Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGERPicasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGERThe opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
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 BERGEREvery city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGERA photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGERNothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
JOHN BERGERIt is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
JOHN BERGERLandscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGERThe camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
JOHN BERGERWhat any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
JOHN BERGERNever again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
JOHN BERGERA drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
JOHN BERGERTo be naked is to be oneself.
JOHN BERGERThose who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGERI can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
JOHN BERGERWhat makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER