the Lantskip round it measures.
Russet Lawns, and Fallows Gray,
Where the nibling flocks do stray.
In Landscape and Memory (1995), Simon Schama argues that ‘landscapes are culture before they are nature – constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock’. The best place to explore this in Berger’s work is the discussion of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (1727–28) in Ways of Seeing. Here, Berger made the painting pivot between the traditions of portraiture and landscape as part of a broader argument that oil painting became a dominant form because it corresponded to a certain phase of capitalism – a way of turning the visible world into tangible property. Again with an eye to plural ways of seeing, Berger packed a variety of different perspectives into this description. Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art (1949) provided him with a quote weighing up two of Gainsborough’s opinions on the painting of landscape, from a famous letter about ‘being sick of portraits and wishing to take his Viol de Gamba and walk off to some sweet village where he can paint landscips’ to another in which the painter writes:
Mr Gainsborough presents his humble respects to Lord Hard-wicke, and shall always think it an honour to be employed in anything for His Lordship; but with regard to real views from Nature in this country, he has never seen any place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude.
In the TV version of Ways of Seeing, the director Mike Dibb superimposed a ‘Trespassers Keep Out’ sign on the tree above the heads of Mr and Mrs Andrews, emphasising Berger’s point that the couple wanted to be painted in the land they owned because it defined their gentility. Only those with property could vote, and the poachers on their land could be deported.
Berger’s conclusions raised varied criticisms. The book incorporated the artist and art historian Lawrence Gowing’s written objections to Berger imposing himself between the ordinary art lover ‘and the visible meaning of a good picture’:
May I point out that there is evidence to confirm that Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews were doing something more with their stretch of country than merely owning it. The explicit theme of a contemporary and precisely analogous design by Francis Hayman suggests that the people in such pictures were engaged in philosophic enjoyment of ‘the great Principle … the genuine Light of uncorrupted and unperverted Nature’.
Berger’s counterargument was that one form of enjoyment does not preclude the other. If the couple are enjoying nature philosophically, they are only able to do so because they are not distracted by the possibility of being chased off it with shotguns and horse whips.
Also in 1972, the academic John Barrell published The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place. In 1980 he followed it with The Dark Side of the Landscape, in which he asked whether, when looking at the works of Gainsborough, Constable and George Morland, we ‘identify with the interests of their customers and against the poor they portray’.2
Barrell and Berger each developed their ideas on landscape through critiquing the other’s. They share some of the same motivations – Berger declared himself ‘still among other things a Marxist’ as late as 2005,3 Barrell is a ‘leftist’. But their differences become clearer in Berger’s review of The Dark Side of the Landscape, which concludes ‘Mightn’t the slogan be: Down with Enclosures! Intellectual as well as rural?’ Berger found ‘the English academic role (so dependent upon the voice and syntax)’ preserved in the book, and lamented its tendency ‘to encourage specialisation at the price of isolation’. On balance, he thought,
John Barrell’s book is a brilliant reading of certain sets of pictorial conventions (signs) and how they changed during a given historical period. But it gives little indication of knowledge, or even curiosity, about the two practices which lie, as it were, on either side of the sign. In this case the practice of painting on one side, and the practice of poor or landless peasants on the other. And so, though the book discloses and denounces an ideological practice, it contributes to and confirms the closed intermediary space in which such ideology operates.
These two practices are forms of work. Berger’s preoccupation with the work done by artists was shaped early in life. As a teenager, Berger wrote vivid short stories about the music hall and the French Resistance. But, as he describes in ‘To Take Paper, to Draw’, he went to art school (the Central and then Chelsea schools) rather than university, and, though he gave up painting around the age of thirty, his writing seems always to be accompanied by drawing. Sometimes this is purely imaginative, in much the way that say Ruskin’s or Hazlitt’s criticism is often nuanced by the experience of having made art. In the case of Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), or ‘A Gift for Rosa Luxemburg’ (2015, collected here), the companionship of drawing is, though the term seems counterintuitive, literal: Berger’s drawings are reproduced alongside the text.
We have to be careful here not to oversimplify the relative merits of practising and non-practising critics. In ‘The Function of Criticism’, T. S. Eliot described moving from ‘the extreme position that the only critics worth reading were the critics who practised, and practised well, the art of which they wrote’ to demand for ‘a very highly developed sense of fact’ – for critics who could offer ‘interpretation’ in the sense of ‘putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed’. Berger’s critical dialogue with Barrell was bound up with his most sustained engagement with the idea of landscape, the Into Their Labours trilogy (1979–91).4 Through imaginative, fictional writing, these three books – Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag – engage with the work of the peasants among whom he went to live in the 1970s, and whose companionship he has called ‘my university’.5 The ‘Historical Afterword’, extracted here, gives an outline of the approach to history that the trilogy takes. This is a landscape in the sense my title proposes: metaphorical perhaps, but equally alive to those who control both the appearance and the actuality of the terrain, and to those who live in it. A Fortunate Man puts it like this,
Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal.
BERGER’S WORK IS an invitation to reimagine; to see in different ways. Accordingly, the texts here are divided into two parts. The first collates a range of pieces that tell us about the individuals – not necessarily visual artists – who have shaped Berger’s thought. Some – Antal, Raphael – are straightforwardly art critics; others – Brecht, Barthes, Benjamin – do not fit easily into that category, but nevertheless demonstrate how early Berger came to much of what now constitutes the expanded art-school reading list. They all play their role in shaping the self-definition as a storyteller with which, as I noted in the Introduction to Portraits, Berger frames the diversity of his written output. To consider these relationships as ones of influence would be inconsistent with this self-definition. Rather than the collective, collaborative act of storytelling, the idea of ‘influence’ seems more associated with the individualism of novel writing, and a capitalist logic of debt and restitution that Berger rejects.
The remainder of this section freely explores the limits of how writing can be about art, and the way in which Berger had been led by his painter’s eye towards storytelling. It ends with ‘The ideal critic and the fighting critic’, a kind of manifesto for how to put these examples into practice. By the end of Part I we see how, particularly in ‘Kraków’, the felt presences of Joyce, Márquez, and the tradition that now includes writers like W. G. Sebald, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith
