Free The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger Page A

David and Absalom, The Jewish Bride …
    Nothing comparable is to be found in the
oeuvre of
any other painter. In Rubens, for instance, there are many figures being handled, carried, pulled, but few, if any, embracing. In nobody else’s work does the embrace occupy this supreme and central position. Sometimes the embrace he paints is sexual, sometimes not. In the fusion between two bodies not only desire can pass, but also pardon or faith. In his
Jacob and the Angel
(Berlin) we see all three and they become inseparable.
    Public hospitals, dating from the Middle Ages, were called in France Hôtels-Dieu. Places where shelter and care were given in the name of God to the sick or dying. Beware of idealisation. The Hôtel-Dieu in Paris was so overcrowded during the Plague that each bed was ‘occupied by three people, one sick, one dying and one dead’.
    Yet the term Hôtel-Dieu, interpreted differently, can help to explain him. The key to his vision, which had to dislocate classical space, was The New Testament. ‘Who lives in love lives in God and God in him … We know that we live in him and he in us because he has given us of his Spirit.’ (The First Epistle of John. Ch.4)
    ‘He in us’. What the surgeons found in dissecting was one thing. What he was looking for was another. Hôtel-Dieu may also mean a body in which God resides. In the ineffable, terrible late self-portraits, he was waiting, as he gazed into his own face, for God, knowing full well that God is invisible.
    When he painted freely those he loved or imagined or felt close to, he tried to enter their corporeal space as it existed at that precise moment, he tried to enter their Hôtel-Dieu. And so to find an exit from the darkness.
    Before the small painting of
A Woman Bathing
(London) we are with her, inside the shift she is holding up. Not as voyeurs. Not lecherously like the Elders spying on Susannah. It is simply that we are led, by the tenderness of his love, to inhabit her body’s space.
    For Rembrandt, the embrace was perhaps synonymous with the act of painting, and both were just this side of prayer.

12
A Cloth Over the Mirror

    The late Rembrandt self-portraits contain or embody a paradox: they are clearly about old age, yet they address the future. They assume something coming towards them apart from Death.
    Twenty years ago in front of one of them in the Frick Collection, New York, I wrote the following lines:
    The eyes from the face
two nights look at the day
the universe of his mind
doubled by pity
nothing else can suffice.
Before a mirror
silent as a horseless road
he envisaged us
deaf dumb
returning overland
to look at him
in the dark.

    At the same time there is a cheek, an insolence, in the painting which makes me think of a verbal self-portrait in a story I like very much by the American polemicist and fiction writer, Andrea Dworkin:
    I have no patience with the untorn, anyone who hasn’t weathered rough weather, fallen apart, been ripped to pieces, put herself back together, big stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice. Then something shines out. But these ones all shined up on the outside, the ass wigglers, I’ll be honest, I don’t like them. Not at all.

    Big stitches, jagged cuts. That’s how the paint is put on.
    Yet, finally, if we want to get closer to what makes the late self-portraits so exceptional, we have to relate them to the rest of the genre. How and why do they differ from most other painted self-portraits?
    The first known self-portrait dates from the second millennium BC . An Egyptian bas-relief which shows the artist in profile drinking from a jar that his patron’s servant is offering him at a feast where there are many other people. Such self-portraits – for the tradition continued until the early Middle Ages – were like artists’ signatures to the crowded scenes being depicted. They were a marginal claim that said:
I
also was present.
    Later, when the subject of St Luke painting the Virgin Mary became popular,