A seascape and a washbasin-I start to see one in the other, the scales reversible. Berger is less making a verifiable argument (although I’m convinced) than he is asking us to participate in a thought experiment, to “imagine” the links between a painter many consider the father of abstraction and his own father’s concrete profession. How, with his signature mixture of profundity and common sense, he manages to link Turner’s personal and class history with his experimental artistic form. Much of what I love about Berger is writ small here. More profoundly-at the level of childish phantasmagoria-picture the always possible combination, suggested by a barber’s shop, of blood and water, water and blood. Consider the equivalence between his father’s razor and the palette knife which, despite criticisms and current usage, Turner insisted upon using so extensively. Consider some of his later paintings and imagine, in the backstreet shop, water, froth, steam, gleaming metal, clouded mirrors, white bowls or basins in which soapy liquid is agitated by the barber’s brush and detritus deposited.
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