читать дальшеAnna Putintseva
English 101
Porter
10-20-05
The Mystery of Passing Through Time
In his essay “Ways of Seeing” John Berger states that how people see things is affected by their own beliefs and knowledge (page 134). The author discusses that each person sees a painting in their own way. My objective is to analyze this idea through my own experience.
By visiting the Portland Art Museum I had an opportunity to look at different works of art. I was looking for a painting that would not only appeal to me but would raise questions. After a while I entered a room where I saw a big painting and knew that I have found the one I was searching for to use in my analysis of Berger’s idea about individual ways of seeing. This work of art caught my attention more than any other. By reading the plaque, I found out that this painting was made by Eugene Berman and is called Time and the Monuments.
In this particular painting, Berman portrays the effects time has on the things of the earth. When I found this work of art in the museum, it amazed me with its enormous size and the awe the composition presented as the whole. As the name suggests, the painting portrays monuments, stone monuments. It’s unusual in the presentation of the passing of time. In fact, there is a fading effect in the painting. It’s created by see-through parts of people and stones.
The first thing that caught my attention in Time and the Monuments was a person leaning against a stone column. The man was not in the center of the painting but was closest to the front. He was looking down with a weary gaze and had ragged clothing. The clothes were of a faraway time period. When I looked closer I could see that even though a part of his head was behind the column, I could still see the shape of it. Then I started to look at other parts of the painting and noticed that this see-through effect was used throughout. Berman painted another person, a woman. But she is hardly visible because he positioned her sitting down with her head bowed. In that way only her head with flowing red hair is visible and a part of the dress she is wearing. A little fountain-like structure is blocking a part of the woman. It is directly in front of her and in the center of the painting. I feel that she is tired and/or crying. Farther away from the viewer are two more people. One of them is positioned behind the woman but higher up. He is visible through an opening in the arch-like monument behind the redhead lady. The man is standing not looking at the viewer and looks weary too. The fourth person is a man partially lying on the floor, positioned between the woman and the man leaning against the pillar. That last man looks like he is dying. The viewer can see the floor tiles through his body. He is like a shadow. And there are also pencil marks visible, like it’s still a sketch, not a finished painting. That gives an effect of time passing. I feel like the people were used here to portray that we do not live long and that time is not merciful to us. Because the people in the painting look weary and distressed at what is happening to them and around them. It’s destruction around, and everything is falling apart, but at the same time new life forms. All of those people seem to be from different time periods but they are in the same picture.
The enormous stone monuments caught my gaze and I lingered there for a while. The archway behind the red-headed woman in the center has a doorway with only one door. That door is closed and colored a faded red color. It is wooden. The stone itself is chipped at angles and there is grass growing on top of the structure. There are two pillars. The one on the right is what the man is leaning on, and the second one looks almost the same but is on the left of the picture and turned a little. It has a rounded top, colored faded gold, looking like a sun with wavy rays sticking out of it. The bottom corners are adorned by stone fence-like identical structures. All of it gives a feeling that a long time is passing in this one picture that is still in itself.
The painting also has pieces of rotten wood and rags lying and hanging here and there. There is one spectacular branch of a thorny shrub. It is located near the woman, in the center. The thorn defines the sorrow of the lady. The floor is made of tile and it’s all chipping away and pieces are lying around. And the sky is enormous. It shows the passing of time by the shape and color of the clouds. The colors are purplish-bluish on the clouds that are shaped like long stretched-out feathers. It looks like a sunset. But on the top of the sky there are some rounded, small white clouds. They contradict the theme of the sunset and show that even though it might be the end of a day, there will be another. In the distance, there seem to be mountains and plains, but they are very blurry and hard to distinguish. They show the distance and that time is stretching just like the earth. We can look through time just like we look into the distance. The colors of the composition as a whole look faded. Even though the painting has reds in it, they are faded and not vibrant. All of the other colors just add to the effect of dying and time passing, just like the moods of the people and the falling apart of the stones and wood and clothes. All things pass away. Only time is always here.
After looking at the whole composition and trying to get the meaning, I started interrogating it, talking to stones, people, debris, colors, and sky. The monuments told me that they were here the longest time and still are standing even though they are chipped, they will stand for a long time. They are the strongest. Stones told me about people too. The people have been telling the monuments their sorrows, how they are dying and can’t help it. Stones have a tendency to store the information, people’s secrets, and keep them. They are silent, but at the same time can speak volumes of history. You just have to ask them in the right way, look deep into each crevice made by time, study their shape and you’ll find out a lot. I talked to the monuments on the painting and asked them about time. They said that time is passing by them, and they have seen different times. At first they were new, clean stones made into beautiful monuments, but with the passing of the time, with the coming and going of different eras, different people and civilizations, the time had an effect on them. They are fading now. Time is stronger than stone. Now time is putting weeds on the stones, destroying their fresh look. But the stones become even more appealing with this mysterious aging look. They look ancient and wise. They know time and history. There is a lot to learn from them.
When I finished questioning the monuments, I went on to talk to the people in the painting. They were so sad and melancholy. I asked them why they were that way. They each told me their stories. Each life – a tragedy mixed with everything else that happens in life. The time is passing them by, wearing them down. Time is stronger than they are. I asked what they were doing, and the reply was that each is mourning and contemplating on the passing of time. They come to the stones to find protection, and find none. There is no power in the stones to save people from time. Time flies away, taking our lives with it into the unknown of the future. The men and the woman told me to look at the horizon. I looked. The woman asked what I saw. I said that I see an endless stretch of land and mountains in the distance. Then I heard her crying. She said that she had seen it too and the mountains are the breakers of life. Her end is approaching. There is still a valley before her, but there is a breaker, an end. That is why they are all sad and thoughtful. They are thinking about time and their lives.
Now, I come back to the essay Berger wrote, “Ways of Seeing”, and I ask myself how my own beliefs and knowledge affected my way of seeing “Time and the Monuments”. I agree with Berger that we all see things differently, according to our own way of standards. As he says, mystification doesn’t help to understand an image. “Mystification is the process of explaining away what might be otherwise evident”(page 140).