John Berger

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure…
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.
To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.”


― John Berger, Ways of Seeing


"I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvelous and the terrible.
Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
What two different people have in common will always, in all cases, be larger than what differentiates them. And yet for dozens of different reasons, circumstances blind people to that.
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it's a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark."





— "John Berger (1926 – 2017) was raised in a working-class home. At a private school, he sharpened his edges writing poetry and reading an anarchist newspaper. He ran away from school at 16, spent time in the army, and then studied art. Realizing he lacked the talent to be a painter, he became an art critic for The New Statesman. Some of his favorite artists were Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vincent van Gogh, and Frieda Kahlo. John Berger, a world-famous polymath — critic, artist, screenwriter, novelist, poet, dramatist, artist, commentator, and storyteller — died January 2, 2017, in the Paris suburb of Antony at the age of 90.


His 1972 book Ways of Seeing was a watershed work for those interested in art and other matters such as sexism, advertising, materialism, and the image-saturation of the modern world; it was made into a four-part BBC series. Berger was truly a Renaissance man who shared his many creative gifts with the world. As lovers of both art and art criticism, we will miss him."

 ~ Frederic Brussat


"Berger married three times, first to artist and illustrator Patt Marriott in 1949; the marriage was childless and the couple divorced. In the mid-1950s, he married the Russian Anya Bostock (née Anna Sisserman), with whom he had two children, Katya Berger and Jacob Berger; the couple divorced in the mid-1970s. Soon afterwards, he married Beverly Bancroft, with whom he had one child, Yves. Beverly died in 2013." ~ Wikipedia