He was a
writer who used words to craft sensitive stories about both artists and
peasants (he lived in a village in the Haute Savoie from 1974) but
was, for me, at his most powerful in two books he wrote with the Swiss
photographer Jean Mohr –
- A
Seventh Man (1975) which looked at the fate of immigrants in post-war
Europe….
His writing,
like the man we saw in
later interviews, was extraordinarily thoughtful – not for him the slick
phrases which pass for most interviews these days. Words were magic and
needed to be weighed carefully….I was amazed to find, as I googled for the
Berger resource I have put together below, a virtual conversation Noam
Chomsky had with him in 2014
A John
Berger resource
thesis on
Berger https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/30264/1/U155538.pdf
the art of
looking 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IeBcecwcQw
about time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USzGCdoLhjQ
https://lithub.com/why-look-at-art-when-you-could-watch-tv/
https://lithub.com/why-look-at-art-when-you-could-watch-tv/
Thank you for the link to the John Berger documentary and the e-book, both are a revelation. I was wondering whether you have come across a programme on the Programa Hristo Botev of the Bulgarian National Radio called Radioencyclopaedia. This particular programme on the history of the portrait discusses how, after the Liberation in Bulgaria, people were unfamiliar with and hostile to the idea of light and shade on the depicted faces for example.
ReplyDeleteQuite fascinating Boryana - and no I'm not familiar with the radio programme (which I see has some English text). I have often wondered about this issue - since I appreciate that the Muslim domination of the country in the 19th century made it very difficult to show human images....I awlays assumed that this was one of the rasons for the vitality of Bulgarian painting (not least in the sheer number of artists you have had)
ReplyDeleteThanks for mentioning my book (which can be accessed by readers in the top right corner of the blog and) which has annotated notes on 300 painters of the early/mid 20th century....
Yes, showing human images during the Ottoman dominion was very difficult indeed. In fact, human images existed only as icons in churches and at homes, and on church murals too. Church benefactors and tsars and their families were also depicted on church walls in the icon style - two-dimensional, no external source of light - even when they were laity and not saints. Examples of this can be seen at the 12-century Boyana Church in Sofia today. Thus, if I may use something I picked up from the John Berger book, the Bulgarian eye and mind, until the 19th century at least, were not trained in the painting conventions used to represent reality since the Renaissance, such as perspective and light and shade. The radioprogramme I referred to above says Bulgarians of the 19th century saw light and shade on depicted faces as superfluous and ugly blots. In the early 20th century, painter Vladimir Dimitrov - Maystora received academic training but then returned to painting maidens in the icon style, and some church benefactors of today end up, to the dismay of many, being portrayed like tsar Kaloyan and his wife Dessislava, inside the churches they have helped renovate...
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