John Berger wrote Ways of Seeing in 1972, and is still quoted nearly 50 years later. I've meant to read it for several years ... but never got round to it ... until I saw a copy of it in Cardiff Museum and Art Gallery.
'The photographer's way of seeing is reflecting in his choice of subject. The painter's way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper.' p10
'When an image is presented as a work of art, ... it is affected by .. assumptions about art ... : Beauty, truth, genius, civilisation, form, status, taste etc'.
'The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we d raw in order to act.'
'The art of the past is being mystified because a privilege minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes'. (What a stonking quote!!) p11
He is quite scathing about monetary values of artwork and the consequences of easy reproducibility. He talks about Leonardo's cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist, only known to scholars until an American wanted to buy it for £2.3m (prior to 1972!).
'Now it hangs in a room by itself ... behind bulletproof glass. ... It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value.'
'The bogus religiosity ... is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. ... It is the final, empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.'p23
'Reproduction [makes] it possible, even inevitable, than an image will be used for many different purposes'. Cropping out sections changes the narrative, and adding words and captions alters it as well. p27
'The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it. .... Art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling. For example, ... Cultural Heritage exploits the authority of art to glorify the present social system and its priorities' p29.
Chapter 3
'Men survey women before treating them. .... How a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. .... That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. ... This exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. [This] presence regulates what is and is not "permissible" within her presence. Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as in indication of how she would like to be treated.' p46
'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object ... an object of vision: a sight.' p47
In European oil painting, women are a recurring subject. Adam and Eve are the first naked subjects. 'Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder. ... The woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man ... the man becomes the agent of God. The single moment depicted became the moment of shame ... their shame is not so much in relation to one another, as to the spectator. ... There remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator. She is not naked as she is; She is naked as the spectator sees her.' p49
' The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralising, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror ... was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.'
Venus and Cupid (Nell Gwynn naked, commissioned by Charles II) ... 'shows her passively looking at the spectator staring at her naked. ... The painting, when the King shows it to others, demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him'.
'The nude relates to lived sexuality. ... To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. ... Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. ... In the average European oil painting of the nude, the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. p54
'Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.' p55
'Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him'. p64
Chapter 5
'The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. ' p86
'The average work ... was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product.'
'Oil painting ... defines the real as that which you can put your hands on. ... It can suggest objects possessing colour, texture, and temperature, filling a space ... filling the entire world.' The Ambassadors by Holbein ... it is ...the stuff, by which the men are surrounded and clothed which dominate the picture'.
'Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth ... had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand of the owner.' p90
'Oil paintings were ... simple demonstrations of what gold or money could buy. Merchandise became the actual subject matter of works of art. (Dutch still life) Here the edible is made visible. ... It confirms the owner's wealth and habitual style of living. Paintings of animals ... livestock whose pedigree is emphasised as a proof of their value and whose pedigree emphasises the social status of their owners. Paintings of buildings ... as a feature of landed property.' p100
The highest category ... was the history or mythological picture ... yet their prestige and their emptiness were directly connected. ... A certain moral value was ascribed to the study of the classics. ... Classic texts... supplied the higher strata of the ruling class with a system of references for the forms of their own idealised behaviour. ... The heightened moments of life - to be found in heroic action, the dignified exercise of power, passion, courageous death, the noble pursuit of pleasure... should be seen to be lived. .... These pictures were to embellish such experience as they already possessed. ... The idealised appearances he found ... were a support, to his own view of himself ... the guise of his own ... nobility. p101
'The genre picture - the picture of low life - was thought of as the opposite of the mythological picture . It was vulgar instead of noble. [It showed] that virtue in this world was rewarded by social and financial success. The illusion of substantiality lent plausibility to a sentimental lie: ... that it was the honest and hard-working who prospered and that the good-for-nothings deservedly had nothing.' p103
'The painted poor smile as they offer what they have for sale. They smile at the better-off - to ingratiate themselves but also at the prospect of a sale or a job. Such pictures assert two things : that the poor are happy, and that the better-off are a source of hope for the world.' p104
[European oil painting is] accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. p109. ... The painting as a whole remains an advertisement for the sitter's good fortune, prestige and wealth.' p111
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