Vintage International
3 total works
Booker Prize-winning author John Berger gives us a stunning critical assessment of Pablo Picasso: At the height of his powers, Picasso was the artist as revolutionary: breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized—and wholly isolated.
Berger—one of this century’s most insightful cultural historians—trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shaped his life and work. Writing with a novelist’s sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the painted etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso’s triumphs and unsparing reckoning of their cost—in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man’s furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.
Berger—one of this century’s most insightful cultural historians—trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shaped his life and work. Writing with a novelist’s sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the painted etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso’s triumphs and unsparing reckoning of their cost—in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man’s furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.
Booker Prize-winning author John Berger brings us this tender and bittersweet novel is a book of dreams: dreams of freedom and romance, dreams that intoxicate and redeem, dreams that have the power to exalt their dreamers or dash them against hard truth.
It is the unforgettable, often comical portrait of a dreamer, one William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, who, in his sixty-third year, has just moved out of the house he shared with his overbearing sister. As Corker takes his first steps into a life of passions, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness—a man whose fantasies and ambitions are at once splendid and tragic.
It is the unforgettable, often comical portrait of a dreamer, one William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, who, in his sixty-third year, has just moved out of the house he shared with his overbearing sister. As Corker takes his first steps into a life of passions, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness—a man whose fantasies and ambitions are at once splendid and tragic.
Booker Prize-winning author John Berger gives a novel both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic. In To the Wedding, a blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.