17 The Jewish Bride
They look at us but they are thinking of each other. Despite the occasion and the finery of their dress, they — she in particular — have that faintly melancholy expression one sees in so many Jewish faces. He sits on the wooden arm of an elegant divan and draws her towards him, his right arm round her waist and his head inclined against her shoulder, so that his cheek seems just to touch the gloved hand she has put up almost protectively. In his left hand he holds his grey top hat and his left foot is thrust forward towards us. She, standing there beside him, does not seem to succumb entirely, partly because he is so precariously perched but also for deeper, more complex reasons, which she would probably not be able to put into words. Her white dress flows down to her feet where it forms a pool of white that covers his right foot, and in her right hand she holds, rather nonchalantly, a bouquet of flowers, their heads pointing towards the floor, which, with the end of the long girdle that runs parallel to it down the left side of her body, introduces an element of fantasy and naturalness into this otherwise rather formal wedding photograph.
They are my grandparents, and the photo dates from the turn of the century. It must resemble thousands if not millions of other wedding photographs of that date. Yet even in its slight stiffness what it registers is above all the trust between these two people as they touch yet remain slightly apart from each other. Though the stance is a little different, it is not all that far removed from Rembrandt's great painting of The Jewish Bride, which similarly conveys a moving combination of tenderness and formality — tenderness in spite of and as a result of the formality. In Rembrandt's painting the man's hand lies protectively just beneath the woman's bosom and her hand rests lightly on his, only four fingers making contact, the merest touch. In the photo, on the other hand, his arm goes protectively round her waist, his hand appearing just above her elegantly curved hip, and she leans towards him, but the message is the same: these two people have entrusted themselves to each other and, for the moment at any rate, they are slightly overawed by the enormity of what they have done; for one long moment touch and distance are combined.
And of course it is a long moment. Because of the changes in the techniques of photography an image such as this, which is in many ways closer to a painting than to a modern snapshot, is simply no longer a possibility. In our much less formal world, too, wedding photographs tend to put one in mind more of a play or a charade than of real life: even when the suits and dresses are not hired for the occasion they tend to be worn awkwardly by people more used to dressing in jeans and pullovers and there is always the sense that this is a comedy put on for other people rather than a moment of significance for themselves. But here there is no play. There is a continuity, we feel, with what has gone before and what is to come, even if the moment itself is of supreme importance. These clothes belong to them; the elegant divan and the heavy drapes of the curtains which form the background do not belong to a photographer's studio but to the drawing room of her father. Their expressions acknowledge and take responsibility for what is laid open to the camera: they are what we see and what they have accepted to reveal. In a secular age which nevertheless still lives to the rhythms of sacramental tradition the photo here could almost be said to have taken over the function of the church or synagogue ceremony: two people here make public their lifelong commitment to each other.
Andrew Graham-Dixon has recently written of The Jewish Bride:
2. (right) Alexei Rabinovitch and Nelly Rossi, Cairo 1907.
3. (facing page) Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, c. 1666. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
It is one of the great paintings of love, of unaffected tenderness, in Western art. It is not idealised or dramatised. Rembrandt's figures do not adopt the stock theatrical postures of the amorous in art. Love, here, expresses itself through the subtlest language of face and body; through expressions that seem charged with emotion and, also, a peculiar sense of momentousness, as if the issue of this union might be as much a cause for apprehension as celebration; through the inclination of the man's body, its slight but immensely affectionate lean from the vertical; through the contact of his hand with the woman's, and the lightness of that contact, so skilfully (and inexplicably) expressed in paint.
That seems exactly right, and if the photo is inevitably less charged, if the faces of the bride and groom seem perhaps even slightly bland, slightly lacking in expressiveness, that is only the difference between photography and paint; not just the difference between the anonymous photographer and Rembrandt but also our different reactions to being photographed and painted, the way we freeze a little to try instinctively to protect ourselves from a photographer, whose act, however well we know him, is always felt as predatory. But in both images touch is at once absolutely natural and, as Graham-Dixon says, momentous. It establishes distance as much as closeness. It shows the relation between the public and the private spheres, between irreducible singularity and the commitment to another. For both couples are anything but starry-eyed. Both seem to see clearly the vicissitudes that lie ahead. But touch is, in both instances, the index of their confidence and trust. Touch establishes the boundaries of each and their dependence on each other, neither perpetual solitude nor perpetual merging but an acceptance of difference in their free decision to make their lives together.
18 First Steps
It was just at the time when newly married couples throughout the western world were having their photographs taken in postures and clothing similar to those of my grandparents that we entered the period that has aptly been called the Age of Suspicion. For the one thing that seems to unite all the greatest artists and thinkers of the later nineteenth century — Marx, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Nietzsche — and of the twentieth — Proust, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Freud, Eliot, Picasso, Schoenberg — was their suspicion of the notions they had inherited from the Enlightenment and Romanticism — Progress, Reason, Imagination, Art, Glory, Human Nature, etc. — and their desire to strip away false façades and lay bare the needs and motives that had given rise to them.
Yet, among the artists at least, this desire went hand in hand with a profound sense that the ethos of suspicion was always in danger of sweeping away the precious and genuine along with the false and the shoddy, with an awareness, largely instinctive, that if our relation to the world is to be one of unwavering suspicion then we will have wounded ourselves more deeply than we realise. Van Gogh, quite as iconoclastic as Nietzsche in his way, could nevertheless write to his brother about ‘what only Rembrandt has among painters, that tenderness in the gaze … that heart-broken tenderness, that glimpse of a superhuman infinite that there seems so natural’. Unmasking the sentimental, the hypocritical, the oppressive, the shoddy, can, indeed must, co-exist with a recognition of the true and the genuine.
Picasso, less romantic than van Gogh but equally responsive to those aspects of our lives that call for celebration as well as those which need to be unmasked, has left us a whole series of icons of trust, particularly that which exists between mother and child, at the same time as he wittily undermines the pretensions and bad faith that so often underlie nineteenth-century depictions of this theme. Two pieces of sculpture in particular come to mind. One of them is so famous that it is now difficult for us to read it. In Vallauris in 1952 the seventy-year-old artist found a toy car which, in a flash of inspiration, he saw as the broad-nosed face of a monkey. The finished sculpture, however, provides us with more than the simple play of wit embodied in that perception. For it is an image not of a car/monkey but of a mother and child. The tiny baby monkey, clinging to the mother's massive chest, completely alters the meaning of the car/face above it. Quite as much as any madonna and child, what the sculpture suggests is the child's need for dependence and the mother's tenderness, clumsiness and pride. Had this been a work of Duchamp's none of this would have emerged. Duchamp would have made the connection between car and monkey-face and been satisfied to embody that flash of wit. Indeed, he would probably have felt that anything more would destroy the purity of the initial conception. For Picasso, on the other hand, the flash of wit — this car, seen from above, is the face of a monkey — is only the beginning.