Over the course of four half-hour episodes, Berger lays out his own iconoclastic interpretation of a specific tradition in European painting - a tradition which, he claims, was born during the height of the Italian Renaissance, and died when the advent of the camera began to push painters from naturalism towards abstraction.Īssembled in his parents’ living room, Berger’s stimulating program was met with rave reviews upon release. Ways of Seeing, which premiered on the BBC in 1972, was edited in a rapid and ephemeral style reminiscent of Orson Welles’ video essay about Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory: F for Fake. Now, in the second half of the 20th century, because we see these paintings as nobody saw them before.” “Tonight,” he says as he attempts to isolate the figure of Venus from the rest of the image, “it isn’t so much about the paintings themselves I want to consider, as the way we now see them. In the opening scene of his television show Ways of Seeing, John Berger - a British critic, painter, and author - uses a boxcutter to methodically slice and dice his way through the canvas containing Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |