Ways Of Seeing

Berger opens this chapter by remarking that oil paintings often depict objects, which, in reality, are purchasable. He observes that buying a painting is not unlike buying the object that a painting depicts, and putting it in your house. In making this observation, Berger arrives at a central assertion of the chapter: oil painting incorporates the act and concept of possession as a way of seeing. In other words, property relations are embedded in the conventions of European oil painting. He declares that this fundamental truth about European oil painting is usually ignored by art experts and historians. Indeed, in Berger’s estimation, it is the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—and not an art historian—who has come closest to naming this intrinsic aspect of oil painting as a genre. He then quotes from Lévi-Strauss’s work Conversations with Charles Charbonnier: “It is this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization” (84). Berger then remarks that, while Lévi-Strauss’s statement may be an overreaching generalization, if it is true, the sentiment it expresses reached its peak during the period of traditional oil painting.