John Berger

"I was observing flowers thrown on a ledge in the corner of a small room in the afternoon light of a late September day in the year 1922 . The Civil War was over. It was nevertheless a year of widespread famine. Nearly all the white spots are covered.

I went to look at the painting several times during the night. Or rather to look at the corner in the small room. I couldn't`t leave it like that. Neither the flowers on the ledge nor the painting. You could still see where the white spots had been. Pockmarked. I had to return them in better condition to that late September afternoon, before the dreaded cold of winter arrived- when there would be little to burn for keeping warm.

I needed to paint more freely. Yet I could not treat the painting as mine; it was Kleber`s. More thoroughly than this I could have previously imagined. If I wasn`t free, the light wouldn`t come back.

The next day early in the morning I continued. Sitting with the canvas on my knees and the saucer on the table beside me. There are some lines in a poem by Akhmatova on the theme of morning, which refer to a chrysanthemum crushed by a boot on a sidewalk. These lines were written twenty years later. The crimson chrysanthemums in this still life are still innocent.

Now I paint freely, inspired by the long of what is there on the canvas. I discover how , in the corner of a small room, the light- falling on two peeling walls and half a dozen throw-down flowers - is a kind of promise from a distant unimaginable future.

The job is done. I feel elated. There it is, a painting by Kleber, 1922.

A moment has, for a moment been saved. This moment occurred before I was born. Where is it now? Is it possible to send promises backwards?"- John Berger, taken from Another Magazine A/W 2004