Landscapes. John Berger

      

      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

       versobooks.com

      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

       8.The Storyteller

       9.Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death

       10.Gabriel García Márquez: The Secretary of Death Reads It Back

       11.Roland Barthes: Inside the Mask

       12.Forthflowing on a Joycean Tide

       13.A Gift for Rosa Luxemburg

       14.The Ideal Critic and the Fighting Critic

       PART II. TERRAIN

       15.The Clarity of the Renaissance

       16.A View of Delft

       17.The Dilemma of the Romantics

       18.The Victorian Conscience

       19.The Moment of Cubism

       20.Parade, 1917

       21.Judgment on Paris

       22.Soviet Aesthetic

       23.The Biennale