Take this from an early review: “The light in a Constable masterpiece is like water dripping off the gunwale of a boat as it drives through the sea.
But his writing about art could be far more delicate. When Berger died in 2017, aged 90, the obituaries dwelled on “Ways of Seeing”.
Instead he sought to stimulate his audience with unnerving generalisations: “Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion” and “Men look at women. It met with enthusiasm in schools and universities, where it popularised the ideas of Walter Benjamin, who in the 1930s had foreseen the implications of artworks being turned, by reproduction, into commodities.īerger was an established broadcaster before “Ways of Seeing”, but the series confirmed that he was the most pugnacious type of critic, itching to overthrow prevailing assumptions about taste, status and genius. (1972) won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize.In four half-hour instalments, and later as a slim book, “Ways of Seeing” reframed the conversation about how art is interpreted, focusing on the nature of ownership and the language of appreciation as well as the ways in which advertising appropriates the motifs of painting. 1926) is an art critic, painter and novelist.born in Hackney, London. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings… he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has. John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.' Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics.
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