“Landscapes.
John Berger on Art” is a compilation of essays written
between the 1960s and 2008 by the renowned art critic and
novelist, John Berger. Unlike its companion volume, “Portraits”,
which comprises a collection of essays about individual artists,
the essays in “Landscapes” are diverse, not always
about art, and, but for a few, not about landscapes at all.
At least not in the artistic sense.
John Berger talks about the people who influenced his thinking,
Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht among them,
the artists who created and defined art through history, the
evolution of art, and Gorbachov. He talks with ghosts and
Palestinian refuges, remembers colleagues left behind in Praga,
and discusses Communism and Capitalism and the brief life
of the Cubist movement.
His essays
are to be read at leisure, savored one by one, for each is
a different flavor, containing a different facet of the human
spirit. If together they make a picture it is a cubist painting,
striking and mysterious, and never easy to interpret.
It was
a rewarding, even if demanding, experience to be in Berger’s
mind. An experience I can’t wait to repeat by reading
both “Portraits” and “Ways of Seeing,”
his book based on the BBC Television Series of the same title.
Controversial
and uncompromising, Berger is a writer worth reading.
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