When he was a teenager, the artist Yves Berger played frequent ping-pong games with his father, the art critic and essayist John Berger, in the hay of their house. John was in the sixties at the time, and Yves remembers that the closely adapted competitors sometimes reached a kind of graceful unity when their movements and their rhythms would fall in synchronization. And with each swing of the paddle, John and Yves said: “To you!” As they sent the ball in both directions through the table.
This sentence makes an appropriate reappearance in To you: letters between a father and a son (2024), composed shortly before John's death in 2017. The book presents a dynamic and sometimes tender exchange of ideas and images between the father and the son, who then lived in the suburbs of Paris and Haute-Savoie respectively. As in their ping-pong games for years earlier, each volley or letter relies on the last, answering its energy and its questions while forging new directions. The result is a constantly evolving meditation of art and the creation of images by two individuals linked by blood and, perhaps more than anything, by art.
You begins with John's first letter. He encloses the images of “The Annunciation” by Rogier Van der Weyden (c. 1434), “La Maja Vestida” by Francisco de Goya (c. 1800-1807), and “Deadly with the Bible” by Vincent Van Gogh (1885), in Yves that “the last two are an invitation”. In response, Yves attaches a photo of the visceral painting by Chaïm Soutine “The flayed beef” (1924) and writes: “How we want … to overcome the isolation that we feel in our flesh.” From there, the letters move in a fluid way, touching the concepts linked to painting, such as light and landscape, and reflection on the intersection of art with doubt and the passage of time. Along the way, John and Yves pass works of art back and back by mainly Western artists, mainly male like Max Beckmann, Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Édouard Manet, exploring resonances between manufacturers and images.
More than two years of correspondence, the outside world rarely develops in their universe. At one point, John writes: “(My God! Look at what is happening in Israel and Palestine; each Grenade bleeds …)”, but no other contemporary conflict leaves a mark. Yves observes that the border control police rose and forcefully withdrawn a second black man during his train from Milan to Geneva, but he quickly returned to his reflections on the photography of his painting process. In fact, the two comments of the shepherds are contained in parentheses, signaling a clear separation between the events of the world they inhabit and the field of art and ideas in which they move so freely.
It is not known if the letters have been modified, because there is no note in the book explaining how they were assembled. The two shepherds approach art from angles in a unique way, and we see them enrich and light each other, but a private conversation between any father and son also attracts us for his promise of intimacy. However, there are some precious personal stories included here, and we do not see the usual quirks or tensions that often accompany parent-child relationships. Yves alludes to daily emails and telephone calls between the two and will sign the two correspondence with love, but letters – although lyrical and thoughtful – do not have the brutality of shared memories or daily concerns.
A more personal tone occurs in the fifth and last section of the book, where the drawings and prints made by men for different periods alternate for several pages. One of the most moving is a sensitive pencil sketch of John made when Yves was only 10 years old. Perhaps it is wrong to seek signs of the connection of shepherds outside of art: after all, as this book clearly does, art was their language for life and for love.
To your letters between a father and a son (2024) by John Berger and Yves Berger is published by Pantheon Books and is available online and via independent booksellers.
