This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
JOHN BERGERMatisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
More John Berger Quotes
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
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The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGER






