xv, 254 pages ; 25 cm

"With Portraits, world-renowned art writer John Berger took us on a captivating journey through centuries of art, situating each artist in the proper political and historical contexts. In Landscapes, a narrative of Berger's own journey emerges. Through his penetrating engagement with the writers and artists who shaped his own thought, Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxembourg and Bertolt Brecht among them, Landscapes allows us to understand how Berger came to his own way of seeing. As always, Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his painter's eyes lead him to refer to himself only as a storyteller. A landscape is, to John Berger, like a portrait, an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid definition. It's a term, too, that reminds us that there is more here than simply the backdrop or 'by-work' of a portrait. Landscapes offers a tour of the history of art, but not as you know it"--

Introduction: down with enclosures. Part 1 Redrawing the maps : Kraków -- To take paper, to draw -- The basis of all painting and sculpture is drawing -- Frederick Antal: a personal tribute -- An address to Danish worker actors on the art of observation, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Anya Rostock and John Berger -- Revolutionary undoing: on Max Raphael's The Demands of Art -- Walter Benjamin: antiquarian and revolutionary -- The storyteller -- Ernst Fischer: a philosopher and death -- Gabriel García Márquez: the secretary of death reads it back -- Roland Barthes: inside the mask -- Forthflowing on a Joycean tide -- A gift for Rosa Luxembourg -- The ideal critic and the fighting critic. Part 2 Terrain : The clarity of the Renaissance -- A view of Delft -- The dilemma of the Romantics -- The Victorian conscience -- The moment of Cubism -- Parade, 1917 -- Judgment on Paris -- Soviet aesthetic -- The biennale -- Art and property now -- No more portraits -- The historical function of the museum -- The Work of Art -- 1968/1979 preface to Permanent Red (1960) -- Historical afterword to the Into Their Labours trilogy -- The white bird -- The soul and the operator -- The third week of August 1991 -- Ten dispatches about place (June 2005) -- Stones (Palestine, June 2003) -- Meanwhile -- Acknowledgements

Includes bibliographical references

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