Titian by John Berger

Preface
I
    The first regular money I earned – I was a painter at the time – was working for the Worker’s Education Association in London. Three evenings a week I would take the tube to Edgware and talk with London Transport bus drivers and conductors about art. I was younger than any of them and had (for the epoch) outrageously long hair.
    Some of the bus people painted as a hobby and would show me their work; others, for different reasons, were curious about how paintings are made and why. I think they put up with me because I seemed to them improbable. At the same time, they didn’t disbelieve me. And so they accepted me as a kind of expert of the unexpected.
    â€˜You gave us a surprise last week,’ they’d say. ‘What have you got up your sleeve tonight?’ I brought books with me and, drinking cups of tea and eating the cakes which one of the conductresses had baked, we turned the pages …
    I received more from them than they did from me. I began to learn something about the space in their lives – and for each one it was slightly different – which they hoped their experience of art might fill. I began to see dimly how life can welcome art.
    Years passed, and I became a writer. Some of the books I wrote were about painting and artists. My work owed a lot to certain philosophers and art historians – to Wölfflin, Antal, Max Raphael, Klingender, Ortega y Gasset, Hauser, Berenson, Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and others. Yet I’m no art historian. I am too impatient, and I live too much in the present.
    When I want to get closer to works from the past, I do drawings from them. (As I have done drawings from Titian’s paintings.) This is, however, a gestural approach, not an historical one. In drawing, you try to touch, if only for an instant – like playing tag – the master’s vision.
    What still intrigues me most is the question I first faced during those evenings in Edgware. How does a work of art, once created, re-enter life? Promising what?
    About this there are still stories to be told and, as with any story, they have to be followed rather than invented.
    Katya, my daughter, grew up surrounded by a lot of art books. Later she travelled and would visit museums and send me postcards. We didn’t talk much about painting – far more about places, films, animals, language. When she sent methe first card from Venice, I replied hoping that she would reply. She did, and this story began.
    John Berger
    PS Katya’s letters were written in French, which is her first language; mine were in English. Much later, Katya translated my letters into French, and I did the same with hers into English. We have used my English translations for this book.
II
    As long as I can remember, I have been used to looking at paintings. Without any fuss, a monograph on Caravaggio or the catalogue of a Poussin exhibition was dumped on my knees, and I was left alone to turn the pages. By a flaring paraffin lamp – this was in a decrepit, out-of-the-way farmhouse in Provence where I spent the most luminous moments of my childhood – I started, as I looked at these books, to dream – a bit like one of those figures in a Chagall painting crossing the sky above the roofs of churches.
    Stories were prompted by the contours of an angel playing a musical instrument. Others came panting from the clenched bodies of
The Rape of the Sabines
. Soon yet others were being whispered from between fruits in a still-life, from the borders of a colour, from the scratches of a texture.
    Several years later – this was when I was earning my first wages working evenings at a McDonald’s – I realised how there’s no communication more total than that between an object (preferably a work of art) and the one watching it. That painting over there, that story, that melody, but also that hairstyle or that expression – each took me by the hand and led me into