John berger ways of seeing chapter 7
This contradiction explains why, for example, oil paintings of Mary Magdalen appear so vacuous: the lustrous realism of the medium contradicts her own narrative of piety.īerger mentions a couple of exceptional painters who deviate from this tradition, among them William Blake, who, despite studying oil painting, preferred to represent subjects as though they are transparent, unbound by the laws of gravity, or overall insubstantial. Herein lies a major problem within this tradition of oil painting: there's little room for symbolism in a tradition that, first and foremost, privileges the tactile materiality of objects. However, a skull in the foreground of the painting is irreconcilable with this style: it is distorted and unrealistic, perhaps because of its metaphysical symbolism as a memento mori. This bolsters the visual desirability of these objects, serving an ideology that encourages people to buy material goods. The objects in the painting have all been elaborately worked over, possessing immaculate detail that creates the impression the viewer might reach out and touch them.
JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING CHAPTER 7 FULL
Berger refers here to Holbein's The Ambassadors, full of impressively-rendered objects that surround two men. This contradiction between art and the market runs through the entire tradition of oil painting, lending a certain emptiness to most of its works. Notably, only a fraction of paintings from the multiple-century tradition are today considered "masterful." So what characterizes the large number of "mediocre" works? To Berger, this mediocracy comes from the fact that the average oil painting implicated in this tradition is essentially "hack work"-rather than meaningfully expressing any particular values, these paintings were created so that painters could put them to market and earn their keep. As such, it lends itself to the glorification of physical objects, conflating the tangible with the real and, by extension, glorifying possession. Oil painting is unique in its capacity to render the tangible details of an object, suggesting a greater degree of dimension, texture, and solidity than other mediums. Moreover, Berger argues that this worldview, with its new attitudes towards property and exchange, was expressed by oil painting better than it could have been by any other medium: oil painting "reduced everything to the equality of objects" by privileging a certain kind of pictorial realism that created the impression of materiality. This logic is related to the elaboration of capitalism in Europe around the time that the oil painting tradition came into fashion: the implicit possibility of owning objects depicted in oil painting upholds the ruling classes' desire to entrench the emerging power of capital. The contents that these paintings depict, then, exist as images of that which the collector may possess. In the logic of this picture-which represents the logic of oil painting in whole-paintings are, before all else, objects to be owned. This tradition set the norms that continue to define pictorial representation, privileging a certain sort of formal verisimilitude that continues to inform our understanding of "artistic genius."īerger begins the chapter by posing the question: "What is a love of art?" Within this tradition of oil painting, "love of art" comes to stand in for "desire to possess." This is illustrated with a painting of an art collector, depicted amongst his vast collection of paintings. Although the literal act of oil painting has existed for centuries-pigments have been mixed with oil to create paint since the ancient world-the tradition that Berger refers to here is characterized by its emergence at around the time that capitalism began to take hold in Europe. In this tradition, the emphasis is often on objects that are buyable, suggesting a relationship between oil painting and the desire to possess. Chapter 5 focuses on a specific tradition of oil painting, which reached its fullest embodiment roughly between 15.