And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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Summary: Intimacy as a means of negotiating reality.
Review: I need a qualification, I have only read p.69-p.86 of this book and am ordering it now to read more. In it he speaks first of pleasure and pain, how "The existence of pleasure is the first mystery." and moves on to talk about Van Gogh and Caravaggio. The piece on Van Gogh is simply brilliant. He talks about a majority artists as what I call Nietzschian perspectivists how they bring down the screen of cliche for personal profit from their art, and how Van Gogh is the farthest from this that there is. How for him the creation of art mirrored Creation, and how he could only approach Reality through work, I apologise that I cannot do this justice in 1000 words. He then talks of intimacy and Caravaggio. I will not get into that, you should read it for yourself, but if you are in love or have ever been in love, not that flowery crap but the dirt and the grime and the sweat that is ACTUAL love and all the pleasure and pain it brings, his discourse on Caravaggio's work brings home how closely linked intimacy and reality are. In this he also shreds all of the stupid power games and subtle manipulations our society ingrains into us without us even realizing it. From the perspective of actual intimacy we can understand so much about our world and we become freed from it. This will enlighten anyone with a compassionate heart. This will also most likely make you weep tears of joy for all that you do have, and dissipate your displeasure at what you do not, because what you do not have is not very important if you have intimacy. I cannot do it justice, so just read it.

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Summary: Berger's Faces
Review: I'm a committed Berger devotee, owning or having read probably every book he's written. 'Our Faces,' is the book I've returned to most often over the years. I feel enlivened by Berger's language, his passions, his insights into art, the crispness of his poetry, his feeling for form; and this book is so elegantly paced & presented. He communicates his finest perceptions about greatly loved paintings and makes earnest & eloquent efforts in establishing their meaning for him. The process invites the reader into his own heart, deepening the world, making it more palpable. The piece on Caravaggio is astonishing, a set piece of concise art writing, free of jargon(as is all of Berger)and superior, to my thinking, to any of the spate of Caravaggio books that hit the shops at the turn of the century.