Praise for Portraits
‘John Berger tedaches us how to think, how to feel, how to stare at things until we see what we thought wasn’t there. But above all, he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity. He is a master’
Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
‘A volume whose breadth and depth bring it close to a definitive self-portrait of one of Britain’s most original thinkers’
Financial 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 here’s another one coming’
Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
‘In this extraordinary new book, John Berger embarks on a process of rediscovery and refiguring of history through the visual narratives given to us by portraiture. Berger’s ability for storytelling is both incisive and intriguing. He is one of the greatest writers of our time’
Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of Ways of Curating
‘One of the most influential intellectuals of our time’
Sean O’Hagan, Observer
‘Berger is a writer one demands to know more about … an intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
‘ Ingenious, jargon-free and direct … Berger is a formidable stylist’
New York Times
‘Perhaps the greatest living writer on art … reminds us just how insufficient most art commentary is these days … an indispensible guide to understanding art from cave painting to today’s experimenters’
Spectator
‘Berger’s art criticism transcends its genre to become a very rare thing – literature’
New Republic
‘In the writings of John Berger we find a passion for art itself, for the created thing, that is everywhere tempered by an awareness of the social and political world, which too many theorists, whatever their special pleadings, simply ignore’
Harper’s Magazine
‘Berger long ago attained a position unrivalled among English writers or intellectuals of his generation; he seems to stand for a vanished era of critical and political seriousness … All that seems worth preserving and worth celebrating in a long and varied but essential volume’
Brian Dillon, Literary Review
LANDSCAPES:
John Berger on Art
by
John Berger
Edited with an Introduction by Tom Overton
First published by Verso 2016
© John Berger 2016
Translation, Chapter 5, from Poems on the Theatre by
Bertolt Brecht © Anya Bostock and John Berger 2016
Introduction © Tom Overton 2016
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
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-584-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-587-1 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-586-4 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berger, John, author. | Overton, Tom, editor.
Title: Landscapes : John Berger’s writing on art / John Berger ; edited with an introduction by Tom Overton.
Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019158| ISBN 9781784785840 (hardback) | ISBN 9781784785871 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art.
Classification: LCC N7445.2 .B467 2016 | DDC 700 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019158
Typeset in Electra by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
Introduction: Down with Enclosures
PART I. REDRAWING THE MAPS
1.Kraków
2.To Take Paper, to Draw
3.The Basis of All Painting and Sculpture Is Drawing
4.Frederick Antal – A Personal Tribute
5.An Address to Danish Worker Actors on the Art of Observation, by Bertolt Brecht, Translated by Anya Rostock and John Berger
6.Revolutionary Undoing: On Max Raphael’s The Demands of Art
7.Walter Benjamin: Antiquarian and Revolutionary
