John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Bergeris an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. 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...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth5 November 1926
love men watches
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
priorities scarcity world
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
mirrors hands vanity
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
lying media bombs
Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why but the editorialists forget it terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
events according-to-plan plans
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
past wish prisoner
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.
choices looks
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
sight earth sun
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.
almost bodies formal gestures heads letters resemble several whereas
In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual.
compassion order way
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
medicine soul mountain
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
may impossible birth
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
real painting absence
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
real painting absence
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.