Summary
Chapter 5 focuses on a specific tradition of oil painting, which reached its fullest embodiment roughly between 1500 and 1900. In this tradition, the emphasis is often on objects that are buyable, suggesting a relationship between oil painting and the desire to possess. Although the literal act of oil painting has existed for centuries--pigments have been mixed with oil to create paint since the ancient world—the tradition that Berger refers to here is characterized by its emergence at around the time that capitalism began to take hold in Europe. This tradition set the norms that continue to define pictorial representation, privileging a certain sort of formal verisimilitude that continues to inform our understanding of "artistic genius."
Berger begins the chapter by posing the question: "What is a love of art?" Within this tradition of oil painting, "love of art" comes to stand in for "desire to possess." This is illustrated with a painting of an art collector, depicted amongst his vast collection of paintings. In the logic of this picture—which represents the logic of oil painting in whole—paintings are, before all else, objects to be owned. The contents that these paintings depict, then, exist as images of that which the collector may possess. This logic is related to the elaboration of capitalism in Europe around the time that the oil painting tradition came into fashion: the implicit possibility of owning objects depicted in oil painting upholds the ruling classes' desire to entrench the emerging power of capital. Moreover, Berger argues that this worldview, with its new attitudes towards property and exchange, was expressed by oil painting better than it could have been by any other medium: oil painting "reduced everything to the equality of objects" by privileging a certain kind of pictorial realism that created the impression of materiality. Oil painting is unique in its capacity to render the tangible details of an object, suggesting a greater degree of dimension, texture, and solidity than other mediums. As such, it lends itself to the glorification of physical objects, conflating the tangible with the real and, by extension, glorifying possession.
Notably, only a fraction of paintings from the multiple-century tradition are today considered "masterful." So what characterizes the large number of "mediocre" works? To Berger, this mediocracy comes from the fact that the average oil painting implicated in this tradition is essentially "hack work"—rather than meaningfully expressing any particular values, these paintings were created so that painters could put them to market and earn their keep. This contradiction between art and the market runs through the entire tradition of oil painting, lending a certain emptiness to most of its works. Berger refers here to Holbein's The Ambassadors, full of impressively-rendered objects that surround two men. The objects in the painting have all been elaborately worked over, possessing immaculate detail that creates the impression the viewer might reach out and touch them. This bolsters the visual desirability of these objects, serving an ideology that encourages people to buy material goods. However, a skull in the foreground of the painting is irreconcilable with this style: it is distorted and unrealistic, perhaps because of its metaphysical symbolism as a memento mori. Herein lies a major problem within this tradition of oil painting: there's little room for symbolism in a tradition that, first and foremost, privileges the tactile materiality of objects. This contradiction explains why, for example, oil paintings of Mary Magdalen appear so vacuous: the lustrous realism of the medium contradicts her own narrative of piety.
Berger mentions a couple of exceptional painters who deviate from this tradition, among them William Blake, who, despite studying oil painting, preferred to represent subjects as though they are transparent, unbound by the laws of gravity, or overall insubstantial. This sharply contrasts with Holbein's Ambassadors, which Berger returns to once again. He observes that the men in the painting gaze at the viewer with a strange sense of formality. Surrounded by objects associated with colonial conquest, Berger posits that this rigidity conveys a larger worldview in which the ruling class believed the world existed to serve them. Such a worldview undergirded colonialism, meaning that paintings like Holbein's upheld the oppressive relationship between colonizer and colonized. Here is another implicit contradiction: the men in the painting suggest a kind of "individual presence," through their distance and aloofness, yet this individualism—which implies equality between all individuals—is used in service of a colonial project that makes equality inconceivable. Similar contradictions run throughout oil painted portraits: the representational realism of the works makes it seem as though the viewer is close to the subject, yet the subject's formal distance and rigidity push the viewer away. This, says Berger, makes many oil painted portraits appear hollow, even comparing the expressions of their subjects to "masks."
Another genre within oil painting is the still-life. These, in Berger's view, amount to "simple demonstrations of what gold or money could buy," capitalizing on oil painting's capacity for representational verisimilitude to make material goods look appealing and incite a desire in the viewer to own more things. The same is true of paintings of animals and buildings, both of which tend to choose their subject matter for its association with social status—rather than depicting naturally beautiful exciting livestock or buildings, they tend to focus on objects that confirm the social status of their owners.
The category within oil painting considered to be "highest" was the mythological or historical picture. These were held in especially high esteem because, in the elite milieux where they circulated, knowledge of the classics was associated with moral virtue. However, to Berger, these paintings tend to strike a contemporary viewer as the emptiest of all. This is because their purpose was to supply the cultural elite with a set of references for their own behavior, allowing them to further the project of their own self-glorification. Rather than stimulating the viewer's imagination, they simply furnish him with an allegorical representation of his own experiences, reinforcing their own nobility. These paintings, then, must be empty: they require the space for the viewer to project his own experiences onto them.
Then, there's the "genre picture"—the opposite of the mythological painting in terms of perceived value. Genre paintings were thought to be vulgar, and served to prove that virtue was correlated with financial success. They peddled the "sentimental lie" that morality and wealth were connected, implicitly confirming the virtue of anyone who could afford to own one such painting. The average genre painting, according to Berger, asserts that the poor are happy serving the rich, whom they invariably aspire to become.
However, one category of oil painting deviates substantially from the tradition thus established: the landscape. This is primarily because, during the era in which the tradition was most prominent, nature wasn't yet subject to the activities of capitalism. Nature could never be possessed, and it could never be rendered as a tangible object. Thus, landscape painting, which began in Holland in the seventeenth century, remained relatively independent from the broader oil painting tradition. Nonetheless, certain exceptions to this statement exist, such as Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. The painting depicts a wealthy couple amidst a beautiful landscape—but because of the couple's inclusion, the landscape is fundamentally figured as an object of their property. The traditional art-historical narrative dictates that they wanted to be painted on their land due to their philosophical appreciation of nature, but Berger posits that this painting served another purpose: glamorizing the fact of land ownership.
Berger then claims that the essential character of oil painting is almost universally misunderstood: the dominant narrative within art history claims that oil paintings function as "windows open on to the world," yet, following his analysis, they function more like "a safe," a vault into which "the visible has been deposited" as the value of material goods is emphasized. The common misunderstanding of this tradition, claims Berger, happens because certain masters, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, broke free of its typical boundaries. Thus, the stereotype of the "great artist' emerged from the oil painting tradition, when, in reality, the works that are remembered today as masterful account for a relatively small percentage of oil paintings, and tend to contradict the values of the broader tradition itself. The stereotypical master in this tradition is plagued by one of its contradictions: artists are plagued by the fact that their paintings celebrate material goods and elite social status, caught in the contradiction between oil painting's visual language and the broader role of art.
To separate oneself from this tradition, then, requires an enormous degree of effort. Berger offers Rembrandt as one example of an artist who successfully divorced himself from the norms of the oil painting tradition—a shift that was fundamental to his reputation for mastery. He compares two self-portraits. The first, painted according to the conventions of this tradition, depicts nominally happy subjects, but conveys a sense of existential emptiness, richly advertising the subjects' good fortune and yet giving a sense of formality and rigidity beneath its veneer of happiness. In the second portrait, painted three decades later, the luscious, tangible details that characterized typical oil painting are absent. Only the painter remains, and his face is the most detailed area of the painting. All that's left in this painting, says Berger, is "the question of existence"—Rembrandt has successfully reappropriated the medium, refocusing it on deeper questions that the superficial glorification of material property.
Analysis
Chapter 5 returns to the standard text-and-image essay format that Berger employs in Chapters 1 and 3, using images to illustrate his writing. It begins with the observation—somewhat tongue-in-cheek—that "oil paintings often depict things," continuing by pointing out that these things are almost always, as it happens, buyable. Then, Berger notes that depicting an object in oil painting is similar to buying and owning the object. This thesis is, at first, controversial: owning a painting of a thing is not at all the same as owning the thing itself, when the painted object has no use value! But Berger will elaborate this over the course of the chapter, building a complex analogy between possessing something in real-life and the way of seeing that is implicit in the tradition of oil painting.
The possessive impulse often encoded in oil painting was first pointed out by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Berger quotes Levi-Strauss' proposition that some art contains an "avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even the spectator," accrediting this tendency to Western civilization as a whole. Berger narrows this proposition, claiming that it applies most strongly within the period of traditional oil painting. Although oil painting as a medium has existed since the ancient world, Berger points out that the peak of the tradition emerged when a specific style and technique, inaugurated by the use of oil on canvas, began to be elaborated in sixteenth-century Europe. The traditional way of seeing that Berger associates with oil painting continued until the late-19th century advent of Impressionism and Cubism; this is largely due to the fact that, as Berger points out, it hinges on a sense of verisimilitude. When photography became more widespread, the representational "realism" that characterized this tradition of oil painting became redundant, as it was no longer the medium best suited for capturing "pictorial likeness." However, during the time of its reign, this style of oil painting defined the conventions like "realism" and "artistic genius" that continue to guide art history today. Notably, he points out that this tradition is associated with the belief that "art prospers if enough individuals in society have a love of art"—indeed, this is the position that Kenneth Clark takes up in Civilization. Berger wants to probe deeper by asking further: "What is a love of art?"
Berger then inserts an image of a painting that depicts a room full of paintings: its subject is a seventeenth-century painting collector, an "art lover" in the sense that Clark's Civilization seeks to glorify. In the context of this image, as Berger points out, paintings are first and foremost objects to be bought and owned. This sense of ownership relies on the paintings' status as unique objects, drawing our attention back to Chapter 1's discourse on reproducibility: once the widespread reproduction of images means that paintings are no longer "unique," a convoluted attempt to retroactively glorify them tends to take hold, insisting that the artwork's value derives from its status as the original of a reproduction. In the painting full of paintings we see here, artworks are "sights of what [the subject] may possess"—and this is equally true of both the paintings within the painting and the larger painting itself. Berger refers once again to Levi-Strauss, who explains that, beginning in the Renaissance, painting became an "instrument of possession" thanks to the immense wealth amassed by the ruling class, particularly in Italy.
This observation is crucial: Berger reminds us of a point he's made in Chapter 1, that the art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. This is especially true in the case of the Renaissance, where the power of capital—that is, the power of money as opposed to land, merchants as opposed to aristocrats—was relatively new. Berger then proposes that the new attitudes towards property and exchange that began to take hold during this period were better expressed in oil painting than they possibly could have been by any other art form—a lofty proposition indeed. He follows this by noting that "oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects." Oil painting rendered anything that could be depicted as a commodity, reinforcing the logic of market exchange and privileging wealth. Sure, some exceptions to this tradition exist—Berger lists Rembrandt, El Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, and Turner as possible examples—but in general, oil paintings that are remembered today as historically important tend to represent a small subset of the overall tradition, disproportionately glorifying the work of a small cadre of "masters." The difficulty of this fact will become clear to anyone who visits an art museum, only to find themselves overwhelmed by the number of works on display, struggling to differentiate between the "third-rate" and "outstanding" works, perhaps because of the arbitrariness of the metrics by which we're taught to evaluate them.
In oil painting specifically, Berger observes that the differential between "masterpiece" and "average work" is exceptionally wide: not only does a "masterpiece" oil painting boast technical mastery and impressive imagination, but also a certain morale. The average work, he explains, was produced cynically, by a painter who was likely commissioned to depict a subject to which they were essentially indifferent in order to sell the painting as a product. This "hack work" is, Berger explains, a direct result of the market's increasingly insistent demands on art, which corresponds with the peak of the oil painting tradition. One can easily think of numerous contemporary artworks that illustrate this paradigm—works made average by their obvious investment in commercial value.
He then explains another central aspect of this oil painting tradition: the nature of the medium lends itself especially well to rendering "the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity" of its subject. This lends itself to a worldview in which "the real" is that which can be touched. Though the painted objects are two-dimensional, they suggest the appearance of depth, texture, and even temperature—tactile aspects that make it seem as though the viewer can physically feel the objects being represented. And, if one considers it, the jump from touching an object to possessing it is not so large after all. This point is illustrated by Holbein's The Ambassadors, painted in 1533, where Berger situates the beginning of this oil painting tradition. The painting's technique is extremely detailed and precise, calculated to put the spectator under the illusion that they are looking at real objects. Every detail lends itself to the sense that the viewer could touch the thing being depicted. As the viewer moves their gaze across the painting, every object represented is immediately "translated....into the language of tactile sensation." Although there are two figures in the painting engaged in some kind of interaction that might constitute a narrative, the materials and objects that surround them are truly front-and-center.
This tradition of oil painting, explains Berger, celebrated a "new kind of wealth"—unlike the fixed order of social class that had previously dominated, oil paintings came about at a time when wealth could be gained and accumulated. As such, the paintings that originated around this time had to demonstrate the desirability of all the goods that money could buy in order to uphold the interests of the elite. It is precisely this desirability that oil painting reinforces: the special sense of tangibility that the medium can offer supports the belief that the objects depicted are rewarding to touch, and, by extension, to own.
Curiously, in the Holbein painting, one object is depicted quite unlike all the others: a mysterious, distorted oval form at the bottom of the painting. Berger reads this object as a skull, noting that it served as a kind of memento mori: among all these realistically-rendered signs of wealth remains one distorted symbol of death. By rendering the skull differently from the other objects in the painting, Holbein imbues it with metaphysical implications: it is not merely an object to be touched and owned, but rather, a source of symbolic meaning. This alludes to the problem of depicting metaphysical symbols in oil painting: the "static materialism" and tendency towards pictorial realism tends to make symbols too literal. For this reason, Berger claims, religious oil paintings appear "hypocritical": the medium and stylistic inclinations of oil painting lend themselves to a literal, tangible depiction of the subject. This is illustrated by several oil paintings of Mary Magdalen, whose story revolves around the fact that she loved Christ so strongly, she came to accept the morality of flesh and repented for her past. However, the method by which she is painted makes it appear that this transformation hasn't taken place—given the materiality encouraged by the form, she is still depicted as "a takeable and desirable woman," the object of seduction.
Berger then turns our attention to the exceptional case of William Blake, whose training reflected the tradition of oil painting, yet whose works departed from it. He rarely painted in oil, instead seeking to depict figures as insubstantial, transparent, and intangible. This desire to transcend the materiality of oil painting, says Berger, offers us insights into the limitations of the typical oil painting tradition.
He returns, now, to Holbein's Ambassadors. He points out that the men in the painting face the spectator, but their faces and stances betray a lack of expectation of recognition; it appears that they are looking out of the painting onto something that excludes them. The objects depicted in the painting might help us decode this relationship: on the shelf between them sits a set of scientific instruments, a globe, a book of Christian hymns, and a lute. This globe reflects the newfound knowledge attained by Magellan's expeditions, which fundamentally undergirded colonial conquest; likewise, the books and lute represent the necessity of converting natives to Christianity and indoctrinating them to believe European civilization was more advanced, including its art. From this information, Berger proposes that the two ambassadors depicted in this painting were members of a class that believed "the world was there to furnish their residence in it": in other words, they were the agents of colonial conquest. Here, Berger notes that the relations between conqueror and colonized tended to be self-perpetuating as "the sight of the other confirmed each in his inhuman estimate of himself"—essentially, to look at and to be seen by the other reinforces both the colonizer and the colonized's understanding of himself. The ambassadors in Holbein's painting conveys a sense of aloofness that might be read as "individualized presence" or a kind that hadn't been seen before: the prospect of individualism insists on equality, but simultaneously relies on a system (in this case, colonialism) that makes actual equality inconceivable.
This conflict is also visible in other oil paintings, such as Suttermans' portrait of Ferdinand the Second of Tuscany and Vittoria Della Rovere. The formal verisimilitude of oil painting lends itself to the illusion that the viewer is within touching distance—and therefore, close and intimate—with the painting's subjects. Yet, their rigidity conveys a sort of distance, entrenching a sense of artificiality within the painting. This, Berger says, characterizes many "average" portraits from the oil painting tradition: the contradiction between the medium's closeness and the subject's distance creates an unnatural circumstance in which the subject matter appears at once nearby and far away, like "specimens under a microscope." As the oil painting portrait grew into an increasingly codified tradition, the sitter's face came to be painted in a more and more generalized fashion—as Berger puts it, "his features became the mask which went with the costume." The tension between oil painting's formal verisimilitude and representational distance was never resolved, resulting in a similar artificiality and discomfort to the "puppet TV appearance of the average politician."
Beyond portraiture, Berger discusses a category of painting unique to this oil painting tradition: the still life. Before oil painting, gold leaf was sometimes used by Medieval painters to convey a sense of wealth; oil painting, rather than using actual gold paint, became a representation of what gold (or, more generally, money) could buy. Rather than painting with gold, painters started to make riches their subject matter—paintings of what gold could buy. Berger illustrates this with an image of Still Life With a Lobster by De Heem, which renders an elaborate feast in extreme detail, showing off both the painter's technical mastery and the owner's wealth and luxurious lifestyle. Similarly, paintings of livestock from this tradition emphasized wealth by depicting the animals "like pieces of furniture with four legs," focusing on the pedigree and glorifying the fact of ownership. Similarly, paintings of buildings from this tradition tended to choose their subject matter not for its architectural interest, but for its status as a feature of landed property.
The most esteemed category in this tradition of oil painting, Berger explains, was the historical or mythological painting. However, as he observes, these paintings tend to strike the modern viewer as especially vacuous—but their historical prestige and contemporary emptiness are, according to Berger, directly related. The study of classics has historically been associated with a wealthy milieu, in which classical knowledge is thought to convey moral value. Berger debunks this connection by stating that classical texts "supplied the higher strata of the ruling class with a system of references for the forms of their own idealized behavior"—in essence, they set forth a series of codes and etiquette by which the elite could justify their behavior. Due to this fact, mythological oil paintings tend not to stimulate the viewer's imagination. Rather, they serve to embellish and illuminate the experiences that the viewer has already had, in order to confirm his preexisting view of himself as "noble." In this sense, the mythological scene, says Berger, "functions like a garment held out for the spectator-owner to put his arms into and wear": the scene, although fundamentally empty, serves to entertain the viewer's own conception of himself.
In opposition to the glorified mythological painting stood the "genre picture," which was thought to be vulgar. These paintings served to uphold the view that virtue was rewarded by social and financial success, meaning that "those who could afford to buy these pictures...had their virtue confirmed." The tactility and materiality suggested by oil painting helped bolster this worldview, which Berger calls a "sentimental lie": the medium helped create realistic scenes that made a world in which virtue and wealth were correlated appear plausible. When painters deviated from this convention, as did Adriaen Brouwer, their works—which represented "cheap" or "low-life" scenes with bitter realism—were impossible to sell, commanding no market value. Berger then discusses two genre paintings by Hals as examples. The subjects of both paintings are smiling, offering goods for sale, ostensibly to a wealthy owner-spectator. Their smiles convey a desire to ingratiate themselves with the rich in order to make a sale or gain a job, asserting that they are happy to participate in the system of exchange that oppresses them.
Berger then notes that, out of every genre of oil painting, landscape represents the biggest exception to the tradition. Throughout the history of this tradition, nature was though of as outside capitalism—it was the realm in which everything existed, but it defied possession. Herein lies the major problem with landscape oil paintings: the sky, for example, has no tangibility. Contrary to the general tradition of oil painting, the tradition of the landscape led progressively away from the desire to depict objects as tangible and substantial, leaning instead toward subject matter too large, too nebulous, to grasp. Nevertheless, some landscape paintings fit within the broader oil painting tradition. Here, Berger points towards Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Contrary to Kenneth Clark's evaluation of the picture, which Berger quotes at length, he encourages the reader to question why the nobles depicted in the painting would want to own a painting of themselves against the backdrop of their own land. This painting, argues Berger, fundamentally figures its subjects as landowners, exercising a proprietary attitude towards their surroundings. Earlier art historians like Lawrence Gowing argued that the subjects were merely engaged in philosophical enjoyment of nature, but Berger refutes this claim as disingenuous. Of course it's possible that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews admired nature, but this doesn't preclude them from desiring to own it—in fact, the very distinction of land as "uncorrupted and unperverted nature" worthy of enjoyment relies on sharp property distinctions, wherein individuals can generally only enjoy the parts of nature that belong to them. Try avoiding a conviction for trespassing charges by claiming you simply meant to commune with nature. The point Berger makes here is that paintings like this primarily serve to give their owners a sense of pleasure by marveling at themselves among the beautiful land that they own.
Berger observes that the oil painting tradition conceives of itself as "an imaginary window open onto the world." But by his analysis, the paintings from this tradition are less like windows, and more like "a safe in which the visible has been deposited." Aside from a handful of masters whose exceptional works broke free of the tradition's norms, most oil painting is, by Berger's assessment, mediocre and obsessed with property. From this tradition, however, the stereotype of "the great artist" managed to emerge. This stereotype suggests that the masterful artist—always male—lives a life consumed by struggle, fighting the society that fails to comprehend their genius as much as they battle their own interior psychology. This struggle, Berger asserts, was underpinned by the oil painting tradition: painters became disillusioned with the realization that their work was limited to a celebration of material objects. Exceptional painters, then, had to unlearn the conventions of this tradition, which they likely studied on their path to artistic mastery. Two side-by-side self-portraits by Rembrandt, painted thirty years apart, are referenced here. In the first, he shows off Saskia, his young bride, who died six years later—but the apparent happiness of the scene is actually empty and unfelt, undercut by a sense of artifice that arises from the contradiction in oil painting portraits that Berger discussed earlier. Berger refers to the painting as "an advertisement for the sitter's good fortune," observing that, "like all such advertisements it is heartless." By the second painting, thirty years later, Rembrandt managed to "turn the tradition against itself." Appearing alone in the portrait, the painter is now an old man. Though it uses the same medium, the painting is free from the traditional conventions of oil painting, departing from the usual emphasis on tactile and material objects. What remains, then, is simply the painter's image of himself, turning the focus from material questions to existential ones.
