I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively enter the studio in which it was made. And there I wait in the hope of learning something of the story of its making. Of the hopes, of the choices, of the mistakes, of the discoveries implicit in that story. I talk to myself, I remember the world outside the studio, and I address the artist whom I maybe know, or who may have died centuries ago... Occasionally there’s a new space to puzzle both of us. Occasionally there’s a vision which makes us both gasp—gasp as one does before a revelation.

For Berger, paintings are testaments to human expressions or stories of human struggle—they are not simply objects to be admired. It is for this reason that he continually pulls the real, outside world into his criticism.

Hell, from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, 1503-1515. Wikimedia / Prado Museum

“Leave the museum. Go the emergency department of the hospital,” Berger writes in his essay on Rembrandt, and it is only in the hospital that we begin to understand how Rembrandt’s captured our corporeal existence, how his calculated dislocation of proportion reflected the “sentient body’s awareness of itself.” Similarly, in his discussion of the “Hell” panel in Hieronymous Bosch’s Millennium Triptych, Berger observes that:

There are no horizons there. There is no continuity between actions... There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present… Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirium. Compare this space to what one sees in the average publicity slot, or in a typical CNN news bulletin, or any mass media news commentary. There is a comparable incoherence, a comparable wilderness of separate excitements, a similar frenzy.

Here he has revealed something vital about Hieronymous Bosch, about modern life, and—most importantly—about how Bosch can help us and navigate modern life. In its bridging of time periods, it also reveals Berger’s acute historical awareness.

“All history is contemporary history,” begins a famous paragraph from G, his 1972 novel that won the Man Booker that year. “For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.” History is always vibrating in Berger’s mind. He knows that history must be understood (imbibed, really) if we are to escape the contingencies of our present and engage with art of the past. And he does his best to share this historical awareness with us. This is why he interrupts a discussion on cave paintings of animals to provide a detailed and moving account of taking his cows out to graze. (For the past 38 years, Berger has lived in Quincy, a town of about 100 people in the French Alps near Mont Blanc.) The cows are brought home, and he returns to the cave art. Suddenly we are struck by their impact. It is the pasture that helped under us under the paintings. Through simple, moving narration, Berger has helped us surpass 5000 years of history, and Portraits is crisscrossed with these bridges between the present and the past.