Ways of Seeing

This is a book about art by John Berger. Apparently it's very famous; I just heard about it in a reference in one of Alexander McCall Smith's books. One day I'll write a list of all the books I discovered through other books. Anyway, this is a really interesting set of essays on art. There's essays on oil painting, on women in art, on class and art. It was written in the seventies and you can feel the sort of anger that people felt comfortable with then.

There's also a few visual essays, where there's just the paintings and you're supposed to think about them yourself. One of the interesting things that he says about painting is that it's silent - with everything else you've got that voice reading and analysing in your head, but looking at a painting, it's you and the thing and it's quiet. So he has some silent essays there.

This is the kind of book you dip into, think about, think about over a long time, talk to other people about, think about while you're looking at paintings. It's filled with interesting thoughts. They might not be all true, but they've been thought about, hard, which is more than I've ever done about art anyway.