Obituary: Remembering John Berger

John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing famously began with him setting a knife to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. Flouting all rules of television performance, he stood with his back to the camera that instead faced the framed painting hung in a museum-like setting alongside other works. The dramatic gesture that ripped the canvas to cut the head off Venus served to make a point about how reproductions (and we later learned the Botticelli canvas was one) fundamentally changed the nature of the art object – that we could view it in close-ups and enlargements, set against text or printed on coffee cups, all of which made it a very different beast from times past. Berger’s comments on reproduction are now commonplace enough but the iconoclastic gesture of shredding the canvas still has the power to shock, bearing reminders to Bunuel’s compelling scene of the razor blade slicing the eye from Un Chien Andalou.