Selected Essays of John Berger

Rating:
Summary: Selections from a Life Well Spent
Review: 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".)

Rating:
Summary: Selections from a Life Well Spent
Review: 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".)

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable
Review: 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.