In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGERA tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
More John Berger Quotes
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
JOHN BERGER -
Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
JOHN BERGER -
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
JOHN BERGER -
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
JOHN BERGER -
All creation is in the art of seeing.
JOHN BERGER -
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
JOHN BERGER -
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER -
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGER -
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER -
It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
JOHN BERGER -
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGER -
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
JOHN BERGER -
I 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 BERGER






