John Berger - Portraits: John Berger on Artists
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John Berger, one of the worlds most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. In Portraits, Berger grounds the artists in their historical milieu in revolutionary ways, whether enlarging on the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves or Cy Twomblys linguistic and pictorial play.
In penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary worlds most incisive critical voices
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Electric with thought and energy Bergers words and images, rendered serene by age and habit, provide an exhilarating and unflinching account of global devastation and ordinary life
Colin MacCabe, New Statesman
Berger is a writer one demands to know more about an intriguing and powerful mind and talent
New York Times
John Berger throws a long shadow across the literary landscape; in that shade so many of us have taken refuge, encouraged by his work that you can be passionately, radically political and also concerned with the precise details of artistic production and everyday life, that the beautiful and the revolutionary belong together, that you can chart your own course and ignore the herd, that you can make words on the page sing and liberate minds that way. Like so many writers, I owe him boundless gratitude and regard news of a new book as encouragement that the most important things are still possible. The gifts are huge, and heres another one coming
Rebecca Solnit
A broad jumper of the intellect. He is always making links where no one else has. Between the famous photograph of a Bolivian colonel pointing to Che Guevaras dead body and the Rembrandt painting of a doctor in an identical pose pointing to a cadaver before a group of medical students. Between the struggle of Third against First World today and the tensions of city dweller against peasant as painted by Millet
Adam Hochschild
In this extraordinary new work, John Berger embarks on a process of rediscovery and refiguring of history through the visual narratives given to us by portraiture. Bergers ability for storytelling is both incisive and intriguing. He is one of the greatest writers of our time
Hans Ulrich Obrist
JOHN BERGER ON ARTISTS
John Berger
First published by Verso 2015
John Berger 2015
Introduction Tom Overton 2015
Lack of space constrains the publisher from acknowledging all the publications in which these writings originally appeared and the copyright holders for each image reproduced here; a comprehensive list of acknowledgements appears in the back matter.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections to be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-176-7
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-177-4 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-178-1 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Berger, John, author.
[Essays. Selections]
Portraits : John Berger on artists / edited by Tom Overton.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78478-176-7 (hardback)
1. Art. I. Title. II. Title: John Berger on artists.
N7445.2.B466 2015
709.22dc23
2015030114
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Electra by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackeys
For Beverly and for Gareth Evans
I HAVE ALWAYS hated being called an art critic. Its true that for a decade or more I wrote regularly in the Press about artists, exhibitions, museum shows, and so the term is justified.
But in the milieu in which I grew up since I was a teenager, to call somebody an art critic was an insult. An art critic was somebody who judged and pontificated about things he knew a little or nothing about. He wasnt as bad as an art dealer, but he was a pain in the arse.
This was a milieu of painters, sculptors, graphic artists of all ages who struggled to survive and to create a lifes work with a minimum of publicity, acclaim, or smart recognition. They were cunning, they had high standards, they were modest, the old masters were their companions, they were fraternally critical of one another, but they didnt give a fuck about the art market and its promoters. Many of them were political migrs. And by nature they were outlaws. Such were the men and women who taught and inspired me.
Their inspiration has led me to write about art intermittently throughout my long life as a writer. Yet what happens when I write or try to write about art?
Having looked at a work of art, I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively enter the studio in which it was made. And there I wait in the hope of learning something of the story of its making. Of the hopes, of the choices, of the mistakes, of the discoveries implicit in that story. I talk to myself, I remember the world outside the studio, and I address the artist whom I maybe know, or who may have died centuries ago. Sometimes something he has done replies. Theres never a conclusion. Occasionally theres a new space to puzzle both of us. Occasionally theres a vision which makes us both gasp gasp as one does before a revelation.
What such an approach and practice yields, it is for the reader of my texts to judge. I myself cant say. Im always in doubt. One thing, however, Im sure about, and that is my gratitude to all the artists for their hospitality.
The illustrations in this book are all in black and white. This is because glossy colour reproductions in the consumerist world of today tend to reduce what they show to items in a luxury brochure for millionaires. Whereas black-and-white reproductions are simple memoranda.
John Berger
24 March 2015
I OFTEN THINK now that even when I was writing about art, said John Berger in 1984, it was really a way of storytelling storytellers lose their identities and are open to the lives of other people.
Some of Bergers friends, Geoff Dyer and Susan Sontag included, were unconvinced. Wasnt this a story Berger was telling about himself? Isnt storytelling an oral form, and dont writers like Berger deal in the printed word? Nevertheless Berger stuck to it, partly because it covers the breadth of his work, from short fiction to plays, poems, novels, radio, films, installations, and essays to unclassifiable collaborative performances. As Marina Warner has pointed out, the way Berger addresses people in their own homes on the 1972 collaborative BBC TV series Ways of Seeing has all of the direct, spoken address of a much older form of engagement.
Berger proposes that he began to see himself as a storyteller during his military service in 1944, when he had written letters home for soldiers who couldnt. Often, he added embellishments to order, in return for their protection. This wasnt the splendid isolation of the stereotypical novelist or critic; rather, here Berger saw himself as equal, arguably even subservient, to the society around him.
In 1962 Berger left Britain, spending the years that followed moving around Europe. It was only once he settled in the French Alpine When it arrived in lightly edited form at the British Library in London in 2009, it was with the logic of storytelling: what interested Berger most about it, he said, were not the notes and the drafts he had made, but the letters or messages that had been sent to him.
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