English art critic (1926-2017)
The happiness of being envied is glamour.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
JOHN BERGER
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
JOHN BERGER
A Painter of Our Time
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone.
JOHN BERGER
"Mother"
Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event -- either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
JOHN BERGER
Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.... The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy -- less in their deep anatomy -- in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.
JOHN BERGER
About Looking
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
JOHN BERGER
Adventures in Painting
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing