old man

It now transpires that this, my favourite painting, is not by Rembrandt after all! The hands, so crudely done, cannot be the work of the master. It must be wonderful to have that skill and insight: the ability to discern that something isn't quite right, through the patient accumulation of learning but also through instinct. To be able to tell that the spirit doesn't belong here but is derivative.

And yet, does it make a difference? Isn't the worried look on the face, the furrowed brow, enough to convince us? Must there be a unity between hand and mind? There is something deeply satisfying, reassuring even, about a pre-existing harmony of hand-eye-mind; as the poet said:

My eyes have seen
what my hand did

It is said of the hands in The Jewish Bride that nothing more delicate has been painted in the history of art, and that nothing better depicts the deep strain of humanism in western sensibilites.

And yet, if this is Rembrandt is it possible to imagine that his wavering hands have lost something of their precision, their magical ability to conjure something out of the dark? If the hand registers our presence-as in the earliest Cave Art-then perhaps we are being drawn to a truth that Berger explains as: the human is no longer self-evident. Is he, then, painting the sentinet body's awareness of itself? If so, one can afford to forego attention to 'the whole' and can focus on the essential, as if a few details of a life illustrates what we fundamentally are. Under such circumstances proportion or fidelity to reality is not important throughout the composition. Meaning is not a pattern, not something that permeates each and every instant of our lives. It is a moment, a naked moment, in which we reveal to ourselves our secret...

Instead, the aim is to deliver us to the sense that here is a man doubled up by time, utterly withdrawn from the spectator's gaze, alone in his finitude.

Pain sharpens our awareness of such space. It is the space of our first vulnerability and solitude.

On a painting by Degas, Berger has this to say:

Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognized and admitted. We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel, or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance...do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, our legs, shoulders, elbows and hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known?

Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color,
Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As a summer's wholeness in a golden church.