Learning to see

...His response to the spiritual impoverishment of that society was to idealize, like the Spanish anarchists, a simpler, presumably more natural way of being...

...Most writing on the arts either focuses narrowly on the work itself, making us lose sight of the artist or the context in which the work was created, or it uses the work simply as a springboard to the artist's biography or to a political polemic, making us lose sight of the work...

...Here is a remarkable essay on how animals, once essential to our physical existence and central in our imaginary life as metaphors of human experience, have been marginalized by industrial capitalism, replaced by Donald Duck, the family dog, the child's stuffed toy, and zoos, where they "constitute the living monument to their own disappearance...

...This curious statement is the starting point of Berger's analysis...

...In the lively and well-written essays in About Looking and in The Success and Failure of Picasso, the socialist art critic, novelist, script writer, and documentarist John Berger avoids both these pitfalls...

...Thus, Berger's essays simultaneously elucidate art and illuminate our own experience and the manner in which we represent it...

...Strangely, this celebration of the artist over his work was shared by Picasso himself...

...He was corrupted by success, not because he lost his integrity, as conventional wisdom might have it, but because he was cut off from modern life...

...In a society that appeared to be going nowhere, the compelling vision of change for many Spaniards, including Picasso, was not that of socialism, with a steady march toward industrialization, but of anarchism, generated by a sudden, destructive transformation that would eradicate the Spanish ruling class and return social life to its communal peasant past...

...The revolutionary in Picasso, Berger argues, idealized the noble savage he saw in himself...

...During his lifetime he became a superstar of the art world, perhaps the most famous painter ever, and the richest...

...Picasso, and those around him, came to believe that he was mysteriously possessed by a creative spirit...

...Although Picasso lived as an exile from the age of twenty-three until his death, Berger believes that he always viewed modern European society through the lens of his Spanish past...

...Because he refuses to idealize the artist as a creature apart from you or me, he is able to reveal parallels between the artist's attempts to represent his or her experience of the world and our own, more casual attempts...

...Jonathan Cobb (Jonathan Cobb is co-author with Richard Sennett of "The Hidden Injuries of Class...

...Until the 1940s he was able to produce great art on this basis, but it couldn't last...

...They permeated the Romantic movement...

...Picasso could have found his subject in the peoples of the Third World, Berger suggests, but instead "he became a national monument and produced trivia...

...Berger's essays enable us to do just that...

...It's not what the artist does that counts," he once said, "but what he is...

...Particularly remarkable is Berger's ability to take the artist's point of view (he began his career as a painter...

...Picasso, born in 1881 of a middle-class family, spent his formative years in a country that, unlike the rest of Europe, lay frozen at a preindustrial stage of development...

...Explanations, analyses, interpretation," Berger says in About Looking, "are no more than frames or lenses to help the spectator focus his attention more sharply on the work...

...Picasso joined the Communist Party in 1944, but the Communists, no less than the bourgeoisie, separated Picasso from his art, glorifying the man but giving him no subjects save himself...

...Picasso's failure thus is an outgrowth of his very success in our culture's terms...

...This self-perception contained a hidden truth, Berger demonstrates: Except during the high tide of Cubism, from 1907 to 1914, there were abrupt changes in Picasso's style but no real development...

...By the standards of capitalist society, Picasso was an extraordinary success...

...Picasso believed that he needed to identify with others in order to paint, but he found his subject in his own sensations...

...He shows us how the lens through which the artist perceives the world is ground by his or her historical context, class position, and individual biography, and he explores how what we see in art is shaped by our context and experience...

...In the twenty-three essays on photography, on animals, and on artists that make up About Looking, all of which first appeared in New Society and other European periodicals, Berger explores what various artists see in their subjects, what we see in the works, the subjects, and the artists, and, of course, what the critic sees...

...Here, in About Looking, is Berger's reaction to the elegant essays of Susan Sontag's On Photography...

...His talent was so prodigious that at the age of fourteen his father, a provincial art teacher, declared he would never paint again because his son had already surpassed him...

...Picasso can be lionized today, Berger argues, because his form of revolt is anachronistic, familiar, and safe...

...His writings represent the marriage of art and social criticism at its best...

...In Berger's view, Picasso was a "vertical invader" on the stage of modern European society...

...He denied any development in art or in himself...

...Berger's preoccupation is with lived experience—of the artist, of the subject of art, of the spectator, of the critic—and how it is made sense of...

...The underlying themes of most of the essays in About Looking are our alienation from nature and the transformation of art and perception by the social experience of capitalist industrialization...

...Like most superstars, Picasso the man was acclaimed as a creative genius even by those who knew next to nothing of his work...

...The price of celebration in modern capitalist society is isolation...

...Berger and Sontag share an interest in showing that photography, like painting, does not mirror reality but is a construction of it, and Berger goes on to discuss how the camera can be used in a nonex-ploitative way...

...Berger's essays are easy to read, yet they are so filled with subtle analyses of paintings, brilliant if sometimes cryptic asides, and acute perceptions of art and society that no brief review can do them justice...

...The only justification for criticism is that it allows us to see more clearly...

...Picasso's isolation as a man apart, Berger argues, left him with a tragic and, to us, perhaps a surprising problem: what to paint...

...Although he remained largely outside of the political currents of his time, Picasso saw himself as a revolutionary...

...He relates artistic work to the artist, to society, and to how we see in a fresh, insightful, and exciting way...

...These qualities of Berger's work are especially apparent in his 1965 book on Picasso, now reissued...

...Like the Spanish anarchists' vision of radical transformation, Picasso was, in a sense, born and not made...

...While one's interpretation of this or that painting or period is bound to differ from Berger's, his arguments are usually cogent and convincing...

...In Berger's view, the modern artist can find a subject by identifying with the people or by looking within the self...

...The artist as exile, the cultivation of the noble savage, and the celebration of the idea of genius—these aspects of the artist in revolt are of course not new...

...Here also are essays on Rodin's treatment of women, on the similarities of Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, and a marvelous piece on the change in Millet's painting wrought by his realization that the peasantry embodied a cultural heritage that was being rubbed out forever by the spreading market economy...