Summer Dissertation Support Sessions

Want to get a head start on your dissertation? Come along to our Summer Dissertation Support Sessions!

The Library and Study Zone are joining forces to put on sessions to teach you how to find resources, read and take take notes, reference and use theory!

New books from the 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series.

Destruction  /  edited by Sven Spieker.  (2017) 700.108 SPI

Essays explore contemporary artists' engagement with destruction, and how it has disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions.

Practice  /  edited by Marcus Boon and Gabriel Levine.  ([2018]) 

700.1 BOO

Wabi Sabi.

Wabi - Sabi
'this Japanese term means “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.”' Collins, 2018.

Wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers  /  by Leonard Koren.  (1994)

701.170952 KOR












Wabi-Sabi - Further Thoughts.  /  Leonard Koren.  (2015)

701.170952 KOR




Wabi-Sabi Wisdom: Inspiration for an Authentic Life.  /  Andrea Jacques  (2016)

158.1 JAC

Kintsugi : heal your life, repair the cracks and embrace imperfection - the Japanese way  /  Tomás Navarro.  (2018)

158.1 NAV

The Body.

New books about the body, and body image.

The disabled body in contemporary art  /  Ann Millett-Gallant.  (2012)

704.942 MIL

The honest body project : raw stories and untouched portraits of women and motherhood   /  Natalie McCain.  ([2017]) 779.2 McC This is who I am  /  Rosanne Olson ; foreword by Rita Charon.  (c2008) 779.22 OLS The body at risk : photography of disorder, illness, and healing

Book of the week - November 13th.

Surrealism, Occultism and Politics In Search of the Marvellous - Studies in Surrealism

709.04063 BAU

This week's book of the week features an essay by Plymouth College of Art Dean for Media, Judith Noble, where she discusses the work of Maya Deren. 

Examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses.

New books from HE Fashion Lecturer Ilker Cinarel.

Ilker Cinarel works as a lecturer on HE Fashion here at Plymouth College of Art. His new books 'Adopting A Father' and 'Boy Room' are newly available in the library.

'Boy Room' explores ideas of belonging, personal space, home and inter, through installation and photography. 
709.2 CIN

'Adopting A Father' documents Cinarel's research project about father- son relationships and what it means to be a man. Cinarel invited potential 'fathers' to become part of a performance at the Newyln Art Gallery, in 2015, and the book displays the fathers in a series of 'family album' style photographs and interviews with the men describing their ideas of father-son relationships. 
779.2 CIN

After studying fine art at Marmara University Istanbul, Ilker Cinarel moved to the UK in 2000 to work in London, as a Designer Assistant for Vivienne Westwood's Gold Label range. Ilker then went on to work as a Designer Assistant for Giorgio Armani in Milan and as the Visual Merchandising Co-Ordinator for all Giorgio Armani UK stores. He studied an MA Fine Art Contemporary Practice at Falmouth University and graduating in September 2011, won the Sandra Blow Award and 2014 Inland Art Festival Award. 

Book of The Week: Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramics in Contemporary Art.

This weeks book of the week is 'Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramics in Contemporary Art' 
738.0922 LIL



Featuring the work of Plymouth based artist Keith Harrison.
and with contributions by Plymouth Art Centre's curator, Ben Borthwick. Keith Harrison is a studio holder, at KARST in Plymouth. 

A global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists, chosen by leading art world professionals.

Vitamin C celebrates the revival of clay as a material for contemporary visual artists, featuring a wide range of global talent as selected by the world's leading curators, critics, and art professionals. Clay and ceramics have in recent years been elevated from craft to high art material, with the resulting artworks being coveted by collectors and exhibited in museums around the world. Packed with illustrations, Vitamin C is a vibrant and incredibly timely survey - the first of its kind.

Artists include: Caroline Achaintre, Ai Weiwei, Aaron Angell, Edmund de Waal, Theaster Gates, Marisa Merz, Ron Nagle, Gabriel Orozco, Grayson Perry, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Schütte, Richard Slee, Clare Twomey, Jesse Wine, and Betty Woodman.

Research Week Sessions Happening Today!

Sessions take place at 10am and 2pm.

We look forward to seeing you!

Spooky New Titles.

The library has taken stock of several spooky new titles and put on a ghoulish display to celebrate Halloween! We have also acquired some new books on witchcraft and magic.

The art of horror : an illustrated history  /  edited by Stephen Jones ; foreword by Neil Gaiman.  (2015)

741.674 JON

Amazingly, there has never been a book quite like The Art of Horror- a celebration of frightful images, compiled and presented by some of the genre's most respected names. While acknowledging the beginnings of horror-related art in legends and folk tales, the focus of the book is on how the genre has presented itself to the world since the creations of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley first became part of the public consciousness in the 19th century. It's all here: from early engravings-via dust jackets, book illustrations, pulp magazines, movie posters, comic books, and paintings-to today's artists working entirely in the digital realm. Editor Stephen Jones and his stellar team of contributors have sourced visuals from archives and private collections (including their own) worldwide, ensuring an unprecedented selection that is accessible to those discovering the genre, while also including many images that will be rare and unfamiliar to even the most committed fan. From the shockingly lurid to the hauntingly beautiful-including images of vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, demons, serial killers, alien invaders, and more-every aspect of the genre is represented in ten themed chapters. Quotes from artists/illustrators, and a selection from writers and filmmakers, are featured throughout.

The Krampus and the old, dark Christmas : roots and rebirth of the folkloric devil  by  Al Ridenour.  (2016)

398.4 RID

With the appearance of the demonic Christmas character Krampus in contemporary Hollywood movies, television shows, advertisements, and greeting cards, medieval folklore has now been revisited in American culture. Krampus-related events and parades occur both in North America and Europe, and they are an ever-growing phenomenon.

Though the Krampus figure has once again become iconic, not much can be found about its history and meaning, thus calling for a book like Al Ridenour's The Krampus: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. With Krampus's wild, graphic history, Feral House has hired the awarded designer Sean Tejaratchi to take on Ridenour's book about this ever-so-curious figure.

Al Ridenour has lectured on Krampus at the Goethe Institutes in Los Angeles. He became somewhat of an internet phenomenon himself due to the hilarious hijinks he coordinated with the controversial Cacophony Societies.

The Occult, Witchcraft & Magic  by  Christopher Dell.  (2016)

133.409 DEL

From the earliest Paleolithic cave rituals, magic has gripped the imagination. Magic and magicians appear in early Babylonian texts, the Bible, Judaism and Islam. Secret words, spells and incantations lie at the heart of every mythological tradition. Today, magic means many things: contemporary Wicca is practised widely as a modern pagan religion in Europe and the US; ‘magic’ also evokes the cathartic rituals of Chaos magic, but stretches to include the non-spiritual, rapid-fire sleight of hand performed by slick stage magicians who fill vast arenas. 
The Occult, Witchcraft and Magic is packed with authoritative text and a huge and inspired selection of images, chosen from unusual and hidden sources. The material is presented in 100 entries, and includes some of the best-known representations of magic and the occult from around the world.

The Little Book of Witchcraft  by  Astrid Carvel.  (2017)

133.43 CAR

Are you in need of a little magic to entice love into your life?

Maybe someone you know could benefit from a good-luck spell?

Or perhaps you want to feel more in control of your destiny?

The Little Book of Witchcraft uncovers the mysteries of this ancient art and shows you how to tap into the positive natural energies of the cosmos to release your inner power. Learn about different kinds of witchcraft and its fascinating history, its symbolism and the building blocks of Wicca, and how to perform simple spells to attract good energy, luck, love, health and happiness.

Book of the Month for May

May’s Featured New Book:

The surreal life of Leonora Carrington

759 CAR

In 2006 journalist Joanna Moorhead discovered that her father's cousin, Prim, who had disappeared many decades earlier, was now a famous artist in Mexico. Although rarely spoken of in her own family (regarded as a black sheep, a wild child; someone they were better off without) in the meantime Leonora Carrington had become a national treasure in Mexico, where she now lived, while her paintings are fetching ever-higher prices at auction today. Intrigued by her story, Joanna set off to Mexico City to find her lost relation. Later she was to return to Mexico ten times more between then and Leonora's death in 2011, sometimes staying for months at a time and subsequently travelling around Britain and through Europe in search of the loose ends of her tale. They spent days talking and reading together, drinking tea and tequila, going for walks and to parties and eating take away pizzas or dining out in her local restaurants as Leonora told Joanna the wild and amazing truth about a life that had taken her from the suffocating existence of a debutante in London via war-torn France with her lover, Max Ernst, to incarceration in an asylum and finally to the life of a recluse in Mexico City. Leonora was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s, a founding member of the Women's Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s and a woman whose reputation will survive not only as a muse but as a novelist and a great artist. This book is the extraordinary story of Leonora Carrington's life, and of the friendship between two women, related by blood but previously unknown to one another, whose encounters were to change both their lives.

More about Leonora

Leonora Carrington, (b Clayten Green, nr Chorley, Lancashire, 6 April 1917; d Mexico City, 25 May 2011).

Born in Lancashire as the wealthy heiress to her British father's textiles empire, Leonora Carrington was destined to live the kind of life only known by the moneyed classes. But even from a young age she rebelled against the strict rules of her social class, against her parents and against the hegemony of religion and conservative thought, and broke free to pursue an artistic and personal freedom.

Today Carrington is recognised as the key female Surrealist painter, for a time Max Ernst's lover in Paris, Carrington rubbed shoulders with Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, André Breton and Pablo Picasso. When Ernst fled Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, Carrington had a breakdown and was locked away in a Spanish asylum before escaping to Mexico, where she would work on the paintings which made her name.

In 1936 she enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, where in the classes of cubist Amédée Ozenfant, art, commitment and precision all came together. Ozenfant insisted on understanding “the chemistry of everything you used”

In 1936, she visited the London International Surrealist Exhibition, and became obsessed with the movement. During this time, she met Max Ernst at a dinner party; he became her lover, and her much-desired passport to Paris, and the Surrealists. “I fell in love with Max’s paintings before I fell in love with Max,” she said. Ernst, captivated by her beauty and imp-like obstinacy, abandoned his wife and ushered young Leonora into his social circles in Cornwall and Paris.  Leonora started to paint her first surrealist works, holding her own among the greats of the Parisian art world: Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Breton, Fini and Duchamp.

At the outbreak of World War II, Ernst was interned as an enemy alien, and Carrington escaped to Spain, where she was admitted to a private clinic after having a nervous breakdown; she later recounted the experience in her book En bas (1943). After marrying the Mexican poet Renato Leduc in 1941 (a marriage of convenience), she spent time in New York before settling in Mexico in 1942, devoting herself to painting. There she and Remedios Varo developed an illusionistic Surrealism combining autobiographical and occult symbolism. Having divorced Leduc in 1942, in 1946 she married the Hungarian photographer Imre Weisz.

Carrington remained committed to Surrealism throughout her career, filling her pictures with strange or fantastic creatures in surprising situations, notably horses, which appear in Self-portrait, as well as unicorns, owls, dogs and lizards; she sometimes also combined features of animals and human beings. Her references were wide-ranging, whether to ancient Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian mythology or to visions reminiscent of the Middle Ages. The strange, enigmatic and subtly humorous anecdotes that appear in her work were the expression of a profound inner world, a mythology of her own making, which although terrifying protected her from the aggressive banality of the external world. A prolific painter, she combined technical refinement with a careful but at the same time extremely free design.

Other books in the Library featuring Leonora Carrington

50 British Artists You Should Know

709.41 HAW

This roll-call of British artists confirms the dominance and excellence of British art across five centuries, from Blake to Banksy, Turner to Tracey Emin. This highly readable and informative collection of the best of British art showcases magnificent portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Stanley Spencer; landscapes by J. M. W. Turner and David Hockney; satire by William Hogarth and Gilbert & George; sculpture by Henry Moore and Rachel Whiteread; and the latest works by Grayson Perry and Damien Hirst. Each artist is presented in a double-page spread that features a major work, details from the work, a brief biography and fascinating insights into the artist's life and times. Lucinda Hawksley's engaging survey compares the skill of the Elizabethan miniaturists and the magnificence of the High Victorians with the grit of post-war British modernists and the best of the Young British Artists, whose fearless approach to controversial themes make them worthy inheritors of the great traditions of British art.

The Artist's Joke

700.417 HIG

This title traces the role humour plays in transforming the practice and experience of art, from the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, through Fluxus and Pop, to the diverse, often uncategorizable works of some of the most influential artist's today. Artists' writings are accompanied and contextualized by the work of critics and thinkers including Freud, Bergson, Helene Cixous, Slavoj A iA ek, Jorg Heiser, Jo Anna Isaak and Ralph Rugoff, among others. Artists surveyed include Leonora Carrington, Maurizio Cattelan, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Fischli & Weiss, Andrea Fraser, Guerilla Girls, Hannah Hoch, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Raymond Pettibon, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Arnulf Rainer, Ad Reinhardt, Ed Ruscha, Carolee Schneemann, David Shrigley, Robert Smithson, Annika Strom, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol. Writers include Hugo Ball, Henri Bergson, Andre Breton, Helene Cixous, Sigmund Freud, Jorg Heiser, Dave Hickey, Jo Anna Isaak, Ralph Rugoff, Peter Schjeldahl, Sheena Wagstaff, Hamza Walker and Slavoj A iA ek.

Black Mirror 1 – Embodiment 

704.949133 BLA

In esoteric traditions, the mirror does not just reflect back an image of the self. It is understood as an instrument of vision through which inspiration and knowledge may be gained. The occult, with its constant questioning of theories of perception and notions of the self and subjectivity, has been at the centre of counter-cultures and avant-gardes since the first esoteric revival at the end of the nineteenth century. Since the beginnings of modernism, artists have used esoteric, magical and occult philosophies as sources of inspiration. They have written and theorised about them, and made them central elements of their practice. But these aspects have been marginalised by a critical culture that emphasizes ‘truth to the materials’ and negates any examination of the role of the spiritual and esoteric in the making of art. Black Mirror seeks to redress this imbalance and examine ways in which the occult and the esoteric have been at the heart of art practice now and throughout the modernist period. It is part of a growing movement that seeks to critique the dominant twentieth century notion of disenchantment, and that rejects notions of the esoteric and occult as irrational, escapist, regressive and essentially anti-modern.

Intersections : women artists/surrealism/modernism

709.04063082 ALL

Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars, Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three terms. The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren, Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elleouet, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar.

Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement

704.042 CHA

Examines the work and careers of Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, and Kay Sage, all surrealist painters.

Other ways to access more information about Leonora Carrington

A quick Search on the Library’s Databases brought up a wealth of scholarly articles about Leonora, her life and artistic output.

Click here for Full Text Articles on Art Source about Leonora Carrington

Click Here for Full Text Articles on JSTOR about Leonora Carrington

Articles are also available from American Vogue about Leonora Carrington - just type Leonora's name in the search box

Articles are also available from the Oxford Art online about Leonora Carrington.

 

Creative Arts Person of the Month - May 2017 - Contemporary Painter Mark Grotjahn

As an new initiative, each month the Library is going to shine a light on individuals who have made an impact on the creative world in which they work; this will include creative people past and present and from all walks of the creative arts, reflecting the wide range of disciplines studied at Plymouth College of Art.

This month's Creative is Contemporary Painter: -

Mark Grotjahn 

The Library recently purchased the exhibition catalogue of Mark Grotjahn’s Circus Circus, produced on the occasion of an exhibition held at Kunstverein Freiburg, May 16 - July 27, 2014.

Mark Grotjahn (born 1968) is an American painter best known for abstract work and bold geometric paintings. He lives and works in Los Angeles) and ranks among the best-known American painters of his generation.

His heterogeneous oeuvre includes depictions of anthropomorphic plants and masks as well as colorful abstract compositions in oil or wax crayon. After 1997, he also produced numerous monochromes. Grotjahn's "Butterfly" and "Face" paintings are animated by a dynamic dialectic between gestural representation and formalist structure.

Mark Grotjahn : Circus Circus

709.2 GRO

The lavishly designed book "Circus Circus" presents a selection of paintings from Grotjahn's new "Circus" series as well as a "Mask" bronze sculpture. The ambitious polychromatic works combine the geometric rigor of the "Butterfly" series with the gestural facture of the "Face" pictures, in which primary facial symbols emerge from flowing streams of color.

The essays by Caroline Kading and Mark Prince analyze the "Circus" series in light of the painterly traditions on which it draws and examine its place in Grotjahn's oeuvre.

Other books held in the Library which discuss Grotjahn work include

The forever now : contemporary painting in an atemporal world

759.07 HOP

xhich was published to accompany the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art.

Timeless Painting presents the work of 17 contemporary painters whose works reflect a singular approach that is peculiarly of our time: they are a-temporal, a term coined by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the originators of the cyberpunk aesthetic. A temporarily or timelessness manifests itself in painting as an ahistoric free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras co-exist. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that explores the impact of this cultural condition on contemporary painting, this publication features work by an international roster of artists including Joe Bradley, Kerstin Bratsch, Matt Connors, Nicole Eisenman, Mark Grotjahn, Charline von Heyl, Julie Mehretu, Oscar Murillo, Laura Owens and Josh Smith, among others. An overview essay by curator Laura Hoptman is divided into thematic chapters that explore topics such as re-animation and reenactment, recontextualization, Zombie painting, and the concomitant Frankenstein approach, which describes a process of stitching together pieces of the history of painting to create a work of art that would be dead but for its juxtaposed parts, all working in association with one another to propel the work into life.

Grotjahn is also included in

Art Now Volume 2 : The new directory to 136 international contemporary artists

709.22 GRO

Unless you regularly trawl the Chelsea galleries, hang out at the Tate Modern, peruse the Pompidou, attend every Biennale, and religiously read Artforum, you could likely use a primer on the art scene in the world today. Fortunately we've created our second Art Now volume to keep art fans abreast of the latest trends and hottest names. Not only will you discover the most important artists in the international art market, you'll also learn how the art scene has changed dramatically in recent years-notably with a return to figurative painting and an increase in political topics. Featuring over 135 artists in A-Z entries, plus a special section about gallery representation and current market prices, Art Now Vol. 2 is the guide to what's happening and who's who in contemporary art. A-Z artist entries include: short biography, exhibition history and bibliographical information, images of important recent work. Bonus illustrated appendix features:names and contact information for the galleries representing the artists featured, primary market prices, the five best auction results. 

NEW FILMS from the Library's DVD Collection

 L'Avventura - (1960) [DVD]

791.4372 ANT

The first part of a loose trilogy by director Michelangelo Antonioni, parts two and three of which were 'La Notte' and 'L'Eclisse'. It concerns Claudia, Anna and Sandro (Sandro being the lover of Anna), who embark on a cruise on which Anna disappears. Sandro and Claudia set off in search for her and become lovers in the process. The film is a triumph of style over content and has been classed as an existentialist film that revolves around its characters being out of place from their environments.

The Magnificent Seven [DVD] [2016]

791.4372 MAG

In director Antoine Fuqua's modern vision to a classic story, the desperate townspeople of Rose Creek employ protection from seven outlaws, bounty hunters, gamblers and hired guns after the town falls under the deadly control of industrialist Bartholomew Bogue. As they prepare the town for the violent showdown that they know is coming, these seven mercenaries find themselves fighting for more than money.

John Berger: Looking at the Man Who Made us See

With the sad passing of John Berger at the beginning of the year, I thought that as a mark of respect to his life-time’s work and his contribution to the art world, that I would highlight some of the books held by the Library which are just a few examples of John’s work.

John Peter Berger, born in 1926, was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.

The art critic, essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his television series Ways of Seeing. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the arts pages of the New Statesman. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which Kenneth Clark, its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had traveled 80,000 miles through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western world. Berger traveled as far as the hut in Ealing, west London where his programmes were filmed, and no farther. What he said in his characteristic tone of sweet reasonableness was: “In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be naked is to be oneself; to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.” In other words, art is a commodity and a woman in art is an object. No approach to art could have been more different from Clark’s gentlemanly urbanity. 

These demotic programmes turned Berger into the hero of a generation studying the burgeoning new university courses on European visual culture. The spin-off book was never out of print.

Ways of Seeing   701 BER

How do we see the world around us? "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." "But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is 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." By now he has.



Understanding a photograph    770 BER
The unique combination of critic and photographer results in a work that moves beyond the landmarks established by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to establish a new theory of photography. When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us.

Permanent Red : Essays in Seeing   701 BER

These essays by John Berger had their origins in articles written for publication in periodicals, particularly The New Statesman. They have now, however been so thoroughly thought over, revised and expanded that they form a consistent whole. This is not a haphazard selection of the best of Berger but a systematic attempt to place contemporary art in a critical perspective.

About looking    701 BER

As a novelist, essayist, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.

Another way of telling: a possible theory of photography 770 BER

In one of the most eloquent accounts of photography ever devised (originally published in 1982 and unavailable for many years), the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr set out to understand the fundamental nature of photography and how it makes its impact. 

Asking a range of questions – What is a photograph? What do photographs mean? How can they be used? – they give their answers in terms of a photograph as 'a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photography are often contradictory'. From these beginnings they develop a theory of photography that has at its centre the form's essential ambiguity, arguing that photography is totally unlike a film and has nothing to do with reportage. Rather, it constitutes 'another way of telling'. The unique combination of critic and photographer results in a work that moves beyond the landmarks established by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to establish a new theory of photography.

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos  828.91409 BER 

'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'.

Art and revolution :Ernst Neizvestny and the role of the artist in the USSR      759.7 BER

In this prescient and beautifully written book, John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger's impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre-glasnot Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy--which involved a face-to-face confrontation with Khruschev himself--Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions.

Berger on Drawing  741.0118 BER

A series of essays from a sensitive writer. Not on how to draw but getting at obliquely why we draw & how drawing can function for us. Everybody should draw to live vividly (forget so-called 'talent' - and abandon the childish need to make a pleasing drawing for others - just draw honestly and keep drawing - become involved in the visual world and strangely lay down memories that include sounds, feelings external & internal, smells...

Portraits: John Berger on artists  704.942 BER

A major new book from one of the world’s leading writers and art critics John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. In Portraits, Berger grounds the artists in their historical milieu in revolutionary ways, whether enlarging on the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves or Cy Twombly’s linguistic and pictorial play. In penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world’s most incisive critical voices.

Landscapes: John Berger on Art    700 BER

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 Luxemburg 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.

The moment of Cubism : and other essays   709.04032 BER

A collection of essays by John Berger, who is as usual provocative and thought provoking. He has a unique way of looking at art that forces us to engage with art on a different level.

The success and failure of Picasso 
759 PIC

In this classic of art criticism, one of our foremost cultural historians grapples with the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most mercurial and prodigious artists. In The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger places the artist in the historical, social and political contexts that made his work possible.

A Seventh Man, a book of images and words about the experience of 

Migrant Workers in Europe    301.55 BER 

Why does the Western world look to migrant labourers to perform the most menial tasks? What compels people to leave their homes and accept this humiliating situation? In A Seventh Man, John Berger and Jean Mohr come to grips with what it is to be a migrant worker the material circumstances and the inner experience and, in doing so, reveal how the migrant is not so much on the margins of modern life, but absolutely central to it. First published in 1975, this finely wrought exploration remains as urgent as ever, presenting a mode of living that pervades the countries of the West and yet is excluded from much of its culture.

The Shape of a Pocket     330.122 BER

John Berger writes: 'The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about - Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of certain hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I've never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.'

A jar of wild flowers : essays in celebration of John Berger   828.91409 GUN

In this collection of essays on the work of, and conversations with, John Berger, thirty-seven of his friends, artistic collaborators and followers come together to form the first truly international and cross-cultural celebration of his interventions. Berger has for decades, through his poetic humanism, brought together geographically, historically and socially disparate subjects. His work continues to throw out lifelines across genres, times and types of experience, opening up radical questions about the meaning of belonging and of community. In keeping with this spirit and in celebration of Berger, the short essays in A Jar of Wild Flowers challenge us all to take the brave step from limited sympathy to extended generosity. 

And finally…….

DVD John Berger: The Art of Looking (BBC4 Jan 2017)     701 BER

Art, politics and motorcycles - on the occasion of his 90th birthday, this is an intimate portrait of the late writer and art critic whose groundbreaking work on seeing has shaped our understanding of the concept for over five decades. The film explores how paintings become narratives and stories turn into images, and rarely does anybody demonstrate this as poignantly as Berger.

Berger lived and worked for decades in a small mountain village in the French Alps, where the nearness to nature, the world of the peasants and his motorcycle, which for him deals so much with presence, inspired his drawing and writing.

The film introduces Berger's art of looking with theatre wizard Simon McBurney, film director Michael Dibb, visual artist John Christie, cartoonist Selçuk Demiral and photographer Jean Mohr, as well as two of his children - film critic Katya Berger and the painter Yves Berger.

The prelude and starting point is Berger's mind-boggling experience of restored vision following a successful cataract removal surgery. There, in the cusp of his clouding eyesight, Berger re-discovers the irredeemable wonder of seeing. Realised as a portrait in works and collaborations, this creative documentary takes a different approach to biography, with Berger leading in his favourite role of the storyteller.

JB Quotes

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.