Titian by John Berger Page A

its forest. Many things stayed hidden, others spoke to all my senses. It was as if my own gaze took on flesh from contact with the thing seen and then blew on it with warm breath which was almost visible, as when one breathes into frozen air.
    At about the same time, I came to understand that I was never more alive than when I was able to give myself, even if only partially, to such an exchange. The capacity to join myself to what I was looking at – and particularly if it was something which had been created – offered me nothing less than immortality – for I left in this thing, destined to outlive me, some scrap of what I had lived.
    A river painted by Courbet, containing something of my own experience of water flowing, of wetness, of the visible, was more intensely and permanently alive than I could ever be. And, what is more, it conferred upon me a little of its own immortality. It went beyond me and tugged me into the universal. A prelude by Bach, taking the same path as one of my dreams, but surpassing it in solidity and precision, would then miraculously lend my dream, retrospectively, its own grace.
    At this age, too, I came upon my dearest wish: The best thing that might happen, I decided, would be to becomeentirely a painting, a novel, a quartet. Not as a protagonist, whose own life was built into art, but in a more diffused way, to become the under-canvas for a portrait of a gentleman, to become the recurring rhyme of a poem, or to become a description of people dancing at a ball. Thus I would breathe onto such creations and be materialised in them for ever.
    At first, I invented a god who lived in the sky, surrounded by a committee of those who were timeless and who looked through a telescope to direct the story of my life! Later, my narcissism pared away by the years, I found enough comfort in the idea that with or without a telescope focused on me, a simple movement of a human face (mine or somebody else’s) could be the equivalent of a work of art, and that it was the quality of seeing – and, equally, the power of the invitation to look – which offered that feeling of cosmic harmony which I had discovered when a painting welcomed me into its forest.
    I started to hunt everywhere for promises of this magic, a magic which is both permanent and ephemeral, inimitable and universal. And so it was that I was led, with the passage of time, to become a film critic, still searching for this sudden solidity and swift incarnation which we call
meaning
.
    The Rape of the Sabines
, which I had goggled at long ago by the flaring paraffin lamp and which, for a fraction of a second, surrounded the whole world with its frame, had little by little shown me how art with its miraculous eye – an eye which both fixes and liberates – can seize the essential.
    When in 1990 I went to the Titian exhibition in Venice, I saw the old painter coming towards me, and I saw myself spread out in paint on a scrap of canvas. This is what made me want to start a dialogue with John: he who had hinted to me how life welcomes art, he who knew, as well as I do, that everything still escapes us.
    Katya Berger Andreadakis

    â€˜That’s purity,’ he said,
    â€˜It is the same on the slopes as in your entrails.’
    And he spread his hands as would
    an old experienced God creating clay
    and heavenliness together.
    Odysseus Elytis

Letters
    PIAZZA SAN MARCO, VENICE
    John
,
    What do I think about Titian? In one word on a postcard: flesh.
    Love, Katya
    AMSTERDAM
    Kut
,
    All right, flesh. First, I see his own, when he’s old. Why do I immediately think of Titian as an old man? Out of solidarity – given my own age? No, I don’t think so. It’s to do with our century and the bitterness of its experience. It’s always searching for rage and wisdom rather than harmony. Late Rembrandts, late Goyas, Beethoven’s last sonatas andquartets, late Titians … Imagine the élan of a century