Read Online Selected Essays of John Berger by John Berger - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Berger
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that he is essentially an artist of conflict and pain. In fact, his constant theme is something quite different – energy. In his earlier works, up to about 1920, he was concerned,mostly in portraits, with what is roughly called nervous energy. The spirits of his sitters crackle like lightning, and their hands, with their outstretched fingers, often look like trees that have just been struck. Later he was concerned, in his large panoramic views, with the energy of cities – with what might be called historical energy. Still later he turned to ancient legends to find themes which embodied the energy of the cycle of life itself.
But of course the word energy is too vague and too abstract to define the character of Kokoschka’s achievement and searching. It makes it easy to understand why he has turned to baroque artists for help, but it does not explain why his voice has such authority, why he is so surely a modern artist.
Energy means for him movement and development. In his portraits one has the sense that the sitter has been painted, unawares, whilst on a journey, not necessarily a physical journey, but a journey of thoughts and decisions, which is going to change – which indeed at that very moment is changing – his life. In our century of crisis these are, in this sense, the most precarious portraits painted, and in that precariousness we recognize ourselves. How often in his panoramic landscapes he includes a river or, as an important not an incidental element in the picture, birds in the sky; and these again suggest voyaging, movement, time passing. In his recent large triptychs his concern with development, with consequences, is even more obvious, for here he has painted consecutive incidents from a story – the story of Prometheus or the story of the Greeks defending Thermopylae.
Kokoschka did not of course arbitrarily select this constant theme. It has arisen from his experience. As a mid-European born in 1886, he has seen much. And he has never been a passive spectator or a remote studio man. He has prophesied and committed himself. He is acutely aware of the way our European societies alienate man from man (and incidentally believes abstract art to be a symptom of this alienation):
That technical civilization, in which we have all collaborated, has been throughout two world wars nothing but an attempt to escape disaster by means of an intensified production for the mere sake of production, and the effort is shown to be all the more senseless as the numbers of the homeless, the desperate and the starving roaming over the untilled fields of the world increase.
Consequently he has searched for a way forward, a way of release. The emotion behind most of his work is liberating. The figures, the animals, the cities in his canvases are set free: the skies around them are like those endlessly imagined by a prisoner. His richness and abundance is not luxurious as in true baroque art, rather it represents a kind of innocence.Not that he is a Utopian artist. His aim is simply to make us see what we are capable of, to warn us against accepting the idea that all circumstances are final.
His weakness as a painter is that he is sometimes formlessly effusive. This may be the result of the fact that he blames technology itself for our predicament, so that his positive alternative becomes an unselective all-embracing humanism. If he were more aware of the economic and social basis of history, his hopes might be sharper and less generalized. Nevertheless we can only honour. He has confronted our situation with open eyes and has never retreated into cynicism, nihilism or morbid subjectivity: his genius has remained expectant. Having borne witness to great suffering, he still, at the age of over seventy, believes with Blake that ‘Exuberance is Beauty’.
1952
The Clarity of the Renaissance
It’s depressing. The rain’s set in. It’s wet but we can’t grumble. It’s grey and dull. Each of these comments describes
But of course the word energy is too vague and too abstract to define the character of Kokoschka’s achievement and searching. It makes it easy to understand why he has turned to baroque artists for help, but it does not explain why his voice has such authority, why he is so surely a modern artist.
Energy means for him movement and development. In his portraits one has the sense that the sitter has been painted, unawares, whilst on a journey, not necessarily a physical journey, but a journey of thoughts and decisions, which is going to change – which indeed at that very moment is changing – his life. In our century of crisis these are, in this sense, the most precarious portraits painted, and in that precariousness we recognize ourselves. How often in his panoramic landscapes he includes a river or, as an important not an incidental element in the picture, birds in the sky; and these again suggest voyaging, movement, time passing. In his recent large triptychs his concern with development, with consequences, is even more obvious, for here he has painted consecutive incidents from a story – the story of Prometheus or the story of the Greeks defending Thermopylae.
Kokoschka did not of course arbitrarily select this constant theme. It has arisen from his experience. As a mid-European born in 1886, he has seen much. And he has never been a passive spectator or a remote studio man. He has prophesied and committed himself. He is acutely aware of the way our European societies alienate man from man (and incidentally believes abstract art to be a symptom of this alienation):
That technical civilization, in which we have all collaborated, has been throughout two world wars nothing but an attempt to escape disaster by means of an intensified production for the mere sake of production, and the effort is shown to be all the more senseless as the numbers of the homeless, the desperate and the starving roaming over the untilled fields of the world increase.
Consequently he has searched for a way forward, a way of release. The emotion behind most of his work is liberating. The figures, the animals, the cities in his canvases are set free: the skies around them are like those endlessly imagined by a prisoner. His richness and abundance is not luxurious as in true baroque art, rather it represents a kind of innocence.Not that he is a Utopian artist. His aim is simply to make us see what we are capable of, to warn us against accepting the idea that all circumstances are final.
His weakness as a painter is that he is sometimes formlessly effusive. This may be the result of the fact that he blames technology itself for our predicament, so that his positive alternative becomes an unselective all-embracing humanism. If he were more aware of the economic and social basis of history, his hopes might be sharper and less generalized. Nevertheless we can only honour. He has confronted our situation with open eyes and has never retreated into cynicism, nihilism or morbid subjectivity: his genius has remained expectant. Having borne witness to great suffering, he still, at the age of over seventy, believes with Blake that ‘Exuberance is Beauty’.
1952
The Clarity of the Renaissance
It’s depressing. The rain’s set in. It’s wet but we can’t grumble. It’s grey and dull. Each of these comments describes
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