Ways of Seeing
John Berger, Chris Fox, Sven Blomberg, Michael Dibbs, Richard Hollis
Language: English
Pages: 79
ISBN: B0050WE3UG
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
John Berger’s Classic Text on Art
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) 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.
"Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review
"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling
Winner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.
Lives of Images (Picturing History)
seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization. If this is true – though the historical span of Levi-Strauss’s generalization may be too large – the tendency reached its peak during the period of the traditional oil painting. The term oil painting refers to more than a technique. It defines an art form. The technique of mixing pigments with oil had existed since the ancient world. But the oil painting as an art form was not born until
added to the globe the name of the estate in France which belonged to the ambassador on the left. Beside the globe are a book of arithmetic, a hymn book and a lute. To colonize a land it was necessary to convert its people to Christianity and accounting, and thus to prove to them that European civilization was the most advanced in the world. Its art included. ADMIRAL DE RUYTER IN THE CASTLE OF ELMINA BY DE WITTE 1617–1692 The African kneels to hold up an oil painting to his master. The
to give up.) Landscape painting was, from its inception, a relatively independent activity. Its painters naturally inherited and so, to a large extent, were forced to continue the methods and norms of the tradition. But each time the tradition of oil painting was significantly modified, the first initiative came from landscape painting. From the seventeenth century onwards the exceptional innovators in terms of vision and therefore technique were Ruysdael, Rembrandt (the use of light in his later
fellow men and heightens our awe for the ever-increasing power of the mighty impulses that enabled him to give us a close view of life’s vital forces. That is mystification. In order to avoid mystifying the past (which can equally well suffer pseudo-Marxist mystification) let us now examine the particular relation which now exists, so far as pictorial images are concerned, between the present and the past. If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.
fellow men and heightens our awe for the ever-increasing power of the mighty impulses that enabled him to give us a close view of life’s vital forces. That is mystification. In order to avoid mystifying the past (which can equally well suffer pseudo-Marxist mystification) let us now examine the particular relation which now exists, so far as pictorial images are concerned, between the present and the past. If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.