Product Description

The writing career of John Berger–poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist–has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger’s seminal essays.

Berger’s insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the lean beauty of his prose, and the keenness of his anger against injustice move us to view the world with a new lens of awareness. Whether he is discussing the singleminded intensity of Picasso’s Guernica, the parallel violence and alienation in the art of Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, or the enigmatic silence of his own mother, what binds these pieces throughout is the depth and fury of Berger’s passion, challenging us to participate, to protest, and above all, to see.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #279796 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-11
• Released on: 2003-03-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375713187
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
At 75, British-born prolific art writer Berger (Ways of Seeing) is a longtime farm dweller in the French Alps, which may help give his prose its much-praised unadorned directness and earthiness. This weighty tome selects essays from previous volumes, including The Sense of Sight and Keeping a Rendezvous. They include terse meditations on painters like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Goya, Poussin and Gauguin, as well as sculptors like Lipschitz, Brancusi and Zadkine. There are farm-inspired essays like "A Load of Shit" and stark personal essays with a peasant-like directness: "When my father died recently, I did several drawings of him in his coffin. Drawings of his face and head." This stance makes his thoughts about artists, whether praising Picasso or decrying the British painter Francis Bacon, seem all the more authentic and credible. Piles and piles of prejudices here wind up being eminently readable because they're expressed without ornate flourishes and in a plain-spoken (sometimes overly so) stance. In the tradition of energetic British eccentrics, Berger has contributed much to writing on modern art, often speaking sense and doing it more entertainingly than most salaried newspaper specialists. (Dec.)Forecast: Berger's Ways of Seeing is still a campus favorite for intro. to art classes, and these essays should be a sure thing for most college libraries. But Berger has enough name recognition to reach literate non-specialists, and the book should make it into many public libraries and gift tables. The author's 75th birthday makes a good hook for rousing regular art readers and getting them to make a Berger purchase.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"An important, not-to-be-missed chance to luxuriate in Berger's incomparable sagacity and visual sense." ?The Washington Post

?[Berger?s grace] is in his way with words, and the infinite meanings he finds in that common but extraordinary thing, noticing.? ?The New York Times Book Review

?Tenderness, and an unflagging interest in the experience of being human, infuse his work.? ?Los Angeles Times

"Berger is one of the greatest living writers in the English language." ?Buffalo News -- Review

Review
"An important, not-to-be-missed chance to luxuriate in Berger's incomparable sagacity and visual sense." —The Washington Post

“[Berger’s grace] is in his way with words, and the infinite meanings he finds in that common but extraordinary thing, noticing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Tenderness, and an unflagging interest in the experience of being human, infuse his work.” —Los Angeles Times

"Berger is one of the greatest living writers in the English language." —Buffalo News

Customer Reviews

Indispensable
I happened to pick this book up in a store because I had read one novel of Berger's, Pig Earth, which I thought was very good. I knew he was an art critic, but I never had any particular urge to read art criticism; I didn't think visual art needed a lot of explaining. Just reading the three page essay on Jackson Pollock convinced me that, at least regarding the type of criticism that Berger writes, I was wrong. In a few sentences, he seems to capture the essence of what an artist has accomplished (or is trying to accomplish) in his or her work, and makes the work more vivid and meaningful than it was before. Here is clear proof that finding words for one's experience of a work of art doesn't devalue it but makes it richer.

One of the things that makes these essays so gripping is that Berger is interested in something that seems to have fallen out of fashion in criticism: using art to identify the predicament of a culture. I remember, even before I picked up Pig Earth, being worried by the fact that Berger is a lifelong Marxist. But there is nothing doctrinaire or repetitive about his explanations of phenomenon; he is a free intellect, and I would argue that just because Marx's solutions have been widely discounted does not necessarily mean that his diagnoses are also invalid. In any case, Berger's priorities are always first exploring his subject, not imposing an orthodox framework on them.

The book, also, is not just about art. Berger is a real man of letters; his essays range over every art form and subject, and in the space of a few pages he can marshall support for his points from a novelist, painter, poet, photographer, and historian. He is never pretentious, because his primary objective is always communicating his argument with urgency. I bought this essay on the strength of the Pollock essay alone, and I've discovered so many more that I could read again and again; this is really one of my treasured books (a good measure of which is the frequency with which it comes into the bathroom with me).

The tight construction of Berger's essays makes it hard to quote a section and have it make sense as an argument, but here are a few samples: "Nobody who has not painted himself can fully appreciate what lies behind Matisse's mastery of colour. it is comparitively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture either by allowing one colour to dominate or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby."

Or, in the essay on our changing relationship with animals: "Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was the see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man." The essay on animals had a passage on nearly every page which made me want to put the book down and think for a few minutes, and I hope I'm not doing it a disservice by quoting a fragment. Buy the book and read it all; there are few other collections that contain such a breadth of knowledge and insight. Seriously, this is value for money.

Selections from a Life Well Spent
As Arthur Danto has written, Berger's essays are "always original and often inspired". If you've considered reading Berger's essays because his other works, such as "Ways of Seeing" or "G.", have intrigued you, this is the most thorough - and imaginable - collection to date.

This book offers insight into art and life informed by a sagacious and radical ethos almost totally lacking in the work of art critics and the culture industry they supply. Berger is unafraid to speak honestly about what he knows: art and life -- and he knows plenty about both.

(If the investment seems steep, but you still want a solid sampling of Berger's excellent prose, consider "Sense of Sight".)

John Berger is what politically engaged criticism should look like
This book is what politically engaged leftist art criticism should look like. This is what American art criticism WOULD look like if we could wrest it away from the academic theory cliques and their exclusionist jargon (in which they, without a hint of irony, frame a discourse of 'inclusion'). A left-wing pirate's treasure chest of golden ideas and silver sentences, this is a book to read, re-read, admire and argue with. Berger is the art critic other critics should learn from.