Selected Essays of John Berger (63 page)

Graphic caricatures were of social types. Their typology took account of social class, temperament, character and physique. Their content invoked class interests and social justice. The living caricatures are simply creatures of immediate circumstance. They involve no continuity. They are behaviourist. They are not caricatures of character but of performance. The roles performed may be influenced by social class. (The girl crossing the street or bar in that particular way is likely to belong to the petit rather than grand bourgeoisie; the police are mostly working class; and so on.) But the contingencies of the immediate situation hide the essential class conditions. Likewise the judgement the living caricature demands has nothing to do with social justice, but with the success or failure of the individual performance. The sum total of these performances make a collectivity. But it is the collectivity of theatre. Not a theatre of the absurd as some dramatic critics once believed, but a theatre of indifference.

Most public life in the city belongs to this theatre. Two activities, however, are excluded. The first is productive labour. And the second is the exercise of real power. These have become hidden, non-public activities. The assembly line is as private – in this sense – as the President’s telephone. Public life concerns inessentials upon which
the public have been persuaded to fix their hopes. Yet truth is not so easily ousted. It returns to transform public life into theatre. If a lie is accepted as truth, the real truth turns the false one into a merely theatrical truth.

The very cohesion of public life is now charged with this theatricality. Often it extends into domestic life – but here it is less evident to the newly arrived villager. In public nobody can escape it; everyone is forced to be either spectator or performer. Some performers perform their refusal to perform. They play insignificant ‘little men’, or, if they are many, they may play a cohort of ‘the silent majority’. The change-over from performer to spectator is almost instantaneous. It is also possible to be both at the same time: to be a performer towards one’s immediate entourage and the spectator of a larger more distant performance. For example: at a railway station or in a restaurant.

The indifference is between spectator and performer. Between audience and players. The experience of every performer – that’s to say everyone – has led him to believe that, as soon as he begins, the audience will leave, the theatre will empty. Equally, the experience of every spectator has led him to expect that the performance of another will be irrelevant and indifferent to his own personal situation.

The aim of the performer is to prevent at least a few members of the audience from leaving. His fear is to find himself performing in an empty theatre. (This can happen even when he is physically surrounded by hundreds of people.) There is an inverse ratio of numbers. If a performer chooses an audience of a hundred, he is, in one sense, further from his fear of an empty theatre. But a hundred can leave in seconds. If he chooses an audience of three, he will be able to hold at least one of them back for a longer period – until this third person is forced to
perform
boredom or indifference.

Performing in the theatre of indifference inevitably leads to assuming and cultivating exaggerated expressions. Including expressions of uninterest, independence, nonchalance. It leads to the hamming of everyday life. The most usual final appeal to the departing audience is violence. This may be in words (swearing, threats, shouts), in grimaces, or in action. Some crimes which take place are the theatre’s purest expression.

Exaggeration and violence become habitual. The violence is in the
address
of the exaggeration. In this sense the girl’s performed nubility was as violent as a pointed gun. Gradually the habit of exaggeration informs the physical being of the performer. He becomes the living caricature of the expression towards which he is most generally forced, either by temperament or situation, in his performances.

The existence of the theatre makes itself felt when there is not even a second person present, when the minimum requirement for any performance
(two people) is lacking. Solitude is confused with the triumph of indifference and made entirely negative. The emptied theatre becomes the image of silence itself. To be alone in silence is to have failed to retain a single member of the audience. Hence the compulsive need to walk on again: to the corner shop to buy an evening paper; to the pub for half a pint. This helps to define the particular pathos of the old in the city.

Only one thing can defeat indifference: a star performance. The star is credited with all that has been suppressed in each spectator. The star is the only form of idol in the modern city. He fills the theatre. He promises that no indifference is final.

Following the example of the great stars, who occur in every spectacular activity from sport through crime to politics, everyone can aspire to be a small star of an occasion. If there are six customers in a shop, any one of them can be made a star, by the consensus of those present, elevated, for a brief instant, to that status by a remark, a reaction or a knack of physical presence. In a crowd on an escalator, in a line of traffic at the traffic lights, in a queue at the guichet, there is a chance, like that of winning a sweepstake, for anyone to briefly fill the theatre. During that instant a purely urban pleasure passes over the temporary star’s face. An unexpectedly coy pleasure, comprising modesty and conceit. Like the pleasure of a child praised for something he has done by accident.

The theatre of indifference should not be subsumed under
the artificiality of city life.
It is a new phenomenon. The social life of a village is artificial in the sense that it is highly formalized. A village funeral, for example, is more, not less, formalized than any contemporary public event in a city. The antithesis of the theatre of indifference is not spontaneous simplicity, but drama in which both the principal protagonists and the audience have a common interest.

The historical precondition for the theatre of indifference is that everyone is consciously and helplessly dependent in most areas of their life on the opinions and decisions of others. To put it symbolically: the theatre is built on the ruins of the forum. Its precondition is the failure of democracy. The indifference is the result of the inevitable divergence of personal fantasies when isolated from any effective social action. The indifference is born of the equation between excessive mobility of private fantasy and social political stasis.

In the theatre of indifference, appearances hide failure, words hide facts, and symbols hide what they refer to.

A villager cannot conceive of the theatre of indifference. He has never seen people producing such a surplus of expression over and above what is necessary to express themselves. And so he assumes that their hidden lives are as rich and mysterious as their expressions are extreme. He demeans himself because he cannot yet see the invisible – that which,
according to his imagination, must lie behind their expressions and behaviour. He believes that what is happening in the city exceeds his imagination and his previous dreams. Tragically he is right.

1975

The photographs show a man who fits his own laconic description of himself: born in Livorno, Jew, painter. Sad, vital, furious and tender, a man never quite filling his own appearance, a man searching behind appearances. A man who painted unseeing eyes – often closed, and even when open without iris or pupils, and yet eyes which in their very absence speak. A man whose intimacy had always to traverse great distances. A man maybe like music, present and yet detached from the visible. And nevertheless a painter.

With Van Gogh, Modigliani is probably one of the most regarded of modern artists. I mean that literally: the most looked-at by the most people. How many postcards of Modigliani at this moment on how many walls? He appeals particularly but not exclusively to the young. The young of succeeding generations.

This popular reputation has not been much encouraged by museums and art experts. In the art world during the last forty years Amadeo Modigliani, who died sixty years ago, has been acknowledged and, mostly, left aside. He may even be the only twentieth-century painter to have won, in this sense, an independent acknowledgement. Without cultural retailers. Beyond the reach of critics. Why should this be so?

In themselves his paintings demand little explanation. Indeed they impose a kind of silence, a listening. The whirrings of analysis become more than usually pretentious. Yet the answer to the question has to be found within the paintings. A sociology of popular taste will not help much. Nor can much weight be given to the ‘Modigliani legend’. His life story, lending itself easily to film and sensational biographies, his apotheosis as the
peintre maudit
of Montparnasse in its heyday, the many women in his life, his poverty, his addictions, his early death, provoking the suicide of Jeanne Hebuterne, last companion, now buried near him
in the cemetery of Père Lachaise: all this has become well known, but it has little to do with why his paintings speak to so many people.

And in this, Modigliani’s case is very different from Van Gogh’s. The legend of Van Gogh’s life enters the paintings, the two tumults mix. Whereas Modigliani’s paintings, instantly recognizable as they are, remain at a profound level anonymous. In face of them, it is not the trace or the struggle of a painter that we confront, but a completed image, its very completeness imposing a kind of listening, during which the painter slips away, and gradually through the image, the subject comes closer.

In the history of art there are portraits which
announce
the men and women portrayed – Holbein, Velázquez, Manet … there are others which call them back – Fra Angelico, Goya, Modigliani, among others. The special appeal of Modigliani is surely related to his method as a painter. Not his technical procedure as such, but the method by which his vision transformed the visible. All painting, even hyper-realism, transforms.

Only by considering a painting’s method, the practice of its transformation, can we be confident about the direction of its image, the direction of the image’s passage towards us and past us. Every painting comes from far away (many fail to reach us), yet we only receive a painting fully if we are looking in the direction from which it has come. This is why seeing a painting is so different from seeing an object.

A single drawn curve on a flat surface – not a straight line – is already playing with the special power of drawn imagery. The curve stays on the surface like that of the letter C when written, and, at the same time, it can leave the surface and be filled out by an approaching volume which may be a pebble, an orange, a shoulder.

Modigliani began each painting with curves. The curve of an eyebrow, the shoulders, a head, a hip, a knee, the knuckles. And after hours of work, correction, refinement, searching, he hoped to re-find, preserve, the double function of the curve. He hoped to find curves that simultaneously would be both letter and flesh, would constitute something like a person’s name to those who know the person. The name which is both word and physical presence.
ANTONIA.

At the time of Cubism and its collages, it was not unusual for painters to introduce written words or even single letters into their paintings. And therefore one should not attach too much importance to Modigliani doing the same. And yet when he did do so, the letters always spelt out the name of the sitter: they did in their way what the paint was doing in its way – both recalling the person.

More profound and important, however, is that where there are no words, the curves in Modigliani’s paintings, the curves with which he began, are still both two-dimensional like print, and three-dimensional
like the line of a cheek or breast. It is this which gives to almost every figure painted by Modigliani something of the quality of a silhouette — although in fact these figures glow, and are, in other ways, the opposite of silhouettes. But a silhouette is both substance and two-dimensional sign. A silhouette is both writing and existence.

Let us now consider the long, often violent process by which he proceeded from the initial curves to the finished vibrant static image. What did he intuitively seek through this process? He sought an invented letter, a monogram, a shape, which would
print as permanent
the transient living form he was looking at.

The achieving of such a shape was the result of numerous corrections and redrawn simplifications. Unlike many artists, Modigliani began with a simplification and drawing was the process of letting the living form complicate it. In his masterpieces like ‘Nu Assis à la Chemise’ (1917), ‘Elvira Assise’ (1918), ‘La Belle Romaine’ (1917) or ‘Chaim Soutine’ (1916), the dialectic between simplification and complexity becomes hypnotic: what our eyes see swings like a pendulum, ceaselessly, between the two.

And it is here that we find Modigliani’s remarkable visual originality. He discovered new simplifications. Or, to put it, I think, more accurately, he allowed the model, in that life and in that pose, to offer him new simplifications. When this happened, a shape, that part of the simplified invented letter, which meant an arm resting on the table, an elbow resting on a hip, a pair of legs crossed, this shape, cut for the first and unique time during the drawing of those sessions, turned like a key in its lock, and a door swung open on the very life of the limbs in question.

An invented letter, a monogram, a name, the profile of a key — each of these comparisons stresses the stamped emblematic quality of the drawing in Modigliani’s paintings. But what of their colour? His colours are as instantly recognizable as his use of lines and curves. And as amazing. Nobody for at least two centuries painted flesh as radiantly as he did. And then, if in one’s mind one compares him with Titian or Rubens, what is specific to his use of colour becomes clearer. It is complementary to what we have already seen about his drawing.