In 1969, a BBC miniseries was debuted by Kenneth Clark, a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster, which narrated the history of Western art and was entitled ‘Civilisation’. This series outlined a brief and simple approach to art history, suggesting that we are able to understand every work of art through putting in sufficient amount of time and effort into contemplating its meaning. Whilst this notion seemed attractive to many – “art museum exhibits in both England and the US reported a surge of visitors following the airing of each episode” (Meis, 2016) – there were some who did not agree with Clark’s approach and in fact many of the progressive thinkers from that time challenged it, branding it as reactionary, hindering social progress. The most vocal among these people was a man named John Berger, who, three years later, in 1972, released his own BBC series: 'Ways of Seeing’.
Prior to his career as a critic and novelist, John Berger was first and foremost a painter, with many of his works being exhibited in galleries across London during the 1940s. He formed associations with the Communist Party of Great Britain during this time, although never officially joined (Kellaway, 2016), and his Marxist values would be the underpinning of his artistic and literary work for the rest of his career. As Berger states during a television interview with BBC News Night in 2011: “my reading of Marx from a very early age helped me enormously to understand history, and therefore understand where we are in history, and therefore to understand what we have to envisage as a future, thinking about human dignity and justice.” (Berger, 2011). Having never felt entirely comfortable in England, Berger moved to France in the early 1960s, in self-imposed exile, where, a decade later, he eventually began work on his television mini-series “Ways of Seeing” for the BBC, which was followed by the publishing of a book of the same name, these being Berger’s Marxist response to the aforementioned, Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’ (Wroe, 2011).
Berger begins his book with the statement: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak” (Berger, 1972, p. 7). He is saying that as we inhabit the world and our surroundings we are constantly perceiving it, “always looking at the relations between things and ourselves” (Berger, 1972, p. 9), but only later on in time do we name those things we have seen and therefore language is not sufficient to convey how we see the world around us. Images are a way that we can present our own personal perception of this, they “embody a way of seeing” (Berger, 1972, p. 10). Paintings, films or photographs can act as valuable documents of how their creator’s saw the world, however their underpinning features can have other agendas such as personal interests or political views, and so our interpretation of their world is altered because they have not been objective. Our own experiences and opinions also effect how we interpret images – we may be drawn to certain elements of a photograph not because the photographer has emphasised it but because that element is special or known to us already.
At the end of the first chapter of ‘Ways of Seeing’, Berger poses the question: "To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong?” (Berger, 1972, p. 32). Throughout this first section he encourages us to grasp an appreciation of art’s historical narrative by applying it to our own personal lives, analysing and judging it in this way rather than through “a series of learnt assumptions about art”…”concerning: beauty, truth, genius, civilisation, form, status, taste, etc.” (Berger, 1972, p. 11). The majority of visual art throughout history has been a rare commodity which has isolated it from the lower classes and their everyday lives, whilst aligning it with those with wealth and power. In chapter 5 Berger focuses on the specific European tradition of oil painting, roughly between 1500 – 1900, arguing that the medium itself had the capacity to depict objects so realistically, that they created the desire to touch, as if the person owned the object conveyed, therefore effectively supporting the concept of market capitalism, where possession and power is the ultimate goal. The capacity for mass-production of these images in modern society excited Berger because it challenged the elite, making the work more broadly available to the proletariat – the Marxist term for the collective working class – with reproductions surrounding us "in the same way as a language surrounds us” (Berger, 1972, p. 32) – this concept is one that Berger paraphrases from an earlier work by the German Jewish Philosopher, Walter Benjamin, and his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, written forty years prior, in 1935. The problem that arises with this new artistic language however is that not all people understand how to read an image in relation to themselves or are aware that it is even possible to look at art in a different way – an issue which, through bringing our attention to it in this first chapter, Berger attempts to breach.
Chapters 2, 4 and 6 in ‘Ways of Seeing’ contain only images, no text. In his introductory “Note to the reader” (Berger, 1972, p. 5), Berger refers to these chapters as ‘essays’, making the point that when carefully selected and arranged in a particular order, images can produce their own arguments without the need for words. This makes these sections open to subjective interpretation, there is not necessarily a definitive analysis. Within each chapter, when the images are considered together, they prompt some of the questions which Berger approaches in the very first chapter: how are these images produced? How does the conditions in which they were produced, such as history or culture, impact how they are viewed? “They are intended to raise as many questions as the verbal essays” (Berger, 1972, p. 5) within this book.
In recent times there have been complaints about Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’, the scholar and classicists Mary Beard stating that “Hardly any women got a look-in, and when very occasionally they did, it was not as creative artists or even patrons, but as hostesses, temptresses, Virgin Marys, or something woolly called the ‘female principle’” (Beard, 2016). John Berger clearly shared this opinion and dedicated a whole essay chapter to effectively criticising the oppression of women in art history and even in the modern day. He points out that there is a significant contradiction in the system of gender relations that underly most nude paintings: “On the one hand the individualism” – the freedom of actions – “of the artist, the thinker, the patron, the owner:” – historically male – “on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities – the woman – treated as a thing or an abstraction.” (Berger, 1972, p. 62) This hypocrisy is still present in representations of women in the media today which supports Berger’s Marxist-feminist analysis, making it just as relevant four decades later.
In the final chapter of the book, Berger moves on from art history to a modern-day issue: the advertisement, or “publicity image” (Berger, 1972, p. 129) as he terms it. He explains that they work by manufacturing glamour and making the viewers of them envy the hypothetical future versions of themselves that could become a reality. As Berger states: “publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure” (Berger, 1972, p.132) and their dissatisfaction with their own lives will evaporate if they invest in the product on display. Advertising images reduce the scope of the world by bringing it all in front of and around us: “and because everywhere is imagined as offering itself to us, everywhere is more or less the same” (Berger, 1972, p. 150). But this forced narrow array of interests and aspirations is what Berger explains is helping capitalism to survive, “by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable” (Berger, 1972, p. 154).
When ‘Ways of Seeing’ was first published, in 1972, it received opposing reactions. On one side it produced outrage, with some of Berger’s arguments being dismissed completely and critics accusing him of exaggerating and provoking (Davis, 2017), however this is most likely what Berger was trying to achieve. Regarding the TV series of the same name, the Guardian’s art critic at the time of its release, Norbert Lynton was quoted as saying: “I often cannot believe Berger … it is clear from his writings that he is a sensitive man and in many ways a wise one, and then he is willing to lie about art to make his political points” (Davis, 2017). Another negative review, from over 10 years later in 1988, is made by the author, Rod Taylor, that “Predictably, ‘Ways of Seeing’ has not given any rise to any ‘alternative form of art appreciation’; that is hardly possible when pupils are separated from any direct contact with works of art.” (Fuller, 1988, p. 63). On the other side of the argument, it was described as stimulating and influential, a Sunday Times critic reviewing it as “an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings … he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.” (Penguin, 2008). Another positive review, from over 10 years later in 1986, is that of writer Geoff Dyer, who in his book on Berger, ‘Ways of Telling’ explains that Berger “opened up the world of painting for me. Here was someone who made these boring old paintings of men in ruffs seem suddenly interesting and relevant” (Dyer, 1986) and that “The influence of the series and the book … was enormous … It opened up for general attention areas of cultural study that are now commonplace” (Dyer, 1986).
Since ‘Ways of Seeing’ Berger’s ideas have inspired a new way of looking at images, becoming fundamental within the intellectual fields of art history and visual culture which overlap with other fields of study that focus on aspects of the culture of visual imagery. Berger’s writing on women and their role in art history also heavily impacted a wave of feminism which had gained momentum in the 1960s-70s (Kalkanis, 2018, Module 10). This book has empowered countless writers and a generation of philosophers and historians, including visual theorist Griselda Pollock in her feminist studies in the visual arts, Laura Mulvey the feminist film theorist, Frederic Jameson the literary critic and Marxist political theorist, to name a few, and the book will continue to inform people in years to come.