Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A major new work from the world s leading writer on art
As leading radical writer on art John Berger celebrates his ninetieth year, he brings a lifetime's engagement with the ideas, artists, and thinkers that have shaped his thinking: Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht among them. InLandscapesBerger allows us to see the evolution of his own way of seeing. He explores the relationship between creativity and politics and the revolutionary potential of art through a series of different forms.
As always, in this book, Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his painter s eyes lead him to refer to himself only as a storyteller. A landscape is, to John Berger, like a portrait, an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid definition.Landscapesoffers a tour of the history of art, but not as you know it.
Landscapes brings together Berger's most penetrating insights into how we may engage with both art and the artist in society."
Synopsis
A major new work from the world s leading writer on art
Landscapes, the companion volume to John Berger s highly acclaimed Portraits, explores what art tells us about ourselves.
Berger s work is an invitation to reimagine; to see in different ways, writes Tom Overton in the introduction to this volume. As a master storyteller and thinker John Berger challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives.
In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces essays, short stories, poems, translations which spans a lifetime s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He pays homage to the writers and thinkers who infuenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists from the Renaissance to the present while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation.
Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist s eye makes him a storyteller in these essays, rather than a critic. With landscape as an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid defnition, this collection surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished John Berger s understanding of the world. Landscapes alongside Portraits completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come."