The infinity of desire
Aletter opened has been placed on the window sill in the corner of a kitchen. On the wall of white tiles behind is a poster of a donkey. Near the envelope stand a jar of paint brushes and an empty vase. Through the window I see trees.
Why do people go to galleries and look at paintings? This question probably has as many answers as people. Another naive question: after they've really looked at a painting, where do they keep it in their memory? With their memories of places? With their memories of other spectacular sights? Or somewhere quite different? You would know, Marisa, but you're not saying.
It seems to me one looks at paintings hoping to find some secret. A secret not about art, but about life. And if one finds one, it remains a secret, because, finally, it is untranslatable into words. With words one can only, sometimes, make a clumsy map, hand-drawn, to show where the secret was found.
I'm trying to make a map. The starting point is the category of paintings called still lifes in English, natures mortes in French and bodegones in Spanish (which could mean coming-from-a-cool-cellar). The difference in these names is already promising and confusing.
I'll begin by drawing a line, a list of names: Zurbaran, Chardin, Cézanne, Morandi, Barcelo. When it gets dark, I'll use my list as a cord.
As in every genre, masters were rare. Masters were those who met the public demand yet pushed their art beyond it. Yet whether one is thinking of masters or modest artisans, the genre has its own logic, its own metaphysics, which tends to push its practitioners in a certain direction.
Still lifes - even before they begin to be painted - have been deliberately assembled: objects which the painter finds intriguing or touching have been arranged as compositions on the table or shelf. Still life is a sedentary art, connected with the activity of keeping house. A home may be tidy or informal but there is always a certain welcoming order to it. Which is why Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, or certain canvases of carcasses by Soutine, are not still lifes but dramatic works, whereas Goya's heartbreaking Dead Pheasant is nevertheless a still life.
The drama in a still life is the drama found in a juxtaposition, a placing, an encounter, within a protected space. Every still life is about safety, just as every landscape is about risk and adventure. Still lifes tell about how certain things have come together and, despite their evident ephemerality, will stay together. They are images of residence, in every sense of the term. And so the painter is forced to study the neighbourliness of the things in front of him, how they adjust and live together, how they intersect, overlap and keep separate, and how they converse.
An oyster speaks to a loaf of bread, an apple to a piece of cloth, a carnation to a clock. They converse through colour, texture, shadow, luminosity, shape, and what they talk about is prompted by their juxtaposition. In the safety zone and silence of still lifes the visibility of objects becomes eloquent.
The portraitist contests the mortality of his sitter. The landscape painter contests the ceaseless movement of nature; the history painter the forgetting of history; and the still-life painter the dispersal of objects. His antagonists are decay, the bailiff and the junk merchant.
I hold on to the cord - it is getting dark - and I begin with Zurbaran, who was more or less contemporary with some of the first Dutch or Flemish still-life painters. Therefore, I'll place among the early still lifes Zurbaran's paintings of the Holy Face of St Veronica's Veil. He made at least six or seven versions of this subject, of which the most remarkable is in Stockholm.
A whitish, pinkish cotton or linen scarf is pinned to a dark wall, filling the canvas. The folds and the pins are painted in a style which borders on trompe l'oeil. They are very tangible, in contrast to the image of Christ's face printed on the cloth as a fading ochre stain. This is, of course, in keeping with the story of how Veronica used her scarf to wipe the sweat from Christ's face, as he was carrying the cross to Golgotha. But does it also hint at the secret of still lifes?
Another Zurbaran painting shows just four pots and two pewter plates on a shelf. A modest still life. Behind them there is darkness. They are strongly lit, with evident volume. At first one believes in both their presence and their materiality. They are without question there, more there than many painted objects, because they are precisely lit and tangibly solid before a curtain of darkness.
Yet, after a while, one begins to question whether this impression isn't an illusion. What is there, so strongly lit, is only the "appearance" of each object. The six "appearances" on the shelf have been newly laundered, ironed and put on hangers, awaiting a wearer. No wearer has come forward. There is nothing inside or behind the freshly laundered appearances. The empty pots are doubly empty. The true subject of this painting is the darkness behind, the darkness in which everything is invisible. The vessels on the shelf are there, not for their own material sake but to show that the darkness is - not a curtain - an infinity; just as the cloth with all its folds and woven texture is there, in the painting of St Veronica's Veil, to insinuate the eternity of the immaterial Holy Face. I use the verb insinuate (to bring-in-with-a-curve) in a positive sense: to suggest rather than to enforce. It is a key word and I like it; we can use it.
Zurbaran, at the height of the Counter Reformation, was painting mostly for the monasteries. Chardin was born a century later and worked for the emerging French bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment. He was a friend of Diderot, who wrote with enthusiasm about his art. It is difficult to imagine two painters working for two more opposed or different publics. Yet, as still-life painters, both of them found themselves facing the same persistent question before each object: how is it there?
Chardin was secretive about his working methods - do you know any painter who isn't? It seems that he first applied everywhere on the canvas a kind of paste, with an uneven, rough surface, which he built up slowly, and which, at a certain moment, he coloured with lead white and some reddish brown. The stuff of this surface was both luminous and earthy. He did not apply it mechanically or uniformly; he worked on it and in it with much patience, until it took on the air of being the ground for all substantiality, until he could see in it the unspecified material of the whole world, with its infinitude of possibilities. "Corporeal substance," said Spinoza, "can only be conceived as infinite, unique and indivisible."
He waited until the objects began to glance at him, until their glances came towards him through the act of painting, intimate, furtive glances which became his broken, correcting, crumbling brush-strokes, or sometimes finger smears. The wiggles of a walnut, the mat white shells of newly laid eggs, the black redness of wine in a glass, the fire in dented copper: each of them glanced at him in a breathtakingly distinct and particular way, yet all of them belonged to the indivisible substantial world and the single mystery of its existence.
Like Zurbaran, Chardin in his still lifes confronted the infinite. For the Spaniard it was the infinity of darkness; for the Frenchman the infinity of substantiality.
About 130 years later, between 1900 and 1906, Cézanne was painting his late watercolours. As a young man he had made no secret of his admiration for "the cunning fellow" Chardin. I believe that every time Cézanne laid a knife on his still-life table, a knife pointing diagonally into the picture, he did it as a homage to the old cunning master.
Gradually, still lifes became Cézanne's favourite genre because, as he said, they meant "grappling directly with objects". What happened during this grappling? In his late watercolours there is, it seems to me, a light which hadn't been seen before in European painting. When he applied the colours - blue, green, ochre, red - they all referred to this white in deference. They never referred directly to each other, as in earlier paintings, they referred to each other by way of the white. And the white arranged each of them, according to its wave-length, somewhere between surface and void. The sum of all these exchanges constitutes the new light.
This light enters between things to reveal that every point has its tangent, that everything is touching, and that all the existing distances and spaces which separate objects are no more than clefts or folds. It is a light which, as it travels, bestows continuity, a light which does not allow separation.
I look at the palm of my hand. Now I begin to close my fingers slowly, and watch the creases forming between the phalanges of each finger. Within these paintings, the edges of the apples on the table, or the edges of the casserole dish or of the jar, are like those creases, because they mark both an apparent separation and a real continuity. If I open my fingers a little, the creases will disappear, just as the contours of the objects on the table will disappear if, instead of looking at them, I feel my way either by touch or philosophy from one to the other.
When Cézanne spoke about being faithful to the "motif", faithful to nature, what he had in mind, I think, was the fidelity of an unbroken embrace between his perception and the continuous, infinite extension of everything in front of him.
Giorgio Morandi was probably the most austere still-life painter of all time. Repeatedly during his long life he painted the same dozen or so objects: his bottles, whose glass he painted white or red before painting them on the canvas, his coffee pot, his two jugs, his carafe, his dried flowers, his seashells.
His art divides itself into three periods. From the 1920s until 1940, he painted in order to approach the objects being painted. He goes closer and closer. The final closeness has nothing to do with detail or photographic precision. It is a question of the presence of the object; almost its body temperature being felt. In Morandi's second period, between 1940 and 1950, one has the impression that he stayed still while the objects approached the canvas. He waited and they arrived. In the last period, from 1951 until his death in 1964, the objects seem to be on the point of disappearing. Not that they are faint or faraway. Rather they are weightless, in flux, on the frontier of existence.
If this is a progression - if his mastery increased as he grew older - one has to ask: what was he trying to do? The answer often given - that Morandi was the poet of the ephemeral - doesn't convince me. The energy of his work is neither nostalgic nor - in any personal sense - intimate. In his life he may have shut himself away. And his odious fascist politics suggest panic. Yet his art is strangely affirmative. Of what?
What interests him is the process of the visible first becoming visible, before the thing seen has been given a name or acquired a value. The visible begins with light. And as soon as there is light there is shade. All drawing is a shadow around light. Slowly the eye registers and reads the space which the coffee pot and the jug are going to occupy. In other words, the objects Morandi paints can be bought in no flea market. They are not objects. They are places, places where some little thing is about to come into being. The infinity of becoming.
Morandi's vision depended upon a certain quiet; around it was the afternoon throbbing of cicadas and the silence of the siesta. Within 30 years of Morandi's death, life radically changed and the world was filled with a new kind of noise: the din of commodities. In 1994, Miquel Barcelo painted a series of very large still lifes entitled In Extremis. And at that time he wrote: "To paint a flayed ox has become important_ one has to take things, one after another, from the stickiness of Berlusconi and make them anew, fresh and clean, show them palpitating, or with their own sweet rottenness."
Barcelo paints on the ground, as if with a stick in the dust. In his still lifes there is no affluence and little security - enough maybe for the next 24 hours. And this is where they differ from their predecessors and why they belong specifically to the end of our millennium.
His fruit, carcasses and fish offer no illusion of permanence. What he is painting with each thing that he handles is a moment, a phase, in a repeated cycle of seeding, flowering, fading, dying. The paintings make this clear. They do not celebrate what things look like. What they celebrate, accidents notwithstanding, is recurrence, and the secret of recurrence is mortality. Barcelo's still lifes oppose the crass promises of consumerism with the insinuation of death and the respect which death demands.
In their own way, these paintings are images of paradise. A paradise which has nothing to do with perfection, for perfection is unlovable, and if there's no love in paradise, what is it? Barcelo's is a paradise painted on the reverse side of pain, following the same contours. The infinity he confronts is that of desire.
You are right, Marisa, I'm trying to make a still life with words! My favourite flower is lilac, either white or mauve. Sprigs of lilac always come in pairs. So there is a couple against a green curtain of leaves. And I place them in the empty vase beside the jar with brushes. And their minutely small white petals resemble the white letters in all the words I've written down.
This is an edited extract of the Peter Fuller Memorial Lecture, given by John Berger at Tate Modern on Saturday.
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