Having avoided quoting examples of the qualities I’ve sketched, I’d like to end by returning to Portraits. The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) could be read by people with only the faintest knowledge of Picasso orsuch is the originality of Berger’s insightsby specialists who had spent their lives studying the artist. Some authors say they are writing for “the general reader” (whoever that might be), others for a cohort of fellow experts. What we did know was that we were gripped, absolutely, irrespective of how much we knew about the artist in question. He did this so intimately that it was sometimes hard to say whether we were witnessing a lapel-grabbing fight or a passionate embrace. The odd thing, now that the verdict of posterity has been secured, is that one can still read Berger’s pieces with immense satisfaction and pleasure even though, in critical terms, he consistently backed the wrong horse.įrom the early ’60s on, Berger wrote more expansive (sometimes book-length) essays in which the task of critical judgment was subordinate to sustained examinations of the nature of hisand ourrelationships with artists and their work. After Spender wrote to complain that Berger was “a foghorn in a fog,” Berger replied by thanking him for the compliment: What could be more useful in a fog, he asked, than a foghorn? A more protracted struggle was waged with the Statesman’s other art critic, the painter Patrick Heron, who promoted abstraction against Berger’s stubborn advocacy of social realism. First collected in Permanent Red (1960), those early articles are informed by a straightforward ideological agenda: “Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?” Since this rubbed plenty of people the wrong way, the letters page of the New Statesman often became an entertaining battlegroundnever more so than when the dim-witted Stephen Spender set himself up for a devastating counterpunch. This, combined with his knack for evoking the look of a canvas or sculpture in words, counteracts some of the expected hostility to his writing in an unexpected way. 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 BBC 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.