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
passion hair needs
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
names needs stories
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
needs painting pianist
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
talking evil needs
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.
I very seldom read back into what I've written.
invariably serves
Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.
against becomes becoming boycott directed exclusive itself
Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks becoming exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such.
accurate choosing enter life modest
I think I'm very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine.
absolutely art became encouraged enormous felt few hundred lived paintings people somehow whether
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
art authority exists language longer matters past uses
The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose.
hope perspective science
Perspective is not a science but a hope.
act looked men men-and-women themselves watch women
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
anytime came crude interest labor likely takes unless
We came back from Labor Day, and the interest has just exploded, ... It's just going to get more and more from here unless crude just takes a bath. That doesn't look likely anytime soon.
calf certain figures tangled
In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.