By Will Gompertz, BBC arts editor
John Berger's 1972 programme Ways of Seeing changed the way many of us saw.
He argued that the advent of mass media fundamentally altered our perception of art.
The programme was to become iconic and highly influential but would not, he told me a couple of months ago, be made today.
He challenged convention, the establishment and us. He had the eye of artist, intellect of an academic, and charisma of a born performer.
He was though, above all, a writer and story teller. He enriched our lives with his novels, poetry and criticism.
He showed us how to see, not as individuals, but together.
Mr Overton, who edited Portraits: John Berger on Artists and Landscapes: John Berger on Art, said: "John Berger said his great themes were the experience of exile and the disastrous relationship between art and property.
"So it feels like we need him more than ever at the moment. But he also said some books get younger with time, and I know many of his will.
"John Berger's legacy is one of encouragement and hope, and a massively diverse range of work in all genres.
"He showed us how to see art not as a relay race of individual geniuses but as a kind of companionship."
Berger's Bafta award-winning BBC TV series Ways of Seeing became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made.
He died at his home in Paris.
!!!!
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on this day in 1881.
"The creative spirit, genius as a state of being was celebrated as an end in itself because it alone did not have a price and was unbuyable."
--from "The Success and Failure of Picasso" by John Berger
--from "The Success and Failure of Picasso" by John Berger
At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized−and wholly isolated. In this stunning critical assessment, John Berger−one of this century's most insightful cultural historians−trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shpaed his life and work. Writing with a novelist's sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the pained etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso's triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of their cost−in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man's furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.
John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter andpoet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.
John Berger John Berger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bibliography[edit]
- A Painter of Our Time (1958)
- Permanent Red (1960) (Published in the United States in altered form in 1962 as Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing)
- Poems on the Theatre translated from Bertolt Brecht with Anya Bostock (1961)
- The Foot of Clive (1962)
- Corker's Freedom (1964)
- The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) 台北：遠流
- A Fortunate Man (with Jean Mohr) (1967)
- Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R (1969)
- The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (1969)
- Return to My Native Land translated from Aimé Césaire with Anna Bostock (1969)
- The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles (1972)
- Ways of Seeing (with Mike Dibb, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox and Richard Hollis) (1972)台北：台灣商務等
- G. (1972)
- A Seventh Man (with Jean Mohr) (1975)
- About Looking (1980)
- Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag. A Trilogy)
- Another Way of Telling (with Jean Mohr) (1982)
- Boris [9] (1983)
- Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 (with Alain Tanner) (1983)
- And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984)
- The White Bird (U.S. title: The Sense of Sight) (1985)
- A Question of Geography (with Nella Bielski) (1987)
- Goya's Last Portrait (with Nella Bielski) (1989)
- Keeping a Rendezvous (1992) 《約定》 桂林： 廣西師範大學，2009
- Pages of the Wound (1994)
- To the Wedding (1995)
- Photocopies (1996)
- Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) (1996)
- Isabelle: A Story in Shorts (with Nella Bielski) (1998)
- At the Edge of the World (with Jean Mohr) (1999)
- King: A Street Story (1999)
- Selected Essays (Geoff Dyer, ed.) (2001)
- The Shape of a Pocket (2001) 抵抗的群體桂 林： 廣西師範大學，2009
- I Send You This Cadmium Red: A Correspondence with John Christie (with John Christie) (2001)
- My Beautiful (with Marc Trivier) (2004)
- Berger on Drawing (2005)
- Here is Where We Meet (2005)
- Hold Everything Dear (2007)
- From A to X (2008)
- Meanwhile (2008)
- Why Look at Animals? (2009)
- From I to J (with Isabel Coixet) (2009)
- Mural translated from Mahmoud Darwish with Rema Hammami (2009)
- Lying Down to Sleep (with Katya Berger) (2010)
- Railtracks (with Anne Michaels) (2011)
- Bento's Sketchbook (2011)
- Le louche et autres poèmes (with Yves Berger) (2012)
- Cataract (with Selçuk Demirel) (2012)
- Understanding a Photograph (Geoff Dyer, ed.) (New York: Aperture, 2013)[10]
敦作家約翰‧伯格(John Berger)在著作《講故事的人(The Storyteller) 》 桂林： 廣西師範大學，2009
早期的有趣 發掘蘇聯藝術家Ernst Neizvestny.....
Art and revolution
Art and Revolution:
Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist
Vintage Books, 1998 - 192 頁
In this prescient and beautifully written book, John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger's impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre-glasnot Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy--which involved a face-to-face confrontation with Khruschev himself--Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions. "Berger is probably our most perceptive commentator on art...A civilized and stimulating companion no matter what subject happens to cross his mind."--Philadelphia Inquirer
John Berger pays tribute to his good friend
The Observer, Sunday 8 August 2004
At every railway crossing in France there is a solid notice, a panel with writing on it which reads: 'Attention! Un train peut en cacher un autre.' Cartier-Bresson, whatever the event he was photographing, saw the second train and was usually able to include it within his frame. I don't think he did this consciously, it was a gift which came to him, and he felt in the depths of his being that gifts should continually be passed on. He photographed the apparently unseen. And when it was there in his photos it was more than visible.
Yesterday he joined the second train. At the age of 95 - with all his agility - he jumped it. He has joined his inspiration. Six years ago he wrote something about inspiration: 'In a world collapsing under the weight of the search for profit, invaded by the insatiable sirens of Techno-science and the greed of Power, by globalisation and the new forms of slavery - beyond all of this, friendship and love exist.' He wrote this in his own handwriting, which was open like a lens which has no shutter.
Bullshit! I now hear him saying, look at my drawings, there is no second train in them! So I look at some reproductions of some of his drawings. How drawings change - even 24 hours after a death; their tentativeness disappears, they become final. He said repeatedly in his later years that photography no longer interested him as much as drawing. Drawing - or anyway drawing as he drew - has less to do with the sense of sight than with the sense of touch, with touching the substance and energy of things, with touching the enigma of life without thinking about eternity or the second train. Drawing is a private act. Yet Cartier-Bresson returned to it, knowing very well that it was an act of solidarity with both those who see the second train and those who don't.
That's better, he says.
An epitaph for him? Yes, a photo he took in Mexico in 1963. It shows a small girl in a deserted street carrying a framed daguerreotype portrait of a beautiful and serene woman which is almost as large as the child. Both are about to disappear behind a tall fence.
The last second of visibility, but not of the woman's serenity or the girl's eagerness.
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