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 BERGERJapanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
More John Berger Quotes
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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.
JOHN BERGER -
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
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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.
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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.
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The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
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To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
JOHN BERGER -
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER