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What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
John Berger
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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Absence
Loss
Painting
True
Might
Without
Would
Unaware
Touches
More quotes by John Berger
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
John Berger
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
John Berger
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
John Berger
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
John Berger
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
John Berger
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
John Berger
The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality... could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
John Berger
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
John Berger
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
John Berger
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering music with painting poetry with design fine art with propaganda photographs with typography diagrams with action the studio with the street.
John Berger
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
John Berger
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
