Landscapes: John Berger on Art

Description

In this brilliant collection of diverse works-essays, short stories, poems, translations-which spans a lifetime's engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives. Paying homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, he pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist's eye makes him a storyteller, rather than a critic. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists-from the Renaissance to the present-while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation. Landscapes-alongside Portraits-completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

John Berger (1926-2017) was one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing; the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours; Here Is Where We Meet; the Booker Prize-winning novel G; Hold Everything Dear; the Man Booker-longlisted From A to X; and A Seventh Man. Tom Overton catalogued John Berger's archive at the British Library and edited Portraits: John Berger on Art. He is working on Berger's biography and a book on migration and archives. His collected writing is available at overton.tw. He has organized exhibitions at King's Cultural Institute, Somerset House and the Whitechapel Gallery.

One of the most influential intellectuals of our time. * Observer * John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel how to stare at things until we see what we thought wasn't there. But above all, he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity. He is a master. * Arundhati Roy * Berger is a writer one demands to know more about ... an intriguing and powerful mind and talent. * New York Times * Essential ... reminds us that all good writing comes only from good (that is, patient, attentive, loving) looking. -- Andrew Marr * New Statesman * Essential reading not just for our political moment but outside it. He was a monument, a world of his own; at the same time, his thinking and his art-which are the same thing-address themselves at once to the past, the present, and the future * N+1 *