Looking from Solitude

The Berger Mystery

Mira Schor explores two essays by John Berger: “The Moment of Cubism,” originally published in The New Left Review in 1967, and “The Hals Mystery,” originally published in the British journal New Society in December 1979.

“The Moment of Cubism” is a thrilling essay because it instantly opens up a double vista to the past and to the future of an instance of radicality, whose promise is not completely fulfilled but yet may be ahead of us. Nostalgia, regret, wonder, and hope erupt out of the first sentence of the essay.

I find it hard to believe that the most extreme Cubist works were painted over fifty years ago. It is true that I would not expect them to have been painted today. They are both too optimistic and too revolutionary for that. Perhaps in a way I am surprised that they have been painted at all. It would seem more likely that they were yet to be painted.

Do I make things unnecessarily complicated? […]

And anyway is it not nonsense to think of Cubism as having not yet taken place when we are surrounded in daily life by the apparent effects of Cubism? All modern design, architecture and town-planning seems inconceivable without the initial example of Cubism.

Nevertheless I must insist on the sensation that I have in front of the works themselves: the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are caught, pinned down, in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue a journey that began in 1907.

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Photograph by Flavia Costa, 2004 (Credit: Encuentros con la Fotografia)