As Cameron has noted elsewhere, we’ve been on the road the last couple weeks. Not to be horrifically bougie, but we finally have enough money between the two of us to take a vacation abroad, and as part of those travels, we got to visit Barcelona. The city has haunted my dreams since I was sixteen and had my first encounter with Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle (which both Cameron and I have discussed elsewhere), and to finally be able to visit it was an incredible gift – not least because, as we made our way through the other tourists and the guys trying to get you to come eat their paella, we saw that Permanent Red: John Berger was on display at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

Needless to say, I was incredibly excited, and grew only more excited on learning more about the show, which focuses around Berger’s writing in The New Statesman, and even more excited to learn that the Virreina is free. So the next day, we all went to the palace to see the exhibition.

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The Palau Virreina was built in the 18th century, and you can tell: the ceilings are frescoed and the central courtyard is open to the sky. Entering from the Ramblas, we passed an office, an accessible bathroom, and a staff person in the arched entryway, and then ascends the stairs to the exhibition spaces. On reaching the second floor, by means of an angled, stone stairway, where we were greeted by a young man at a desk, who asked only where we were from before pointing us towards the Berger exhibition.

Berger is best known today for Ways of Seeing, his BBC series-turned-book about looking at art. The series can be viewed in its entirety here, and I recommend it: Berger’s thoughtful and accessible approach to aesthetics is laid out almost in manifesto form, and offers a nice way to see if what he’s doing is right for you.

It’s very right for me, and the show was as thoughtful and accessible in its presentation as could be hoped. Starting with Berger’s writing in New Statesman, but expanding to explore his collaborations with photographers and filmmakers, and even including some of Berger’s own artwork, Permanent Red was simultaneously an appreciation and an introduction to Berger’s deal.

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My first brush with Berger came when, on a whim, I picked up The Success and Failure of Picasso. What I thought might be an analysis of Picasso’s work was, indeed, that – but beyond Berger’s nuanced approach to Picasso’s work, I was happily introduced to Berger’s clear, impassioned prose style. Like Terry Eagleton, another Marxist who writes beautifully on arts and culture and whose works feature in a couple of our book round-ups, Berger’s writing struck me as being driven by a desire that is also an ethical imperative to make art understandable, not because art is inherently difficult to understand but rather because everyone should be able to engage with it as much as they would like. I do them both a disservice in this description, which I’m fucking up because I’m kinda bashing this one out, but you get the idea: I finished Berger’s Picasso in about 48 hours, and they were hours in which I also had work and social obligations.

Since then, I’ve only gotten to read Ways of Seeing and About Looking (discussed here and here, respectively); the latter offers “Between Two Colmars,” one of the finest pieces of writing on coming to terms with the self as subject to and participating in history I’ve ever read, and if you DM me, I will send you a copy of that essay that I transcribed because I love it very much. Permanent Red takes its name from another of Berger’s books, which collected those New Statesman pieces; the show also features work from A Seventh Man, one of Berger’s books on migrant workers, as well as Berger’s poetry. I was totally unfamiliar with his verse, and my chagrin at the man’s universal skill was only heightened by it.

John Berger in a still from *Ways of Seeing*, from this delightful piece.

Strolling through the galleries, we encountered a mix of audio and video presentations. In one room, the visitor could, if they so chose, sit at chairs positioned in front of televisions on the walls of the gallery to watch Ways of Seeing, the audio elements piped through Sennhausers; in another, Berger and Susan Sontag discuss the qualities of narrative and storytelling, their faces projected onto the gallery wall. Books are displayed in metal hooks on the walls; newspapers and magazines are in frames or vitrines. While the show is text-heavy for obvious reasons, many texts are presented in Spanish, Catalan, and English, and the Virreina offers a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition, which translates the wall text, in many other languages as well.

As Berger’s lean, handsome face – he looked disturbingly like Sir Ian McKellan – speaks earnestly to the viewer, the baroque galleries feel warm and alive.

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Ways of Seeing did more than put Berger’s name on the map; it also resurrected interest in the writings of Walter Benjamin, in that Berger structured one of the episodes essentially around Benjamin’s seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In that essay (available in full in English translation here) Benjamin puts forward the concept of an art work’s aura, a combination of its authenticity and its locale. What then, is the aura of, for example, a book printed relatively cheaply in, say, 1980? What is the aura of an interview you can watch on YouTube? Does it matter?

The locale, of course, was something else: the chambers of a baroque palace are nothing to sneeze at; that palace being in Barcelona compounds the matter. And while much of the show depends on Berger’s voluminous body of writing, one of its strongest suits was its use of Berger’s own art work to illustrate and coincide with his points. From portraits of Axl Rose and Slash that he made for his son, to studies of Caravaggio and the famed drawing of his father immediately upon the man’s death, the show is studded with unique images from Berger’s own hand. In an exhibition that depends so heavily on readily available material, the inclusion of these items lent the proceedings an intimate air. Also, he had really nice handwriting.

My own photo, from inside the exhibition.

But considering Berger’s work in this way – as much as, I want to stress, I very much enjoyed the show – feels as if it does a disservice somehow to Berger’s work and worldview, and by “in this way” I mean “as if it were simply an art exhibit and not an experience in a broader context.” As this LARB review notes, Berger constantly sought context: how and why did this piece of art come to be?

So here: three Americans travel to Barcelona in May of 2023 as part of a longer voyage. They arrive in time for warm weather, and stay in a short-term rental in Cornellà de Llobregat. They ride public transport into the city on their trip. They visit the beach and the Gothic Quarter; they visit an Anarchist bookstore and cross paths with an antifascist protest. They ate tapas and visited a gay bar or two, and when they walked down the Ramblas, they saw that an exhibition called Permanent Red was on display at the Virreina. They decided to go, and while there they also took in The City in Dispute, an exhibition on communal solutions to housing crises in southern Europe in the third quarter of the twentieth century. They departed the city by bus in the middle of the night, and who but they could say what changed in them as a result?

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A Communist in the Palace: Permanent Red at the Virreina