m looking at the reproductions in this book called The Last Flowers of Manet. The beauty of these images becomes more and more extreme as time passes, and I gaze at them fascinated. Manet painted them when he was suffering the final stages of an illness that finally killed him at the age of fifty-one—some days after having a leg amputated. Once you are aware of that, you can’t forget it when looking at or thinking of these small nature morte works. Nevertheless, the flowers stand for themselves, and I don’t think someone would guess “where” they come from just by receiving their gift. I think Manet forgot himself while painting these bouquets.
There is something dramatic about them: they stand on the edge of the world. The glass vase has been placed at the extreme limit of visibility. Behind the flowers, there is nothing, not even a dark void. Just nothing. Following that, the bouquets present themselves as the last—or first?—thing vibrating in the light of our world. Maybe these paintings portray the dialectic between life and death. Not Manet’s only, but all. In that sense, they are gigantic! Don’t you think?
Love you, Yves
Yves,
You’re right, those small, last paintings by Manet of flowers are gigantic. And they are so for the reasons you say. I have just one observation to add, and it’s this.
Each time he was given a sprig or a bunch of flowers (the word “bouquet” is too formal, implying something that has been elaborately composed and where there’s no spontaneity), each time, he put it into a glass vase—or, once, into a champagne glass. And these glass vessels function like crucibles in the painting—that’s to say, what is put into them is transformed, and Manet needed that transformation. He was as fascinated and spellbound by what he saw through the glass, within the glass, as by what he saw blossoming out of it.
Within the glass, the natural forms—their articulated space, their colors, their proportions—are decomposed. They become nonfigurative. We are looking through the glass at antecedent raw material. And Manet painted what he saw there as vividly as he painted the flowers, the leaves, or the crystal of his favorite glass vases.
In each of the paintings, thanks to this, there is a section that beckons our eyes into a domain of the nameless, of forms that are still coming into being or, perhaps, disappearing. They evoke a past or a future, both of which surround the present—the present that is entirely filled by the flowers.
As you so justly say, Manet placed the flowers he was about to paint on the edge of the world. Behind them, there is nothing. They are appearing at a first or a last moment, and they fill that moment as if it were the whole of life. He paints their coming-into-being with such immediacy that we cannot but think also of their transience. “Maybe these paintings portray the dialectic between life and death.” They address whatever it is that precedes and follows existence. They address the raw material that surrounds existence.
What I want to add is that a reference to this raw material is there in these last paintings; it’s there in what he saw and painted within the glass vessels, within the crucibles. It’s there in each canvas. And this reminds us of something, among many other things, that painting is about: the recuperation of the invisible. Am I that far out?
With my love, John
