Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGERJapanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGER(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGERWe know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGERHair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGERThis is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
JOHN BERGERFor me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGERHistory always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGERThe publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
JOHN BERGERWhat do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
JOHN BERGERThe contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
JOHN BERGERWhat is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
JOHN BERGERThe impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
JOHN BERGERThe relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGERNo painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGERUnlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGERA peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER