Selected Essays of John Berger by John Berger, Geoff Dyer (Editor)

Product Details

Synopsis

On the occasion of his seventy-fith birthday, Pantheon is publishing a gathering of John Berger's most insightful and provocative writings on art over the past forty years.

Selected Essays brings together a comprehensive array of writings from Berger's previous collections: Toward Reality, The Moment of Cubism, The Look of Things, About Looking, The Sense of Sight, and Keeping a Rendezvous. From Piero to Pollock, from Kokoschka to La Tour, from mass demonstrations to museums -- the ideas in these essays are as fresh and compelling as they were when first published. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original, they display a remarkable continuity of thoughtful inquiry and political engagement.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books include the Booker Prize-winning novel G. and, more recently, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, and Ways of Seeing. Berger lives in a small village in the French Alps.

Publishers Weekly

At 75, British-born prolific art writer Berger (Ways of Seeing) is a longtime farm dweller in the French Alps, which may help give his prose its much-praised unadorned directness and earthiness. This weighty tome selects essays from previous volumes, including The Sense of Sight and Keeping a Rendezvous. They include terse meditations on painters like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Goya, Poussin and Gauguin, as well as sculptors like Lipschitz, Brancusi and Zadkine. There are farm-inspired essays like "A Load of Shit" and stark personal essays with a peasant-like directness: "When my father died recently, I did several drawings of him in his coffin. Drawings of his face and head." This stance makes his thoughts about artists, whether praising Picasso or decrying the British painter Francis Bacon, seem all the more authentic and credible. Piles and piles of prejudices here wind up being eminently readable because they're expressed without ornate flourishes and in a plain-spoken (sometimes overly so) stance. In the tradition of energetic British eccentrics, Berger has contributed much to writing on modern art, often speaking sense and doing it more entertainingly than most salaried newspaper specialists. (Dec.) Forecast: Berger's Ways of Seeing is still a campus favorite for intro. to art classes, and these essays should be a sure thing for most college libraries. But Berger has enough name recognition to reach literate non-specialists, and the book should make it into many public libraries and gift tables. The author's 75th birthday makes a good hook for rousing regular art readers and getting them to make a Berger purchase. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Biography

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-wining novel G. His new collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket has been published in 2001. John Berger now lives and works in a small village in the French Alps.