Regularly assigned in art schools and introductory art history courses, Berger’s project has never really waned in popularity. When Penguin commissioned a paperback adaptation, the first two print runs sold out in months.
People in London and New York argued about Berger’s ideas. It attracted few initial viewers but, through rebroadcasts and word of mouth, the show gathered steam. Ways of Seeing first aired on Sunday evenings on BBC2 at the start of 1972. That tradition which was born about 1400, died about 1900.’
‘This is the first of four programmes,’ Berger says, ‘in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. The opening beat of the programme is the audio of the incision – the blade’s rough abrasion on canvas – before the soundtrack settles into voiceover. At the start of the first TV episode of Ways of Seeing, John Berger takes a scalpel to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars.
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