John Berger meets Spinoza

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Bento's Sketchbook

By John Berger

John Berger’s latest publication is a compilation of his earlier works.  Readers familiar with Berger’s writings, particularly ‘Ways of Seeing’ will recognize many passages in this book based on his earlier, seminal writings about how it is that we come to an understanding of a work of art.  Bento’s Sketchbook is largely autobiographical, but it also a narrative with criticism thrown in.

It was generated by an interesting, imaginative idea (which some might say was too far-fetched).  The philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–77) spent the most intense years of his life writing ‘On the Improvement of the Understanding’ and ‘Ethics’, both of which were published posthumously.

Berger discovered from reading contemporary accounts of the philosopher’s life that he had drawn or made sketches, but careful searches in extant letters and manuscripts have revealed nothing.  Nonetheless, the notion of the philosopher’s thoughts about mind, body, power and the nature of reason coupled with visual images was just too compelling for Berger to ignore. 

The author tells us that one day a friend gave him a beautiful, virgin sketchbook covered with suede leather ‘the colour of skin’ and so it was that this little gift turned out to be the vehicle for an outpouring of the author’s imagination and an invitation to him to write his own ideas in a slightly meandering, stream-of-consciousness style. And so here we have extracts of Spinoza’s writings scattered throughout Berger’s text together with the author’s own pen and ink illustrations. The book is beautifully designed, it looks very like a proper sketch book with a sewn binding that an art student might carry.

Early in the narrative Berger takes us step-by-step ‘into’ a drawing of some plums ripening in a tree.  He describes the purple plums as being ‘ the colour of dusk’ with a bloom on them like ‘vanishing blue smoke’.  His drawing is in line, with a wash in green which the author says he made from a nettle growing at his feet.  Other subjects that drive his text have to do with galleries he visits (the Wallace Collection in London is one) or particular paintings he finds compelling or simply his encounters with interesting people.

He gives an account of an old, flaking painting he discovered in a second-hand shop in Paris.  It was of a still-life of some chrysanthemums lying beside an empty vase on a narrow ledge.  The painting was immediately intriguing – were the flowers about to be arranged in a pot?  Had they been taken out, a little too early, to be thrown away?  Years later Berger again encountered the painting and, still fixated by the work, began to fill-in the flaked off spots, to restore the work, losing himself in the procedure.  The writer follows his account with a lengthy piece taken from Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ (carefully cited from: Part 111, Proposition XV111, Proof).  It begins, ‘As long as a man is affected by the image of anything, he regards the thing as present’ although it might show something in the past.  Spinoza goes on to explain that pleasure or pain to the viewer is just as strong whether or not the image is of something in the present.

There are some interesting ideas here, but the writer has presented the reader with a considerable  challenge to see that the extracts chosen from Spinoza’s writings are indeed relevant to Berger’s text.  Instead Berger’s texts are so wide-ranging and his drawings so various both in subject matter and in quality that the notion of a 17th-century guide to looking at works of art is, in the end, disregarded.

Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger is published Verso, London, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84467-684-2