It is 50 years this month because the first airing of John Berger’s documentary sequence “Methods of Seeing”, which scrutinised the political meanings of artwork. Fifty years, too, since Berger revealed his Booker-prizewinning novel “G.”—a portrait of Europe simply earlier than the primary world warfare, following the exploits of a contemporary Don Juan.
“Methods of Seeing” was a response to Kenneth Clark’s landmark tv sequence of 1969, “Civilisation”, which, in Berger’s view, contributed to the “mystification” of artwork. He proposed an altogether extra direct and private strategy. Within the opening sequence of the primary episode, Berger took a knife to Sandro Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars”—or to what gave the impression to be that well-known portray within the Nationwide Gallery in London. Having eliminated Venus’s head from the canvas, he blithely wandered off. It was a second of pure showmanship, however introduced his resolve to chop by way of the obfuscatory reverence of the scholar and the connoisseur.
In 4 half-hour instalments, and later as a slim e-book, “Methods of Seeing” reframed the dialog about how artwork is interpreted, specializing in the character of possession and the language of appreciation in addition to the methods by which promoting appropriates the motifs of portray. It met with enthusiasm in faculties and universities, the place it popularised the concepts of Walter Benjamin, who within the Thirties had foreseen the implications of artworks being turned, by copy, into commodities.
Berger was a longtime broadcaster earlier than “Methods of Seeing”, however the sequence confirmed that he was essentially the most pugnacious kind of critic, itching to overthrow prevailing assumptions about style, standing and genius. The phrase “possibly” was alien to him. As an alternative he sought to stimulate his viewers with unnerving generalisations: “Glamour can't exist with out private social envy being a standard and widespread emotion” and “Males have a look at ladies. Girls watch themselves being checked out.”
When Berger died in 2017, aged 90, the obituaries dwelled on “Methods of Seeing”. However his writing about artwork could possibly be much more delicate. Take this from an early overview: “The sunshine in a Constable masterpiece is like water dripping off the gunwale of a ship because it drives by way of the ocean. It suggests the best way the entire scene is surging by way of the day, dipping by way of solar and cloud.” A lot of his finest essential prose seems within the chunky quantity “Portraits” (2015), which, because it ranges from the cave painters of 30,000 years in the past to youngsters of the Nineteen Sixties akin to Jean-Michel Basquiat, quantities to a extremely idiosyncratic historical past of artwork.
Berger had different guises—as a poet, playwright, screenwriter, sociologist and polemical humanitarian, vaulting the boundaries between typical literary types. Among the many richest of his essays is an intimate meditation on a discipline. His most outstanding e-book is “A Seventh Man” (1975), an eloquent illustration of the lives of Europe’s migrant employees, on which he collaborated with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. This, too, is almost half a century outdated but feels extra pertinent than ever.
Then there's the much less acquainted determine of Berger the novelist, whom the fiftieth anniversary of “G.” gives a chance to revisit. One of many traits of his fiction is a liking for epigram—generally piercing, generally intrusively didactic. The novels additionally share an intense seriousness about their subject material: in his first, “A Painter of Our Time”, that's the exhausting and infrequently thrilling routines of artistic endeavour; in his trilogy “Into Their Labours”, it's the smells, grime and decay of a peasant neighborhood within the French Alps (the place Berger lived for 40 years); and in “G.” it’s the form and texture of want. Not all of this has aged effectively, however there’s no denying the vivid particularity of his prose.
When “G.” gained the Booker prize, the award was nonetheless sponsored by the corporate that had as soon as managed the Guyanese sugar trade. True to kind, Berger gave half the cash to the British Black Panthers, a revolutionary group, on the grounds that the Booker household had made their fortune off the backs of slaves. But quite than placing a word of insolence, he sounded invigorated. “It's doable,” he stated, “for the descendants of the slave and the slave-master to strategy one another once more with the amazed hope of potential equals.” Right here, as so typically, he was militant and on the similar time empathetic—an agitator, however of an unusually hospitable and attentive sort. ■
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