Review: Bento's Sketchbook

In a comic interlude, Berger, sketching the Antonello Crucifixion in the National Gallery, is confronted by a security guard who demands that he remove his bag from the floor.

"Listen," says Berger reasonably, "let's call somebody from the Gallery staff and with a bit of luck they'll explain that it's OK." "Gallery staff have nothing to do with us," replies the guard "we're independent and our job is security." Berger is marched off the premises for his obstinacy.

A pall of elegy and melancholy nostalgia hangs over this book. Remembering Myra Hess playing Bach during the Second World War, Berger remarks with effortless lyricism: "The piano notes and chords seemed to us like a bouquet of flowers held together by a wire of death."

He repeats the refrain that, "we who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination."

There is something of Barthes's view that photography is orientated towards death here, but it is set off against a cheerier welcoming of ripeness, that finds expression in one of the first sketches of quetsches drooping off a tree.

A couple of quibbles: the early 20th-century translation of Spinoza that Berger quotes from is too literal to be clear. And Berger repeats the canard that 100,000 civilians were killed in one night during the Dresden bombings. But, though this book is expensive for its length - I read it in a couple of hours - Berger's sketches alone justify the price. They are alive with smudges and vigorous scribblings, the hurried lines catching nature in its imperfection.

Jonathan Beckman is the assistant editor of 'Literary Review'