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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indispensable, October 28, 2004
This review is from: Selected Essays of John Berger (Paperback)
I happened to pick this book up in a store because I had read one novel of Berger's, Pig Earth, which I thought was very good. I knew he was an art critic, but I never had any particular urge to read art criticism; I didn't think visual art needed a lot of explaining. Just reading the three page essay on Jackson Pollock convinced me that, at least regarding the type of criticism that Berger writes, I was wrong. In a few sentences, he seems to capture the essence of what an artist has accomplished (or is trying to accomplish) in his or her work, and makes the work more vivid and meaningful than it was before. Here is clear proof that finding words for one's experience of a work of art doesn't devalue it but makes it richer.
One of the things that makes these essays so gripping is that Berger is interested in something that seems to have fallen out of fashion in criticism: using art to identify the predicament of a culture. I remember, even before I picked up Pig Earth, being worried by the fact that Berger is a lifelong Marxist. But there is nothing doctrinaire or repetitive about his explanations of phenomenon; he is a free intellect, and I would argue that just because Marx's solutions have been widely discounted does not necessarily mean that his diagnoses are also invalid. In any case, Berger's priorities are always first exploring his subject, not imposing an orthodox framework on them.
The book, also, is not just about art. Berger is a real man of letters; his essays range over every art form and subject, and in the space of a few pages he can marshall support for his points from a novelist, painter, poet, photographer, and historian. He is never pretentious, because his primary objective is always communicating his argument with urgency. I bought this essay on the strength of the Pollock essay alone, and I've discovered so many more that I could read again and again; this is really one of my treasured books (a good measure of which is the frequency with which it comes into the bathroom with me).
The tight construction of Berger's essays makes it hard to quote a section and have it make sense as an argument, but here are a few samples: "Nobody who has not painted himself can fully appreciate what lies behind Matisse's mastery of colour. it is comparitively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture either by allowing one colour to dominate or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby."
Or, in the essay on our changing relationship with animals: "Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was the see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man." The essay on animals had a passage on nearly every page which made me want to put the book down and think for a few minutes, and I hope I'm not doing it a disservice by quoting a fragment. Buy the book and read it all; there are few other collections that contain such a breadth of knowledge and insight. Seriously, this is value for money.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Selections from a Life Well Spent, March 14, 2004
As Arthur Danto has written, Berger's essays are "always original and often inspired". If you've considered reading Berger's essays because his other works, such as "Ways of Seeing" or "G.", have intrigued you, this is the most thorough - and imaginable - collection to date. This book offers insight into art and life informed by a sagacious and radical ethos almost totally lacking in the work of art critics and the culture industry they supply. Berger is unafraid to speak honestly about what he knows: art and life -- and he knows plenty about both. (If the investment seems steep, but you still want a solid sampling of Berger's excellent prose, consider "Sense of Sight".)
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Attention must be paid!, May 4, 2008
Most of us, most of the time, are satisfied to be awed, intrigued, excited, even enraptured by art without developing any critical understanding of it. John Berger takes an addional step. A thoughtful critic and an excellent writer, he has been sharing his understanding with readers for more than 40 years. This book collects in one place nearly 600 pages of his essays on painting, architecture, photography, drama, and literature.
Berger on Pollock: Imagine a man brought up from birth in a white cell. And then imagine that suddenly he is given some sticks and bright paints. He would want to express his ideas and feelings. He would have nothing more than the gestures he could discover through the act of applying his colored marks to his white walls.
Berger on Picasso: The romanticism of Toulouse-Lautrec, the classicism of Ingres, the crude energy of Negro sculpture, the heart-searchings of Cézanne towards the truth about structure, the exposures of Freud. All these he has recognized, welcomed, pushed to bizarre conclusions, improvised on, sung through in order to make us recognize ourselves in the parody of a distorting mirror.
Berger on Joyce: Deep down, beneath the words, beneath the pretenses, beneath the claims and the everlasting moralistic judgment, beneath the opinions and lessons and boasts and cant of everyday life, the lives of adult women and men were made up of such stuff as this book [Ulysses] was made of: offal with flecks in it of the divine. The first and last recipe!
Four decades of thoughts such as the above: the accreted insights and enthusiasms of a restless intellect steeped in the arts. Berger began commanding attention in the 1950s. With this book, he commands it still.
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