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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
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
Oil
Protagonist
Picture
Nude
Average
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Never
Principal
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More quotes by 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
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
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
Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
John Berger
The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
John Berger
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
John Berger
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
John Berger
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
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 past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.
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
All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
John Berger
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
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
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 opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
John Berger
