This book is based on a television series which can be viewed on You Tube here: is a really remarkable series and a remarkable, although annoying, book. The book is annoying because it should have been a coffee table book with large colour photographs and large font – instead it is a Penguin paperback with a font tending towards the unreadable and grey scale reproductions of the paintings that make them almost impossible to view. This is agonising, as really all you will want to do is studying and think about these images for hours. There is something we sort of know, even if I suspect we are completely wrong in our intuition. We have been, as humans, looking at pictures for a lot longer than we have been reading books. For the vast majority of us, literacy is a disturbingly recent invention – perhaps a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years for people in the first world. Churches told their Biblical stories as much in images as in words. For a long time even here the words were spoken in a language that was not understood by those listening. Learning how to read images, something so many of us assume isn’t something we need to learn, but rather is somehow immediate, takes an entire culture and also takes perhaps as long as to learn how to read. To understand how images work on us – how we are manipulated by them – that takes at least as long as it takes to learn the same things about how words work on and manipulate us. So, on one level this book is an exploration of the history of oil painting and what such paintings ‘mean’ – mean to us now in comparison to what they meant to earlier generations of people in Western societies. Because the Western tradition of painting is quite a separate thing from any other ‘world art’ traditions. He starts by saying that paintings are both still and silent. This is an interesting thing.
Throughout Ways of Seeing Berger challenges received assumptions about the meaning of artworks and such attendant notions as beauty, truth, and genius. He argues that photographic techniques for reproducing images have altered the way in which the art of the past is seen. Images of artworks are caught up in the much larger flow of reproduced images which are basic to the cultural life of fully developed capitalist societies. A young woman wearing a T-shirt with an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is one of a number of examples in Ways of Seeing. Berger suggests that such duplication of images severs art from its past, thereby destroying the authority works of art once had. He provides another example of such cultural mystification in his critique of Seymour Slive’s analysis of Frans Hals’s last two paintings, of the regents and regentesses of the Alms House in the seventeenth century Dutch city of Haarlem. When the art historian emphasizes Hals’s personal vision as one which reveals an unchanging human condition, Berger calls this mystification. In contrast to Slive, he thinks that Hals was the first artist to depict the social relations, expressions, and characters created by capitalism. The art historian’s language thus severs the paintings from their historical situation. In Berger’s opinion, this is a high-cultural instance of the inability of contemporary people to “see” the art of the past and thus to situate themselves in history. This in turn raises a critical question: “ To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?” In answering his questions Berger formulates his view of the class function of oil painting. His argument here has two parts. In chapters 3 and 5, Berger relates the development of oil painting to the rise of the bourgeoisie.
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