Darkest Rhododendron: On John Berger’s “Permanent Red”

“Idly and every so often you close your eyes. Then the image of the pattern of the leaves remains for a moment before it fades, imprinted on your retina, but now deep red, the colour of the darkest rhododendron.”1 In this short fragment, John Berger describes two phenomena. The first is an afterimage. The second is the blood red one sees when facing a strong light with closed eyes. These observations come as part of an essay on how an artist looks at light passing through the branches of a tree. They open a book compiling essays that were originally published in the New Statesman and that deal with the struggle of artists to create politically relevant works. The book was entitled Permanent Red (1960), yet the color of its title is not the same as that behind our closed eyes.

Permanent Red is a social position that Berger assumed. It is the color that tints everything else and allows one to make judgements that are both aesthetic and ethical. One red is produced by the eye, the other by history. Yet both determine the way the world appears. The reappearance of red in this fragment might distract the reader from Berger’s mention of an afterimage. Yet the phenomenon that here gained only the fleeting attention of the young critic was the subject of a series of paintings produced a decade earlier by the Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. For Strzemiński, these momentary visual impressions were not simply physiological curiosities. They formed part of a broader investigation into the historical conditions of vision.

In the same book, Berger makes a seemingly paradoxical claim: Realism is not a style. Its methods and aims change historically, and what appeared realistic in one period may no longer be adequate in another. Masaccio and the impressionists, for example, each pursued realism through seemingly opposite means. Where the former sought to establish the solidity of objects, the latter dissolved their contours. Realism, then, cannot be defined by resemblance or fidelity to appearances. Instead, it is a historically changing relationship between art and reality.

A decade before the publication of Permanent Red, Strzemiński arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion. In his posthumously published Theory of Seeing (1958), he argued that every historical epoch possesses its own realism, which is determined by the material conditions of life in that epoch.2 Seeing is not a natural faculty but a historically produced form of knowledge. Consequently, the history of art becomes a story of changing ways of seeing.

The similarities are striking, especially considering the different circumstances in which these arguments were developed. Strzemiński, a pioneer of constructivism, formulated his theory in Stalinist Poland, where socialist realism had been imposed as the official artistic doctrine. He fought for the right to abstraction as a socially relevant practice. Berger, a rare Marxist critic working in the conservative, Cold War climate of 1950s Britain, developed his ideas in opposition to the increasingly dominant conception of modern art as an autonomous field of formal experimentation. Both sought to recover realism from its identification with a particular mode of representation.

For Berger, however, the historical variability of realism did not imply that all ways of seeing were equally valid. On the contrary, it provided the basis for distinguishing between realism and formalism. In Permanent Red, the realist is an artist who brings into art aspects of life previously ignored or excluded by established conventions. The formalist, by contrast, uses those conventions to avoid confronting what is new in reality. The distinction is therefore not between figuration and abstraction, but between two possible relationships to the world. The history of modern art could thus be understood as a history of the changing possibilities of knowledge.

Yet this raises a difficulty. If realism is defined by the capacity to reveal what existing conventions conceal, how can the critic determine which discoveries matter? And how do a critic’s avowed political commitments, such as the one declared in the title Permanent Red, affect this judgment?

Berger in the same book appears resistant to the new art. When visiting the Venice Biennale in 1958, he saw largely “rubbish.” Among the artists on view were Antoni Tàpies and Alberto Burri, whose paintings incorporated unconventional materials, and Lucio Fontana, whose experiments challenged the integrity of the painted surface. Maria Jarema was exhibiting in the Polish pavilion, where Berger also noticed the emergence of tendencies he strongly criticized, although he did not mention her by name. Jasper Johns was also represented at the Biennale. The unnamed painter of the American stars and stripes, whom Berger dismisses as an example of artistic gimmickry, was most probably Johns. He does not like this type of realism because it focuses on decay instead of construction. These works, as he then saw them, don’t seek to overcome their circumstances. They depict alienation without offering any critical distance from it. What is striking is that while Berger acknowledges the innovation of abstraction, he nevertheless claims that abstract art found itself entangled with individualism and exhaustion. Yet the experiments he dismissed might equally be understood as discoveries about the material reality of painting and the status of the image itself. Berger was aware that his criteria for realism could lead him to overlook the value of individual works. Nevertheless, he accepted that risk, believing that criticism required a position from which judgments could be made.

In a preface written in 1968 for a paperback reissue of Permanent Red, Berger acknowledges the puritanism of some of his earlier judgments and expresses greater tolerance towards artists whose practices were largely destructive. The experiments of Tàpies, Burri, and Fontana offer examples of the kind of art he had previously criticized, although he does not explicitly reconsider these particular artists. This change was closely connected to his increasingly radical understanding of the relationship between art and property, which he now identifies as the recurring theme of the entire book. Art, the older critic now argues, is fundamentally incompatible with private property, and even the practice of regular art criticism becomes suspect, since it helps to sustain the art market irrespective of the critic’s political convictions. From this perspective, destructive artistic practices could acquire a significance that Berger had previously failed to recognize. The problem was whether the very existence of a work challenged the conditions under which art was produced and valued. Writing against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the student movements of the late 1960s, he points particularly to the weakening of the Cold War division between Washington and Moscow, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Cuban Revolution. This dynamic political situation allowed Berger to radicalize his position while abandoning some of the rigid judgments that had characterized his earlier criticism. Berger was well prepared for this step. His intellectual formation owed much to Frederick Antal’s materialist art history and to György Lukács’s theory of realism.3 Lukács famously argued that Marxist orthodoxy was a question of method rather than adherence to a fixed set of conclusions. Perhaps realism could be seen as a method of discovering historical reality.

Indeed, Berger writes that “the title Permanent Red was never meant to imply that I would not change,” and his preface paradoxically makes the book much more radical than it might have appeared on first publication.4 The unresolved contradiction between the artistic freedom in dynamic realism and the question of property seems even more pressing today than it was in the postwar period. In his recent October essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” Josh Kline argues that the soaring cost of real estate in New York has fundamentally altered the conditions of artistic production.5 The lack of affordable studios, combined with the pressure to make commercially viable work, has narrowed the possibilities of experimentation. What Berger understood as a conflict between ownership and imagination thus acquires a very concrete dimension. Property relations determine which forms of art can be produced in the first place.

Strzemiński’s theory offers a parallel in this respect. His concept of commodity-seeing suggests that the history of vision is bound up with the development of economic relations. For both Strzemiński and Berger, the history of art is therefore inseparable from the history of the social conditions that shape what can be seen. The political significance of art thus depends not simply on its subject matter, but on how its form responds to the historical conditions in which it emerges. Perhaps the most radical aspect of Berger’s criticism is his refusal to confuse political intention with artistic discovery. He remained committed throughout his life to the same political struggle as in his earlier writing, but he became willing to reconsider what this commitment allowed him to see, and what it had previously prevented him from seeing. It is then not so much the cases of individual artists that are of most value here. Berger may have been wrong in his assessments of Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth, yet the value of his criticism lies less in the accuracy of individual judgments than in the questions that made these judgments possible.

This brings me back to the afterimage with which Permanent Red begins. An afterimage is a trace of an encounter with the world. It persists after its source has disappeared, preserving something that is no longer there. Political convictions might function in a similar way. They are shaped by historical experience and are able to outlive the circumstances that produced them. The challenge is not to preserve the same image indefinitely, but to confront it with a reality that continues to change. However, the darkest red can be seen only with eyes shut.