A major new book from one of the world's leading writers and art critics
Storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and
critic, John Berger is 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 as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded
Collaborative Doctoral Award with King's College London, and edited
this book as a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow and a Fellow
of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at KCL. He has curated
exhibitions at King's Cultural Institute, Somerset House and the
Whitechapel Gallery, and his writing has been published by the New
Statesman, Apollo, White Review, Various Small Fires, Tate, the
British Council and others.
John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel, how to stare at
things till 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, author of The God of Small Things*
A volume whose breadth and depth bring it close to a definitive
self-portrait of one of Britain's most original thinkers.
*Financial Times*
In this extraordinary new book, John Berger embarks on a process of
re-discovery and re-figuring of history through the visual
narratives given to us by portraiture. Berger's ability for
storytelling is both incisive and intriguing. He is one of the
greatest writers of our time.
*Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of Ways of Curating*
I admire and love John Berger's books ... Not since Lawrence has
there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual
world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a
wonderful artist and thinker.
*Susan Sontag*
One of the most influential intellectuals of our time.
*Observer*
Shows the 88-year-old British art critic at his bristling best.
*Wall Street Journal*
John Berger is always illuminating and his latest book, Portraits:
John Berger on Artists, doesn't disappoint
*Scotsman*
Perhaps the greatest living writer on art . reminds us just how
insufficient most art commentary is these days . an indispensible
guide to understanding art from cave painting to today's
experimenters.
*Spectator (Art Books of the Year 2015)*
A near exhaustive selection of the ever astute writer's 'responses'
to various artists and works, chronologically organised from early
cave paintings through to the Palestinian artist Randa Mdah.
*Independent (Books of the Year 2015)*
Berger has always been a writer who understands that art does not
begin and end with the canvas-instead, art (and great art writing)
should stay with us as a communion between the overlapping titles
we assign as portraits: wife, person, genius, artist. These titles,
when carefully assigned, could be limiting, but in Berger's expert
hands, they are just the beginning.
*National Post*
A lifetime's engagement with artists like Rembrandt, Goya, Henry
Moore and Francis Bacon . Ingenious, jargon-free and direct ...
Berger is a formidable stylist.
*New York Times*
A rich and loving exploration of art history, at once
intellectually acute and deeply personal... vital and uncommonly
engaging proof of concept for ideas that Berger has long
espoused.
*Slate*
Unruly attentiveness animates [...] a lifetime's engagement with
artists like Rembrandt, Goya, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon [...]
Ingenious, jargon-free and direct [...] Berger is a formidable
stylist.
*New York Times*
Berger's art criticism transcends its genre to become a very rare
thing-literature.
*New Republic*
Editors' Choice
*New York Times*
In the writings of John Berger we find a passion for art itself,
for the created thing, that is everywhere tempered by an awareness
of the social and political world, which too many theorists,
whatever their special pleadings, simply ignore.
*Harper's Magazine*
[Berger] long ago attained a position unrivalled among English
writers or intellectuals of his generation; he seems to stand for a
vanished era of critical and political seriousness . All that seems
worth preservng and worth celebrating in a long and varied but
essential volume like Portraits.
*Literary Review*
Regardless of the era he studies or the decade in which he writes,
his lyrical prose always ultimately serves a fervent political
concern . Berger's writing is fearless, winnowing down canonized
artists to their essential political bones.
*Brooklyn Rail*
This insistence upon unearthing for the present viewer the hidden
labor of the artist, when coupled with his own technical knowledge
of painterly art, delivers Berger's essays from the tedium of much
art criticism.
*Open Letters Monthly*
A vast and nourishing compendium... Life has more light and colour
after an encounter with Berger.
*Art Newspaper*
The pages are rife with muscular prose, sinewy intellectualism, and
especially the sensual analogy for which he is most known.
Portraits is so lively a book it can feel uncanny
*n+1*
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