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Hanging Offence

David Sylvester, 21 October 1993

... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of ...

In the bright autumn of my senescence

Christopher Hitchens, 6 January 1994

In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of ‘Socialist Worker’ 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1993, 0 906224 94 2
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Why You Should Join the Socialists 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 70 pp., £1.90, November 1993, 0 906224 80 2
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... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some ...

Bullshit and Beyond

Clive James, 18 February 1988

The Road to Botany Bay 
by Paul Carter.
Faber, 384 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 571 14551 5
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The Oxford History of Australia. Vol. IV: 1901-1942 
by Stuart Macintyre.
Oxford, 399 pp., £22.50, October 1987, 0 19 554612 1
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The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship 
by Sylvia Lawson.
Penguin Australia, 292 pp., AUS $12.95, September 1987, 0 14 009848 8
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The Lucky Country Revisited 
by Donald Horne.
Dent, 235 pp., AUS $34.95, October 1987, 9780867700671
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... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in ...

How Dare He?

Jenny Turner: Geoff Dyer, 11 June 2009

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi 
by Geoff Dyer.
Canongate, 295 pp., £12.99, April 2009, 978 1 84767 270 4
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... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him ...

Revolution must strike twice

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin’s Breakthrough, 25 July 2002

Lenin 
by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 371 pp., £35, November 2001, 0 8419 1412 5
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... post-industrial societies, private ownership has started to lose its central regulating role. John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an Internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: ‘And if the stock market profited everybody?’ The strategy is ...

Insults

Richard Wollheim, 19 March 1987

Semites and Anti-Semites 
by Bernard Lewis.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £15, August 1986, 0 297 79030 7
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After the Last Sky 
by Edward Said and Jean Mohr.
Faber, 224 pp., £6.95, September 1986, 0 571 13918 3
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... Edward Said’s essay about the Palestinians with photographs by Jean Mohr, who worked with John Berger, is a wonderful book. Text and images illustrate one another. The book is calculated to nourish and enlarge our sympathy and our imagination in just the way that social understanding requires. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, a Palestinian ...

Preposterous Timing

Hal Foster: Medieval Modern Art, 8 November 2012

Medieval Modern: Art out of Time 
by Alexander Nagel.
Thames and Hudson, 312 pp., £29.95, November 2012, 978 0 500 23897 4
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Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum 
by Amy Knight Powell.
Zone, 369 pp., £24.95, May 2012, 978 1 935408 20 8
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... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of ...

Shaggy Horse Story

Julian Bell: Fabulising about Form, 17 December 2020

A History of Art History 
by Christopher Wood.
Princeton, 472 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 691 15652 1
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... that the latter are art historians at all. He calls them ‘the fallen’, a category in which John Berger becomes Gombrich’s unlikely bedfellow: for the provocative reductionism of Berger’s Ways of Seeing, equating painting with property, shares with Art and Illusion an appeal to a firm wall of material fact.If ...

Just Like Cookham

Neal Ascherson: Stanley Spencer in China, 19 May 2011

Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 591 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 954193 5
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... sources. A.J. Ayer, preacher of logical positivism, was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in the Communist Party, although his Party discipline was constantly threatened by his merry sense of the absurd (he was to become an inspirational professor of Chinese at Edinburgh). Last, and most ...

The Slightest Sardine

James Wood: A literary dragnet, 20 May 2004

The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? 
by Randall Stevenson.
Oxford, 624 pp., £30, February 2004, 0 19 818423 9
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... interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired in his chapters on poetry. He is less at ease discussing verse than ...

Picasso and Cubism

Gabriel Josipovici, 16 July 1981

Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective 
edited by William Rubin.
Thames and Hudson, 464 pp., £10.95, July 1980, 0 500 23310 1
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Picasso: His Life and Work 
by Roland Penrose.
Granada, 517 pp., £9.99, May 1981, 0 7139 1420 3
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Portrait of Picasso 
by Roland Penrose.
Thames and Hudson, 128 pp., £3.95, June 1981, 0 500 27226 3
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Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration, 1881-1981 
by Donald Duncan.
Allen Lane, 152 pp., £12.95, May 1981, 0 7139 1420 3
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Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916 
by Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet.
Thames and Hudson, 376 pp., £60, October 1979, 9780500091340
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Picasso’s Guernica: The Labyrinth of Vision 
by Frank Russell.
Thames and Hudson, 334 pp., £12.50, April 1980, 0 500 23298 9
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... than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on art of the past ...

Intelligencer

Sylvia Lawson, 24 November 1988

Games with Shadows 
by Neal Ascherson.
Radius, 354 pp., £18, April 1988, 0 09 173019 8
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... readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an ...

The Scene on the Bridge

Lili Owen Rowlands: Françoise Gilot, 19 March 2020

Life with Picasso 
by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake.
NYRB, 384 pp., $17.95, June 2019, 978 1 68137 319 5
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... put nudes in his paintings now that he never got to see any?‘Picasso finds himself in women,’ John Berger wrote. In Gilot he found something else: balance, a degree of harmony. He started new experiments, first with ceramics at the Madoura pottery and then with sculpture, which he took to assembling out of the children’s toys or junk he’d ...

Twenty Kicks in the Backside

Tom Stammers: Rosa Bonheur’s Flock, 5 November 2020

Art Is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur 
by Catherine Hewitt.
Icon, 483 pp., £20, February, 978 1 78578 621 1
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... unsettling or elegiac, their intensity symptomatic of a deeper rupture. By this period, as John Berger observed, the ‘images are of animals receding into a wildness that existed only in the ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... ideas are ‘all sort of like little burps’. He now preferred the company of Chomsky and John Berger, who believed that ‘there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems.’ His own style became less cluttered and precious – more ‘transparent’ and ‘worldly’. He used it to demystify the ideology of Zionism in The ...

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