John Berger Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

  John Berger

  Vanity, Mirrors, Hands

• Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

  John Berger

  Photography, Drawing, Doe

  John Berger (2015). “About Looking”, p.40, Bloomsbury Publishing

• All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

  John Berger

  Photography, Pain, Opposites

• Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

  John Berger

  Oil, Painting, Appearance

  "John Berger, Provocative Art Critic, Dies at 90" by Randy Kennedy, www.nytimes.com. January 2, 2017.

• 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

  Artist, Giving, Desire

• 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

  Loss, Might, Would Be

  John Berger (2014). “The Shape of a Pocket”, p.16, Bloomsbury Publishing

• 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

  Art, Doors, Engineering

• Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

  John Berger

  Needs, Painting, Pianist

  "John Berger: a life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. April 22, 2011.

• Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

  John Berger

  Real, Painting, Absence

  1988 In New Statesman and Society,15 Jul.

• 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

  Men, Average, Oil

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