I’ve never been to Colmar, and there’s no picture of the altarpiece, which was painted by the German master Matthias Grunewald, in the edition of “About Looking” that I’m consulting. I could search online, of course (something I couldn’t have done when the piece first appeared or when I first read it a decade or so later), to see what Berger was talking about. But I don’t think I’ve ever done that, because even though he describes the altarpiece in careful detail — “It was painted on hinged panels of wood. When these were shut, those before the altar saw the Crucifixion, flanked by St. Anthony and St. Sebastian. When the panels were opened, they saw a Concert of Angels and a Madonna and Child, flanked by an Annunciation and Resurrection” — what matters to me more is his experiences of looking at it.
“About Looking” (1980)
An artifact of early-16th-century Europe — an era experienced by many, according to Berger, as “a time of damnation” — that depicts scenes of biblical history strikes Berger as brutal and despairing when he sees it first in 1963, and as hopeful and compassionate when he revisits it. Those impressions are the mirror images of his own state of mind at the beginning and end of a period that started in personal and political optimism and ended in disorientation and defeat. The hope of the early ’60s gave him the security to embrace gloom, while the desolation of the ’70s left him in need of solace. A single work of art answered to both needs. “In a period of revolutionary expectation,” Berger concludes, “I saw a work of art which had survived as evidence of the past’s despair; in a period which has to be endured, I see the same work miraculously offering a narrow pass across despair.”
I find that sentence moving enough that I may never need to see the altarpiece for myself. The idea that art can offer a measure of hope in bad times is a commonplace these days and can easily slide toward sentimentality and escapism. But for Berger art offers not a refuge so much as a way of living in history, of grasping the complexity of the past and the individual’s changing relationship to it. The altarpiece, anchored in the facts of its own epoch — wars of religion; rapid technological change; plague and paranoia — reaches across the centuries as a reminder of the kind of meaning only art can provide.
Similarly, “Between Two Colmars” can remind a 21st-century reader of the urgency and complexity of looking at art. Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.
Berger’s centennial will arrive on Nov. 5. Almost 10 years after his death, his presence is still felt in pockets of the culture. His best-known book, “Ways of Seeing,” has been a staple of art-history classes and a fixture on the bookshelves of critically minded young people for more than half a century. New York Review Books has been steadily reissuing his fiction and criticism, including, earlier this fall, the 1980 collection “About Looking,” which includes the essay I just quoted. A new biography, by Tom Overton, has just been published, the second in a decade.