5 Feet of Fury

John Berger (1926–2017)

Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) blew my mind when I read it in college, and I doubt a month has gone by since when I haven’t thought of it.

(While trying to shove his ultra-radical Marxism — he gave half his Booker prize winnings to the British Black Panthers — out of my mind.)

Although:

…he is clearly the kind of Marxist who would be instantly dismissed from any Marxist organisation he joined.

NYT:

As the host of “Ways of Seeing,” with his shaggy hair and tieless, loud-patterned shirt, Mr. Berger was a public intellectual who became a countercultural celebrity in 1970s Britain, where the BBC kept the four-part series in frequent rotation. The book became an art-school standard on both sides of the Atlantic.

He set the insurrectionary tone in the show’s opening sequence, taking a box cutter to a mock-up of Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” and slicing out the portrait of Venus.