#000163
Portraits: John Berger on Artists
John Berger (ed. Tom Overton)
*Portraits* gathers John Berger's writing on individual artists into something close to a personal history of art, edited by Tom Overton and first published by Verso in 2015. Arranged roughly by chronology of subject, it runs from the prehistoric painters of the Chauvet caves to twentieth-century figures, taking in Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Pollock, Picasso, Henry Moore and many more. Berger - critic, novelist, and one of the most influential writers on seeing in the last century - never separates art from politics or from ordinary life; each essay is short, direct, and startlingly attentive to how a picture was made and what it asks of us. Read straight through, the essays add up to a self-portrait of Berger's own way of looking. For anyone who loved *Ways of Seeing*, this is the deep companion volume.
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The author
John Berger (1926-2017) was a British art critic, novelist, and essayist whose 1972 television series and book Ways of Seeing changed how a generation thought about images. A committed Marxist who lived his later years in a French Alpine village, he wrote about art as something bound to labor, power, and lived experience.
The editor
Tom Overton catalogued Berger's archive at the British Library and has edited two volumes of his art writing for Verso, Portraits and its companion Landscapes.
The book
Drawn from across Berger's career, Portraits collects his essays on individual artists into a loosely chronological sweep - from the Chauvet cave painters to the present. Each piece is brief and concrete, less concerned with biography than with what the work does and why it matters.
How it reads
Critics received it warmly, the Financial Times calling it close to a definitive self-portrait of one of Britain's most original thinkers.
For more context
Start with Ways of Seeing, then read Portraits and Landscapes as the mature elaboration of the same eye.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- John Berger (ed. Tom Overton)
- Publisher
- Verso
- Place of publication
- London; New York
- Year
- 2015
- Edition
- Reprint (orig. 2015)
- ISBN
- 978-1-83976-415-8
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
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