The Political Legacy of John Berger's Art Criticism

In an essay in his provocatively titled 1960 collection Permanent Red — so provocatively named, indeed, that its title for US publication was changed to the far more anodyne Toward Reality — John Berger lamented the unending mawkishness of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. ‘The worst of Victorian painting sentimentalised spiritual yearning; the worst of Soviet painting sentimentalises the achievements of labour; we, at our worst, sentimentalise cheese-cake’, huffed Berger.