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 Hooikoft of their house. At the time, John was in the 1960s and Yves remembers that the closely matched competitors would sometimes reach a kind of graceful unity if their movements and rhythms would fall synchronously. And with every wave of the paddle, John and Yves would say, “About you!” While they sent the ball back and forth over the table.
This sentence makes a suitable weather appeared in About you: letters between a father and son (2024), composed shortly before John’s death in 2017. The book presents a dynamic and sometimes tender exchange of ideas and images between father and son, who then lived in the suburbs of Paris and Haute-Savoie. Just like in their games of Ping Pong years earlier, every volley or letter builds on the latter, responding to his energy and questions, while also forging new directions. The result is an ever -evolving meditation about art and making images by two people connected by blood and, perhaps more than anything, by art.
About you Starts with John’s first letter. He encloses images of Rogier van der Weyden’s “The Appring” (ca. 1434), Francisco de Goya’s “La Maja Vestida” (ca. 1800–1807), and Vincent van Gogh’s “Still Life with Bible” (1885), write to Yves who “two last two are an invitation.” In response, Yves confirms a photo of the visceral painting by Chaïm Soutine “Le Bœuf Écorché” (1924) and writes: “How we want … to overcome the insulation we feel in our flesh.” From there, the letters move fluently, touch concepts related to painting, such as light and the landscape, and musing at the intersection of art with doubt and the passage of time. Along the way, John and Yves artworks pass back and forth by mainly Western, mostly male artists such as Max Beckmann, Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Édouard Manet, exploring resonances between makers and images.
For more than two years of correspondence, the outside world rarely hangs in their universe. At one point John writes: “(My God! Look at what happens in Israel and in Palestine; every pomegranate is bleeding …),” But no other contemporary conflict leaves a stamp. Yves notes that the border control police have searched and powerfully removed a second black man during his train journey from Milan to Geneva, but he quickly returns to his thoughts about photographing his painting process. In fact, both comments from the Bergers have been included in brackets, which indicates a clear separation between the events in the world they inhabit and the realm of art and ideas in which they so freely withdraw.
It is unclear whether the letters have been edited, because there is no comment in the book explaining how they were assembled. Both bergers approach art of uniquely informed corners, and we see them enriching and relieving each other, but a private conversation between every father and son also attracts us for his promise of intimacy. Yet there are few personal stories included here, nor do we see the usual peculiarities or tensions that are often accompanied by parent-child relationships. Yves refers to daily e -mails and telephone conversations between the two and both sign their correspondence with love, but the letters – although lyrical and thoughtful – miss the rawness of shared memories or daily worries.
A more personal tone comes through in the fifth and final part of the book, where drawings and prints of the men alternate for different pages for different time periods. One of the most moving is a sensitive pencil sketch made by John when Yves was only 10 years old. Perhaps it is misleading to look for signs of the connecting of the mountains outside art: as this book makes clear, art was their language for life and for love.
About you letters between a father and son (2024) by John Berger and Yves Berger is published by Pantheon Books and is available online and through independent booksellers.
