The Sense of Sight
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
With this provocative and infinitely moving collection of essays, a preeminent critic of our time responds to the profound questions posed by the visual world. For when John Berger writes about Cubism, he writes not only of Braque, Léger, Picasso, and Gris, but of that incredible moment early in this century when the world converged around a marvelouis sense of promise. When he looks at the Modigiliani, he sees a man's infinite love revealed in the elongated lines of the painted figure.
Ranging from the Renaissance to the conflagration of Hiroshima; from the Bosphorus to Manhattan; from the woodcarvers of a French village to Goya, Dürer, and Van Gogh; and from private experiences of love and of loss to the major political upheavals of our time, The Sense of Sight encourages us to see with the same breadth, courage, and moral engagement that its author does.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Collected here for the first time in book form are essays, poetry, travel sketches and reminiscences, most published previously in magazines, by British art critic and novelist Berger (Ways of Seeing and G), a Marxist who has long explored the uneasy relationship between social conscience and aesthetics. Sharp, challenging and absorbing, Berger writes of painters from Durer to van Gogh, from Monet to Modigliani. He considers the art of storytelling, tells of drawing his father's face in death, discusses the Russian poet Mayakovsky's suicide, considers the difference between "peasant'' and ``bourgeois'' meals. From his travels: ``Manhattan is peopled by people resigned to being betrayed daily by their own hopes. From this comes their incomparable wit, their cynicism and what is taken to be their realism.'' This book forces readers to look at their surroundings in a new way. January
