Selected Essays of John Berger

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Selected Essays of John Berger (First Vintage International Edition) Pub. Date: 3/11/2003 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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Overview

On the occasion of his seventy-fith birthday, Pantheon is publishing a gathering of John Berger's most insightful and provocative writings on art over the past forty years.

Selected Essays brings together a comprehensive array of writings from Berger's previous collections: Toward Reality, The Moment of Cubism, The Look of Things, About Looking, The Sense of Sight, and Keeping a Rendezvous. From Piero to Pollock, from Kokoschka to La Tour, from mass demonstrations to museums -- the ideas in these essays are as fresh and compelling as they were when first published. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original, they display a remarkable continuity of thoughtful inquiry and political engagement.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books include the Booker Prize-winning novel G. and, more recently, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, and Ways of Seeing. Berger lives in a small village in the French Alps.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

At 75, British-born prolific art writer Berger (Ways of Seeing) is a longtime farm dweller in the French Alps, which may help give his prose its much-praised unadorned directness and earthiness. This weighty tome selects essays from previous volumes, including The Sense of Sight and Keeping a Rendezvous. They include terse meditations on painters like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Goya, Poussin and Gauguin, as well as sculptors like Lipschitz, Brancusi and Zadkine. There are farm-inspired essays like "A Load of Shit" and stark personal essays with a peasant-like directness: "When my father died recently, I did several drawings of him in his coffin. Drawings of his face and head." This stance makes his thoughts about artists, whether praising Picasso or decrying the British painter Francis Bacon, seem all the more authentic and credible. Piles and piles of prejudices here wind up being eminently readable because they're expressed without ornate flourishes and in a plain-spoken (sometimes overly so) stance. In the tradition of energetic British eccentrics, Berger has contributed much to writing on modern art, often speaking sense and doing it more entertainingly than most salaried newspaper specialists. (Dec.) Forecast: Berger's Ways of Seeing is still a campus favorite for intro. to art classes, and these essays should be a sure thing for most college libraries. But Berger has enough name recognition to reach literate non-specialists, and the book should make it into many public libraries and gift tables. The author's 75th birthday makes a good hook for rousing regular art readers and getting them to make a Berger purchase. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375713187
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 3/11/2003
Edition description: First Vintage International Edition
Edition number: 1
Pages: 608
Sales rank: 697,083
Series: Vintage International
Product dimensions: 5.17 (w) x 8.01 (h) x 1.06 (d)

Meet the Author

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-wining novel G. His new collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket has been published in 2001. John Berger now lives and works in a small village in the French Alps.

Editor's Introduction

From Permanent Red (1960) (US title Toward Reality)
Preface to the 1979 Edition Introduction Drawing Jackson Pollock Henry Moore Juan Gris Jacques Lipchitz Ossip Zadkine Fernand Léger Pablo Picasso Henri Matisse Oskar Kokoschka The Clarity of the Renaissance The Calculations of Piero Poussin's Order Watteau as the Painter of His Time The Honesty of Goya The Dilemma of the Romantics Millet and Labour The Politics of Courbet Gauguin’s Crime

From The Moment of Cubism (1969)
The Moment of Cubism The Historical Function of the Museum The Changing View of Man in the Portrait Art and Property Now Image of Imperialism
Nude in a Fur Coat: Rubens
The Painter in His Studio: Vermeer
Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin
The Maja Dressed and The Maja Undressed: Goya Mathias Grünewald L. S. Lowry 138
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Alberto Giacometti Pierre Bonnard Frans Hals Auguste Rodin

From The Look of Things (1972)
Peter Peri Zadkine Le Corbusier Victor Serge Walter Benjamin Drawings by Watteau Fernand Léger Thicker than Water (Corot)
Painting a Landscape Understanding a Photograph The Political Uses of Photo-Montage The Sight of a Man Revolutionary Undoing Past Seen from a Possible Future The Nature of Mass Demonstrations

The Booker Prize Speech
Speech on Accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction (1972)

From About Looking (1980)
Why Look at Animals?
The Suit and the Photograph Photographs of Agony Paul Strand Uses of Photography The Primitive and the Professional Millet and the Peasant Seker Ahmet and the Forest La Tour and Humanism Francis Bacon and Walt Disney An Article of Faith Between Two Colmars Courbet and the Jura Turner and the Barber’s Shop Rouault and the Suburbs of Paris Magritte and the Impossible Romaine Lorquet Field

From The White Bird (1985) (US title The Sense of Sight)
The White Bird The Storyteller The Eaters and the Eaten On the Bosphorus The Theatre of Indifference Modigliani's Alphabet of Love The Hals Mystery In a Moscow Cemetery Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death François, Georges and Amélie: A Requiem in Three Parts Drawn to That Moment The Eyes of Claude Monet The Work of Art Mayakovsky: His Language and His Death [with Anya Bostock]
The Hour of Poetry Leopardi The Production of the World

Ulysses
The First and Last Recipe: Ulysses (1991)

From Keeping a Rendezvous (1992)
Note to the Reader Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye That Which Is Held A Load of Shit Mother A Story for Aesop The Ideal Palace Imagine Paris A Kind of Sharing Christ of the Peasants A Professional Secret Ape Theatre The Opposite of Naked A Household Drawing on Paper Erogenous Zone The Soul and the Operator The Third Week of August, 1991

Appendices Notes Sources

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