In this painting, the wealth of the people depicted is obvious. The first is through a painting depicting opulence.Īlathea Talbot Countess of Shrewsbury, 1620 There's two different ways that Berger's argument is exhibited. This is because "oil painting was, before everything else, a medium which celebrated private possessions." We should remember this fact and temper our opinions of these oil paintings accordingly. As Berger details, "we should not confuse such exceptional works with the purpose and significance of the general tradition" of oil painting. John Berger doesn't want us to fall into the trap of museums and art experts that all these old oil paintings are exquisite and beautiful art. Ultimately, though, we must remember what the main purpose of oil painting is. Mostly, he describes that oil paintings allowed artists to be a lot more detailed in their work, so the immense amount of possessions could be carefully painting with this great detail. Why did this idea come about with oil paintings specifically? John Berger doesn't give too much detail about why oil paintings brought this about. Yet, even though Berger claims Rembrandt is making commentary against oil painting tradition, the painting still adheres to it! The painting would be valued somewhere around 3 million pounds. The portrait of him later in life, though, is barren of these possessions to comment on the oil painting style. The young portrait embodies all of the principles of displaying incredible wealth and possessions. Near the end of the video, Berger describes Rembrandt's self portraits. But this is just perpetuation of the tradition of oil paintings. As Berger points out, it's ironic that we then protect these paintings and guard them for fear of someone stealing the image of the desired objects depicted in the painting. This is similar to the icon discussion in McCloud's "The Vocabulary of Comics". We are looking at images of the things that may exist somewhere, but they aren't tangible in this painting. When these objects are depicted in art, however, they are no longer real. In life, we have real and tangible objects. This is the main argument made by Berger about oil paintings. The subject of the art isn't necessarily art, but instead the wealth and purchasing power, the fact that it's merchandise. If the image is of yourself, then the point is to depict all of your possessions with you in the middle of them. He argues that oil paintings exist mainly to depict the owner's wealth. The starting reference for the mentioned essays was the forty years older text by Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which has set the still not surpassed theoretical grounds for a reflection on the changes in our visual sensibility brought about by the possibility of endless reproduction and multiplication of images.This is a video by John Berger about the true meaning of European oil paintings and what traditions they have. Experienced and erudite in many areas, Berger synthesised a large scope of knowledge in his essays, from art history, structuralism, and anthropology to sociology and critical theory. received the Booker Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize), an author appreciated by both the literary as well photography, film, and visual arts sphere. John Berger is an art historian and critic, painter and novelist (his novel G. John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most inspiring and influential books on art ever written in any language, though it was actually adapted from a BBC television series.
All the art in john berger ways of seeing how to#
The book brings us essays proposing a way how to understand tradition and enjoy through contemporary eyes. Ways of Seeing is a text book, a manual, a must read for all trying to understand the relations between biological, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of visual reception and for all those aiming to rethink the cultural history of the viewed and the seen with the help of Berger's in-depth analysis. Ways of Seeing was published in 1972, immediately gaining wide recognition and a number of prizes, among other also the Guardian Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize, bringing its author, till then disapproved by the art critics' sphere, to an important and visible social position. Thirty-seven years after its first publication, the fundamental work of the important thinker and art theoretician and critic John Berger is finally translated also to Slovenian.
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