Ways Of Seeing

Berger opens this chapter by remarking that oil paintings often depict objects, which, in reality, are purchasable. He observes that buying a painting is not unlike buying the object that a painting depicts, and putting it in your house. In making this observation, Berger arrives at a central assertion of the chapter: oil painting incorporates the act and concept of possession as a way of seeing. In other words, property relations are embedded in the conventions of European oil painting. He declares that this fundamental truth about European oil painting is usually ignored by art experts and historians. Indeed, in Berger’s estimation, it is the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—and not an art historian—who has come closest to naming this intrinsic aspect of oil painting as a genre. He then quotes from Lévi-Strauss’s work Conversations with Charles Charbonnier: “It is this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization” (84). Berger then remarks that, while Lévi-Strauss’s statement may be an overreaching generalization, if it is true, the sentiment it expresses reached its peak during the period of traditional oil painting.

Berger then defines the term oil painting. “Oil painting” is not only the name of a technique: the term also defines a particular art form. Materially, the technique of oil painting has existed since antiquity. However, oil painting as an art form emerged specifically in order to “express a particular view of life for which the techniques of tempera or fresco were inadequate” (84).

Oil painting as a genre did not firmly establish its own conventions and its own way of seeing until the sixteenth century. Although the end of the period of the oil painting cannot be dated exactly (oil paintings are still being made today), the basis of its traditional way of seeing was challenged by Impressionism and usurped by Cubism. At around the same time as the rise of Cubism, the photograph ousted the oil painting as the primary source of visual imagery. Therefore, the period of the oil painting can be distinguished as approximately 1500-1900.

However, in Berger’s view, the tradition and its underpinning ways of seeing still undergird many of our cultural assumptions. From it, we derive our definition of pictorial likeness. The norms of the oil painting tradition still influence the ways in which we see such things as landscape, women, food, dignitaries, and mythology. The oil painting tradition shapes how we conceive of artistic genius. Furthermore, it defines what we mean as a love of art. From studying oil painting’s history, its norms and conventions, we have come to define a lover of art as a person who, fundamentally, loves to possess art objects. In turn, the art-lover loves these art objects because they show him sights of what he may possess.

Berger then cites Lévi-Strauss again, who remarks that, for Renaissance artists, painting was ostensibly an instrument of knowledge, but its more paramount function was to serve as an instrument of possession. Renaissance painting was itself only made possible because of the immense wealth that was being hoarded in Florence and elsewhere. The Italian merchants who commissioned Renaissance painters did so in order to confirm their own possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world through the commissioned artists’ paintings.

Berger asserts that the art of any given period is inclined to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. This is an assertion that he admits is somewhat hackneyed. However, his proposition goes further. He proposes that “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form” (87).

He then argues that “oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations” (87). Within both capitalism and the conventions of oil painting, all objects became exchangeable because all objects became commodities. All of reality was measured through material property relations. Due to the reign of Cartesian philosophy, the soul was philosophically placed in a separate philosophical category. Therefore, a painting was capable of speaking to the soul, but only through the secondary valences of reference, and never through its primary manner of envisioning the world: “Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority” (87).

Berger remarks that the oil painting tradition, in actuality, consisted of hundreds of thousands of paintings, although only a fraction of that number are today treated as works of fine art. He asserts that art history has completely failed to attend to the distinction between an outstanding work and an average work of the genre. He then reveals that, in his estimation, hack work within the genre is a result of cynical adherence to the mandates of a commissioner or of the market. (Crucially, the rise of the oil painting coincided with the rise of the open art market). For him, we must attend to the contradiction between art and the market in order to fully parse out the contrasts between the exceptional and the unremarkable works of the period and genre. This is a point that he will later return to.

Berger then observes the distinguishing features of oil painting as an art form. More than any other painting technique, it can depict the textural tangibility and visual subtleties of objects. Its potential for creating convincing illusions is greater than that of sculpture, “for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space, and, by implication, filling the entire world” (89).

He then turns his attention to Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors  (1533), a work that stands at the beginning of the European oil painting tradition. He observes that, within the painting, Holbein has skillfully created the illusion that the spectator is looking at real objects and materials. Its lush details importune the sense of touch. While the painting does indeed depict the two male ambassadors, and objects that symbolize ideas, the sheer volume of finely-made objects which surround the men is the truly salient element of the painting. This pictorial emphasis, and the skill required in order to successfully produce it, would remain a constant within the tradition of oil painting.

Here, Berger forwards the notion that oil painting distinguished itself from earlier art traditions that celebrated wealth, because, in those previous traditions, wealth was understood as a symbol of a fixed social or divine order. Oil painting, however, celebrated a new kind of wealth: wealth which was capable of dynamic movement and change, and which found its only validation not in an entrenched social or religious order, but in the supreme buying power of money. Thus, oil painting was tasked with the mandate to illustrate the desirability of what money could buy. It did so by representing objects with as much sensory—and especially tactile—detail as possible. The desirability of objects, after all, lies in the promise of their ability to gratify the senses of their owner.

He also attends to the mysteriously-slanted and distorted likeness of a skull that lies in the foreground of Holbein’s painting. He remarks that most scholars agree that the skull’s presence is a take on the medieval convention of the memento mori, in which a skull was placed within an image to remind the viewer of the pervasive specter of death. For Berger, the most crucial visual element of the skull is its distortion: if the skull had simply been painted realistically and as another item within the Ambassadors’ horde, it would have become merely another object. This points to a persistent problem within the oil painting tradition: any metaphysical visual symbols which painters attempted to incorporate within their paintings were rendered ineffectual through the “unequivocal, static materialism of the painting-method” which stubbornly depicted these would-be allegorical items as, firstly and wholly, objects (91). The conventions of the genre itself, with its hyper-focus on convincingly rendering material objects, precluded any attempted metaphorical message. Berger then concedes that William Blake is one notable exception to this general tendency. With his aversion to oil paint and propensity to render people and objects as insubstantial, transparent, and unmoored by the dictates of gravity, Blake transcended the limitations of the dominant art of the period.

Berger then returns to Holbein’s The Ambassadors. He observes that the two men within the painting communicate an insurmountable remoteness through their stance and their gaze. Coldly indifferent to those whom they may hold in their gaze, they wholly exclude the viewer from any possibility of joining them inside of their world. Indeed, the painted objects that lie on the shelf that stands between the two ambassadors would only be legible to the selected few who could understand the objects’ allusions to European explorers and the subsequent rise of global commerce and the slave trade.

Berger then directly correlates the ambassadors’ cold, withholding glance, as well as the objects the painting depicts, to the logics of colonialism. Among the objects on the shelf are a globe that charts the route that Magellan had recently taken during an expedition that was conducted under explicit pretenses of resource extraction and colonial domination. Additionally, a book of arithmetic, a hymn book, and a lute stand on the shelf. Through these objects, the painting directly invokes the colonial mandate to convert native peoples to Christianity, and to convince them of the supremacy of European civilization and art. The ambassadors’ stance and gaze can also be read as the hallmarks of their entire class: “the two ambassadors belonged to a class who were convinced that the world was theirs to furnish their residence in it” (96). Their gaze, which is both “aloof and wary,” expects no reciprocity (97). They aim to impress upon the viewer a sense of both their own vigilance and their own inaccessibility. This aim, Berger notes, is not unlike the visual depiction of kings and emperors of eras past. However, oil painting inaugurated a new and disconcerting element within this unoriginal power dynamic: the emphasis upon individuality. In keeping with humanist values, oil painting was tasked with depicting individuality. That individualism, in turn, posits equality. However, through its visual machinations, as exemplified by The Ambassadors, oil painting simultaneously renders that equality inconceivable.

The fundamental conflict between individualistic equality and the persistent inaccessibility of the ruling class reveals itself within a central conceit of oil painting. Its emphasis on obsessively producing visual verisimilitude produces the illusion that the viewer is within touching distance of anything in the painting’s foreground. If the object in the foreground is a person, this verisimilitude produces the illusion of intimacy. Yet, a painted public portrait of members of the ruling class must, by necessity of class relations, enforce a formal distance. It is this necessity which renders the average portrait within the tradition stiff and rigid: these regents of the ruling class must simultaneously appear close-up and far away, in much the same manner that objects appear under a microscope. The viewer can plainly see these regents in all of their particularity and detail, but it is impossible to imagine that the gaze is reciprocal. Faces within the oil painting tradition were thus transformed into veritable masks.

Here, through several reprinted examples, Berger emphasizes his central point that oil paintings were, fundamentally, demonstrations of objects that money could buy: food items, animals, buildings as features of landed property.

Berger then indicts the most esteemed category of oil painting—the history or mythological painting—as the genre’s most vacuous. To Berger, the purpose of such paintings was essentially to provide fodder for the members of the ruling class as they used the lofty figures of classical literature and mythology to confirm and flatter their own inflated senses of themselves, the grandiloquence of their own emotions, and their affected nobility.

Inversely, the so-called ‘genre’ picture, which depicted ‘low-life,’ illustrated the opposite of the mythological picture. The purpose of its depiction of the ‘vulgar’ was to “prove—either positively or negatively—that virtue in this world was rewarded by social and financial success” (103). These paintings, although cheap, were favored by the newly-arrived bourgeoisie who saw themselves reflected within them: not by the characters within the painting, but by the moral that the scenes generated. Here, oil painting’s predilection for recreating the illusion of material reality lent credence to the sentimental moralizing that pervaded the period—namely, the lie that a meritocracy ensured the success of the honest and hard-working, while bestowing a deserved life of poverty on the ne’er-do-wells.

Berger then remarks that the landscape painting was the type of painting within the oil tradition which least conformed to its central aims of realistically depicting and fetishizing objects as commodities and legitimizing both the ruling class and the logics of capitalism. This is due to the simple fact that, while aspects of nature could be objects of scientific investigation, “nature as-a-whole defied possession” (105). However, Berger asserts that the landscape painting found its footing within the at-large ideological framework of the oil painting tradition by depicting land-owners as the gloating possessors of the landscapes that served as their visual backgrounds. The ability of oil paint to render these possessed landscapes in extreme detail flattered and increased the pleasure that these landowners derived from their status as landowners. He also observes that these landowners’ estimation of “the natural” was very narrow: it did not, for instance, include the very natural act that an unlanded intruder upon their land might undertake if he were to steal a potato in order to nourish himself. (The penalties for such figurative poaching included public whipping and even deportation). Berger therefore indicts this dubious and elitist definition of “nature,” and its extrapolated connection to landscape paintings, as a classist machination.

Here, Berger quotes a fellow art critic who derides Berger’s above position on landscape paintings and takes issue with Berger’s assertion that oil paintings normalized and naturalized the unequal circumstances that capitalism produces. Berger does so in order to re-affirm his countering position, and to exemplify the myopic resistance to class critique within art criticism at large.

Berger then concedes that his survey of European oil painting has been so brief as to render it rudimentary. He posits his own investigation as a starting point for others. His salient point, though, stands: the particular qualities of oil painting produced a specific system of conventions that governed the representation of the visible. In so doing, the conventions of genre invented a way of seeing. Following those conventions, painting of this tradition, then, is not a window on the world, so much as it is a safe into which the visible has been deposited, as an object.

Berger then dives into the various academic and cultural conventions that have contributed to the mystification of oil painting as a genre, and thereby obscured the chapter’s central assertions. For one, he feels that the few exceptional artists who managed to break free of the norms of the genre are not today understood as anomalous resisters, but as representatives of the genre as a whole. Secondly, the artists who openly defied the dominating mandates of oil paintings are now subsumed into a fraudulent, oversimplified, and generic mythology of the great, suffering artist, instead of being recognized as renegades whose resistance to the tradition’s prevailing norms—and not a romanticized and rootless poverty—was the true cause of their destitution.

He then offers two contrasting paintings by Rembrandt in order to demonstrate the criteria that Berger uses to distinguish a painter whose work contravened the prevailing traditions of oil painting. In the first painting, Portrait of Himself and Saskia (1634), Berger observes that Rembrandt uses the traditional methods of oil paintings for their traditional purposes. Although the figure of the artist turns toward the spectator with a smile on his face while embracing his new bride, for Saskia (who died within six years after the painting was completed), the happiness is both formal and unfelt. The painting, via its fidelity to both the technical and ideological underpinnings of the oi painting tradition, thus functions as a soulless advertisement. The later painting, a self-portrait completed when the artist had become an old man, turns the tradition of oil painting against itself. Instead of functioning as an advertisement, it uses the language of oil painting to depict the artist’s bereavement, and his open questioning of his own existence. It is through this subversive resistance to the dictum to render both people and things as either idealized commodified objects or the heroic regents and possessors of those objects that Rembrandt’s work becomes exceptional. He uses the language of the genre to do the opposite of that for which the language was designed.