John Berger Centenary

I decided to follow a similar format to Cadmium Red by beginning with a letter in the form of a booklet. I knew John enjoyed receiving these little books from me and I thought that if the first one could be intriguing enough it would hopefully draw him into a longer correspondence. I was conscious that he was now 85 years old and didn’t want to waste his precious time so I began in that first letter by imagining taking him around the Sainsbury Centre (I know he would have loved the place) and introducing him to some of my favourite works there.

The various book/letters that made up the Cadmium Red correspondence had been in a variety of formats, mainly dictated by the contents of each individual letter but with this new enterprise I decided to try to keep my correspondence to John to a regular size. As before the formality of the book format helped me present my letters and any illustrations I chose to use with the text in the order I wanted things to be read and seen.

I made a couple of trips up to SCVA to help me write that first letter, each time heading straight for my favourite drawing in the collection, Giacometti’s 1935 Self Portrait. One of the advantages of SCVA, apart from the fact that was no charge for admission, was that the galleries were rarely crowded so I could stand and study any work for as long as I liked without blocking any other visitor’s view. The more time I spent studying Giacometti’s beautiful portrait - a drawing made, I realised, as much with a rubber as with a pencil - trying to work out what I wanted to say to John about it, the more I became aware of the other art surrounding me, all portraits from different periods: Egyptian tomb figures from the distant past right up to 20th century paintings by Bomberg and Soutine. I was surrounded by faces and this became the theme (and the title) of that first letter which I posted off to John in January 2011.

He replied with four hand-written pages on the 5th February, a wonderful letter reflecting on portraiture. In a postscript he added:

‘I see a correspondence between portraits and abandoned garments. You come upon a shirt, a dress, a pair of gloves, a pair of shoes, left behind by somebody you know well. It is simultaneously the most intimate reminder of that person and a declaration of their absence. In the term likeness isn’t there already a feeling of loss?’

This brought to mind the large fold-out drawing he’d made almost twenty years before for his book Pages of the Wound (the book I published in 1994) of his poems, drawings and photographs - the drawing of a nightdress, shoes and hair brush, all in fact belonging to Nella - the drawing that he made to accompany his poem Separation.

The correspondence continued steadily for the first months of the year. My letters were always in the uniform format, the pages sewn into paper covers to form a book. The typed text, which I wrote and revised several times until I was happy, was laid out on the computer to be easily readable (although sometimes I added handwritten sections to this printed text) and photographs and paintings were positioned in the text to illustrate a particular point. So in appearance my letters looked quite formal. As I posted them off to him I always pictured John taking these book/letters out of their envelope and enjoying how carefully I’d made them for him - I wanted each one to feel like a present. His letters by contrast were always handwritten, often with lots of changes and words crossed out, sometimes a section would be written in ballpoint instead of his usual fountain pen. They had a sense of urgency about them that suggested letters written at the speed of his thought. Looking back at the Cadmium Red letters from twelve years before the handwriting in them is cleaner, more controlled, with hardly any corrections. Perhaps those letters were more thought out in advance, perhaps John rewrote them as a fair copy before he sent them? I never asked him when I had the chance. Often too his envelopes would contain a loose postcard or picture cut from a magazine and placed between the folded A4 pages of the letter to illustrate his point.

Around June 2011, when the correspondence was well under way, I decided to approach the Sainsbury Centre to let them know what we were doing - those first six letters between us had all featured and discussed work almost exclusively from the SCVA collection. I was trying to avoid any major problems with image rights and thought that if they were enthusiastic about the project then that would be really helpful if any copyright difficulties arose later. I presented the idea and showed them the progress so far, I also showed them a copy of Cadmium Red to indicate how such a correspondence could be presented in book-form.

Despite funding problems I gradually came round to the idea of publishing the book myself, under the imprint Objectif, the publishing name I used for the small edition artist’s books I’d produced over the years.

Without the constraint of having to write all the time about works in the Sainsbury collection, the range of subjects discussed between us broadened. Each time I received one of John’s letters I had the habit of setting off, with the letter in my pocket, on walk along the footpath that ran behind our barn, across the fields and around the local farmer’s wood. The wood itself was unfortunately private and out of bounds to me but the public footpath that circled it was always full of interest, whether in winter when snow revealed a multitude of animal footprints or at other times of the year when the bushes and trees were full of birds or the fields alive with hares and deer. Often I would stop on the way round the footpath to read John’s latest letter again. Almost always by the time I’d got back home I had the subject, or at least the germ of an idea about the subject of my next letter back to him.

In this way our letters ranged over many different things. We talked about a variety of artists, looking closely at the work of Giacometti, Modigliani, Auerbach and John’s friend Osip Zadkin (all artists represented in the Sainsbury collection). We wrote about our recollections of working with other writers and artists and explored a whole range of unexpectedly connected subjects including making drawings of the dead to encounters with owls and hares and the mythologies surrounding these creatures. Travels on the Silk Road were recalled and observations of the night sky in Tajikistan and the Alps; memories of the 1000-year-old carved stone churches at Lalibela, Ethiopia and meditations on angels in literature, art and film. 

Lapwing & Fox

"Both writers are sufficiently relaxed to be discursive as well as intently focused, and the book offers a delightfully informal but still serious account of what might be called an art friendship."

Andrew Lambrith

The Art Newspaper, 2016

"Stimulating, intimate, heartfelt and beautifully designed, this is a book to be treasured"  

Geoff Dyer

"It is such a true and lovely record - gentle, affectionate, seeking…I am so glad you have allowed your reader to listen in. And, of course, visually so beautiful."

Anne Michaels

"I love its form and concept and look, the hand-written, the visuals, the back and forth, the type. I love it."

Michael Ondaatje

"Fascinating book, interesting interaction.."

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Books About Art customer

Over to You

"Both Bergers approach art from uniquely informed angles, and we see them enrich and enlighten one another... Yet there are precious few personal stories included here..."
Lauren Moya Ford

Hyperallergic

"I was breathless at times being witness to the delicate conversations and the beautiful topics discussed between these two... We should all be so lucky to have the closeness that these two shared."

The StoryGraph

"Much more interesting for me was the relationship between the two men... It has a deepness to it, in the discussion of the subject and the relationship between the father and son."
John Benson

Goodreads

"Over to you was what the Bergers would yell at each other during their table tennis games, and it is a delight to see a similarly intense repartee at work in their letters."
The Art Newspaper

Smoke

"Smoke, [Berger] concludes, is a 'sign of mankind'—evidence not of man's endurance but of the promise of companionship and stories shared."

Jonathon Sturgeon

Art in America

"An ode to imperfection, Smoke turns atomising rhetoric on its head through rugged playful sketches and aphorisms."

The London Review Bookshop

"This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society's attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant."

New York Review Books