The Lens Grinder: on Bento’s Sketchbook
Philip Harris on John Berger's "Bento's Sketchbook" and the search for truth and beauty in a state of emergency.
In the opening pages of Bento’s Sketchbook, we meet John Berger not as the Booker-winning novelist, nor the Marxist critic, nor the television personality, but as simply the man, alone, drawing for his own edification. In a garden or public space, sketchbook in hand, he is attempting to capture the something-ness of the autumnal quetsch plums that hang in groups from fruit-burdened trees: “Early one morning I decide to draw a cluster, perhaps to understand better why I repeatedly say ‘handful.’”
Berger’s eyes take in a lot. The plums’ blueness, like “a vivid but vanishing blue smoke” when compared to a blueberry’s coloration, “dark and gem-like.” A snail at rest “three handfuls away,” sleeping on its meal, a leaf. His first two drawings are failures, so he returns in the afternoon, locating the same cluster by first finding the same snail. After another session—successful, the sketch itself reproduced in the book—he spies a group of mollusks on the ground, unhurt: “I placed five of them side by side, and to my surprise it was easy for me to recognize the one who had been my guide.” What a sense we get of Berger from that one appellation: guide.
First published in 2011 when Berger was 83, Bento’s Sketchbook is a curious, late-style text. On any given page one can find an ink drawing, of a flower or a Peragino painting copied in situ; a philosophical proposition by Spinoza (a significant early influence and, allegedly, Marx’s favorite philosopher); or a brief essay, some philosophical, on drawing or storytelling, others anecdotal. It’s a brief 176 pages, with the quotations, prose, and images given ample space to breathe. As one reads, there is a sense that their arrangement contains a kind of argument about time and politics, human suffering and art, and the way we, as agents of perception, see—or don’t see—the slice of history we’ve been marooned on. Berger himself said of the text: “I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvelous and the terrible.”
Pondering the book’s opening—and pondering too what Berger means when he refers to a “shared awareness about where and to what the practice of drawing can lead”—I can’t help but think of the artists across time whose spiritual company Berger kept. I think of the academic painter Frederic Leighton, who spent a week in Capri in 1859 drawing a lemon tree. (To one side of his lapidary drawing, Leighton also gently rendered a handful of snails.) I think of Andrew Wyeth, who used to collect plants to bring back and study their coloration in his studio. I think of the modern Spanish master Antonio Lopez Garcia, who, in the autumn of 1990, worked for a frustrating month to paint, after his rigorously optical method, a quince tree—only to declare failure and switch to graphite.
It is, after all, the torturous lot of the artist to know how it feels to want to remake the world and to sometimes admit that one simply can’t draw a plum to save one’s life. Berger understood this dialectic in his bones—both as an artist and, in a way, as a political writer—and it enabled him to go to the open, empathetic, experimental places he so often does in his work. It’s why his prose can feel like a sympathetic hand innervating out towards its subject, as it does throughout Bento’s Sketchbook, where failures—personal, artistic, historical—abound. The book is exemplary of the late critic’s thought, wherein art and life and the pyrrhic struggle against history are all ineluctably bound up.
Earlier this year, I went to a flea market in Barcelona with a close friend, a Chinese expatriate and painter. Spiritually-inclined, intellectual, occasionally a model for other painters, she was casually picking through a heap of leather jackets. It was a big, walled-in space, this market, full of people milling about, even more full of things. Stalls full of antiques and electronics, tables covered in smaller objects: verdigris’d cutlery, earrings and bangles, porcelain figurines and pewter icons of faith. Against one table leg leaned an old pornographic calendar. A golden, soft-focus image of desires past, adrift in a 4K, foreclosed future.
We passed a pile of old, square-format Canson sketchbooks, softened by time. I picked one up, opened it. Inside were sketches in brown ink: a man’s face in profile, a standing figure, a dog curled in on itself, snout to tail. They almost recalled the drawings of Rembrandt in their brevity, their walnut ink. (At one time, Spinoza lived a couple hundred meters from the man, and scholars believe they probably met; Berger wrote that “he was the first artist to take the tragic isolation of the individual as his recurring theme.”) But no, the comparison was too generous. They weren’t particularly good, these sketches. And perhaps Spinoza’s drawings were like this: middling and general and nothing like his arithmetic prose. We’ll never know, his sketchbooks lost to time. I turned a page and there was a beach scene which could be any beach, anywhere.
And yet, quality aside, there was undeniably something intimate about these sketches, especially compared to the kitschy paintings found at a place like this. In different essays, Berger articulates a distinction between drawing and painting: where in front of a painting we typically identify with its subject, interpreting the image for its own sake, with drawings we’re more apt to identify with the artist themself. The marks on paper we read as phenomenological shorthand for their creator’s act of looking. They say: I saw this.
Hence, I thought, the diffuse, ghostly presence in these pages, the sense that this sketchbook weighed just a little more than a blank one, somehow. A desiring subject once drew in this, someone to whom these phenomena of life called out. What were they like, I wondered, what was the character of their hopes and dreams?
Were they happy?
Did they see clearly?
Before he was anyone of note, John Berger drew. In 1942, at 16 years old, he left a miserable boarding school to strike out for London, where he enrolled in the Central School of Art. In “To Take Paper, To Draw,” he reflects on those times, the experience of educating himself in “the mystery of anatomy and love” in the life room, while overhead RAF fighters split the skies to intercept German planes at the coast. He would go on to enlist in 1944—serving in Northern Ireland, where he also wrote letters home on behalf of some of his barely literate cohort—afterwards continuing his studies at London’s Chelsea School of Art.
These historical circumstances forged a certain hardscrabble, class-conscious disposition. For one, Berger enduringly hated being called an “art critic,” recalling his youthful milieu’s opinion of them: “[a critic] wasn’t as bad as an art dealer, but he was a pain in the arse.” More significantly, witnessing a world in shambles sounded something in Berger, on a deep, moral level. Of time spent painting in Livorno in the forties, he writes:
“This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power.”
He would, of course, go on to become a celebrated novelist and one of the most influential art critics of his generation, perhaps most known for authoring Ways of Seeing, a Marxist rejoinder to Kenneth Clark’s art historical program Civilization.
Contrary to Clark’s Enlightenment-narrative traditionalism, Berger’s approach, following Walter Benjamin, was to brush art history against the grain. The collection of pictorial and print essays begins with a piece drawing heavily on Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; popularized, in its discussion of the female nude, the term “the male gaze”; and was adapted into a four-part BBC program that Berger himself presented. Where Civilization begins with a reverent montage of famous statuary and architecture, the first episode of Ways of Seeing opens on Berger—his hair curly and bouffant, his patterned shirt tight, his voiceover evincing a slight lisp—cutting the head of a Venus out of a framed Botticelli with a box knife.
While this program is notably one of the most successful incursions of Marxist thought into popular culture, to most, I imagine, Berger’s allure as a critic lies less in his iconoclasm than in his playfulness, empathy, and ability to see through prejudice. Or, put differently, his magic trick is an ability to shuttle, often within a single essay, between two perspectives: that of the critic unpacking historical-materialist factors, and that of the artist alone in his dingy garrett, cunning and modest and hungry after the understanding of deeper things. In his own words:
“Having looked at a work of art, I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively enter the studio in which it was made. And there I wait in the hope of learning something of the story of its making...I talk to myself, I remember the world outside the studio, and I address the artist whom I maybe know, or who may have died centuries ago. Sometimes something he has done replies.”
Which is to say, Berger practiced criticism on his own terms. He played with the genre, with critical distance, with the inclusion of his mental feints—erring or desirous or curious—all to meet his subjects on their terms. An essay on Caravaggio, a master class on the artist’s use of shadow, begins in a sort of yearning void, several paragraphs of Berger himself apostrophizing an absent lover. An essay on Degas starts with a poem, one on Goya contains fragments—“Act I Scene 4,” “Act II Scene 8,” etc.—of a play featuring the artist. Still another, on Titian, is a conversation by post between Berger and his daughter Katya.
Like an artist answering a muse, Berger can begin with an overriding question and from there grope—gracefully, eloquently, excitedly—towards a truth. A consideration of Hans Holbein the Younger begins with an admittance of ignorance: Berger doesn’t quite understand how paintings elicit “pity” from us, how—or even whether—catharsis is possible in the form. To find out, he proposes a journey to see Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ, only for it to become a different kind of essay when he learns upon arrival that the painting, which he thought was in Berne, is in Basel.
He stays, wandering through the gallery in Berne, thinking of the Holbein and of what multiple characters from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot say of it. Several rooms in, Berger stops before a painting by Caroline Müller, one that initially strikes him as “rather dull.” However, as his eyes move about the picture, he is arrested by a passage with three apple trees; they “take his breath away.” These square inches of the canvas—these were truly seen.
He walks back past paintings in previous rooms—by Courbet, Monet, Braques, Rothko—and in each he sees something new. And so, the piece, finally, has become one about the fundamental dilemma the visual artist faces: how to see, and keep seeing, truly. And, moreover, how to keep communicating freshly that revelation in paint: “Without a pictorial language, nobody can render what they see. With one, they may stop seeing. Such is the odd dialectic of the practice of painting or drawing appearances since art began.”
Any honest critic must admit this artistic dilemma applies equally to language proper. That is, the critic’s real task is not to find the totalizing, “correct” lens, but to be flexible, open, willing to discover the language for what they see. As Berger wrote elsewhere: “Explanations, analyses, interpretation, are no more than frames or lenses to help the spectator focus his attention more sharply on the work.” The joy of reading Berger is that of witnessing him—with the love, care, and singular attention of an artist—grind a lens for the matter at hand. His aim never seemed to be right, just to see the world, history, an artist or beloved friend, a little more clearly.
I have myself spent a fair amount of time drawing and painting, training myself to see a little more clearly. I’ve passed winter mornings working in charcoal from plaster busts, their blank, grecian eyes unseeing. I’ve painted beside babbling brooks, chasing color notes towards their evening dissolution. I’ve waited in third-floor French studios while models in break-time kimonos shook out the pins and needles of arduous poses. I’ve stared at breasts not out of lust but to check and recheck the distance from chin to aureolas, aureolas to navel. I’ve filled my own share of sketchbooks.
But I wasn’t in sunny Barcelona to draw. The painter J.A.D. Ingres advised students to “draw with your eyes even when you cannot draw with a pencil,” so let’s say I was doing that. I considered myself on an existential sabbatical, of sorts. As in, the “has any decision I’ve made in the near-decade since college been rational?” kind. Mostly, though, I went there to spend time with my friend. We talked a lot, about our hopes and dreams for the future, about art and AI, about the widening gyre that was the present moment. We drank, as per.
On or around January sixth I went for a walk alone, stopping at one point to read a Don Delillo novel in a park. There was a man there with parrots, who I’d seen before. His form of busking was to have tourists crucify their arms and then he would sprinkle seeds on them. The brilliantly green birds would alight and the tourists would smile while their companions took photos. He seemed amiable, the busker, but he had a doberman shortchained to a bench that growled maliciously at passers-by.
There’s a trick for when you’ve looked at a painting too long: you use a mirror to flip the image and thereby startle into clarity the flaws of proportion or angle. The point being that you can look at something so long you stop seeing it. Sometimes, I wished for a mirror big enough to flip my life’s image, to call the flaws of proportion and angle to account. Through my studies, I have come to understand that all we have as humans are “ways of seeing,” that before anything—judgement, appreciation, scorn—we first look. It’s quite hard to see things clearly, especially these days.
The sun was lowering, all the shadows lengthening, the pages of my book growing dim. I recalled a line from another of Delillo’s novels, Zero K: “Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”
I struggled to think about the political and economic and academic situations back home. They seemed hazy and out of proportion at this distance.
I felt a little bit like I didn’t know where home was.
One section from Bento’s Sketchbook crystalizes Berger’s sensibility writ large, his ability to suspend a tender dialectic that yokes the personal to the historical, while privileging neither. It’s an essay recounting an airy friendship with a Cambodian woman whom Berger meets at a municipal pool in France. He notices her ginger-colored cap, her peculiar style of swimming, the manner in which she enters and leaves the pool aided by her husband:
“When she first came into the pool and wanted to enter the water, he would climb halfway down the ladder and she would sit on one of his shoulders and then he would prudently descend until the water was over his hips and she could launch herself to swim away.”
We wonder: do the two of them caretake some kind of pain? In an essay on Degas—whose late, candid pastels were, notably, of women bathing—Berger writes: “The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.” Like much of Berger’s criticism, this observation is also auto-portraiture. As the woman leaves the swimming area, Berger’s eye registers an everyday, heroic endurance: while she doesn’t limp, her body is “taut, as if stretched on tenterhooks.”
Eventually Berger speaks with them. He learns she is Cambodian, a painter whose pain stymies her craft, that she fled to Europe in her twenties. Afterwards, Berger lies in the grass contemplating the encounter. Contemplating the woman’s pain as synecdochal of her country of exile’s pain, its political cruelties, its genocides:
“Gazing at the willows, I watched their leaves trailing in the wind. Each leaf a small brushstroke. I found it impossible to separate the pain to which her body was apparently heir from the pain of her country’s history during the last half century.”
This impossibility of separation points to a truth, one that artists across time have intuited. When a painter isolates a figure—when Millet captures a peasant toiling, or Kollwitz a mother clutching a dead child—the figure is not only symbolic of some larger, historical struggle, but also simply a record of how we, each of us, carry history’s burden inside. Millet, the subject of a superb essay by Berger, wrote of a drawing by Michelangelo: “When I saw that drawing of his in which he depicts a man in a fainting fit—I felt like the subject of it, as though I were racked with pain. I suffered with the body, with the limbs, that I saw suffer.”
So moved, Berger decides to give this woman a prized Japanese brush, and months later he is gifted a painting of hers in return, of a bird. At first, Berger admires its integrated beauty. Then he looks again, more deeply, and sees something else:
“When you enter the drawing, however, and let its air touch the back of your head, you sense how this bird is homeless. Inexplicably homeless.”
Just so, the individuals foregrounded in Bento’s Sketchbook are those who have been made inexplicably homeless. This Cambodian woman in a French swimming pool, doubly in exile when pain keeps her from her art. Baruch “Bento” Spinoza, excommunicated at 24 by his Jewish community, his later years spent philosophizing on man’s relationship to his own passions and to nature, earning his living working as a lens grinder. And, close to Berger’s heart, Errhard Frommhold, his first publisher, who in the 1970s, in East Germany, was terminated from his position at the Verlag der Kunst, banished by GDR political forces to perform “socially useful” work. He became an assistant gardener at a public park. One can picture him there, like a figure from a Millet, bent beneath historical forces greater than he.
To see in these accounts the “hope and despair that millions of people live with” is to begin to understand Berger’s existential project. In that same essay about Degas, Berger remarks on his, Andrea Mantegna‘s, and Michelangelo’s shared fascination with martyrdom: “All three wondered if it wasn’t this that defined mankind.” “Martyr” derives from the Greek word for “witness”—which, as a verb, also means “to see.” In early usage, “martyr” designated those who saw and believed Christ’s acts and were persecuted. Across centuries of religious violence, its meaning was ultimately constrained to mean someone who dies for their beliefs. To recuperate its original sense, is to entertain the possibility of a more profound kind of seeing, that which is negatively implied by the scriptural dilemma of those who, having eyes, see not. The martyr’s promise is that truth is, in fact, seeable—and it is this promise which flickers through Berger’s oeuvre.
Because it can seem, in modern times, like the dilemma has surfaced again, the chasmic distinction now between those who “witness” history’s lessons, and those who don’t. Berger ends a brief, elegiac essay about Errhard with a consideration of an etching by Kathe Kollwitz. It’s a three-quarters self-portrait in which she wears a small earring, the background a scratchy darkness that threatens the integrity of her form. Thinking of Errhard—and no doubt thinking too of the encompassing darkness that was the 20th century—Berger concludes: “To decide to engage oneself in History requires, even when the decision is a desperate one, hope. An earring of hope.”
Ingres also said that we should “love truth because it is also beauty.” Sometimes this is easy enough, things are self-evidently beautiful and his syllogism lands neatly: sunsets, mountain vistas, trees and flowers and flowering trees. Softly turning in bed to discover the face of a lover in profile, beatified by sleep, half-protected, half-made vulnerable by early morning light. But that’s only one half of Berger’s equation—it’s the marvelous and the terrible. Would that it were an even split.
In our “fake news” era, Pilate’s vertiginous question has returned as farce: “What is truth?” Politicians are seemingly unconcerned with it, nihilistic and uncaring, often deranged. Violence is pandemic, a future-numbed unrest our existential medium. History, any curatorial respect for it anyways, is slipping through our fingers—or perhaps, to purloin Benjamin’s famous image, it’s rapidly accumulating behind us as inchoate debris, we ourselves borne helplessly into the future. If Ingres is right and the two are twinned, one might today also ask: “What is beauty?” The brain skips once, and then again.
It’s there though, flickering behind appearances, in every good, loving deed or word, every true thing said about past or present, every hopeful thing said about the future. Which is to say, in these times, I think truth becomes only more beautiful, so too the ability to look squarely and with clear eyed conviction for its traces amidst the “marvelous and the terrible.” To read Berger is to come home to this sensibility, this respect for and devotion to the search. It is to remind oneself that it’s possible to live in truth’s service. A reminder that the earring of hope is there, we just have to learn to see it.
I closed the sketchbook and set it down on the table, turning to look for my friend in the crowd.
There she was, an unmistakable silhouette.
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Philip Harris is an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books. He currently studies painting at a private studio in New Hampshire.