Personally, I find Berger’s insistence on identifying himself as a storyteller a less-than-adequate description of what he was up to, but his ability to embed a critical assessment of an artist’s work within a narrative is indeed matchless. In a 1984 interview, Berger claimed that even when he was working as a regular art critic for the New Statesman in the 1950s, he was really writing stories. No, no, that puts it far too tamely: whoever’s story is being told. Each piece comes as close as possible to placing you directly in front of the work of whoever is being discussed. Glancing through the contents, I guessed that I’d read everything before, but that familiarity manifested itself as an almost physical sensation of excitement: flash after flash of revelation and discovery. In 2015, curator and writer Tom Overton excerpted stuff Berger had written about artists and arranged it chronologically so that the resulting collection, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, comprised a highly individualized history of art. Contrast that with Berger, with the thrill you get when reading himon any artist, from any period in historyat any phase of his long writing life. But that sensation, as you slit the shrink-wrapwas it a tremble of anticipated pleasure or a faint gurgle of dread? Either way, the feeling when you got to the end of the texts was surely one of relief: Phew! That was a bit of a slog, but I learned something. You really wanted a souvenir of your visit, but when you looked at the catalogue’s essays, your heartwell, it didn’t exactly soar, did it? You bought the book anyway and lugged it home. Think, on the other hand, of that lavish catalogue accompanying the wonderful show of whatever at the museum of wherever. He was able to do thisand so much morebecause he was the least boring writer on art there has ever been.
John berger ways of seeing more books series#
What first struck me, when I saw the classic 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing and read the book adapted from it, was the way Berger made boring old paintings of men in ruffs look interesting. TO EXPLAIN why John Berger was such a great writer about art, it’s easiest to start with questions of boredom. Still from Ways of Seeing, 1972, a TV show on BBC.