John Peter Berger (/ˈbɜːrdʒər/BUR-jər; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English
art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972
Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the
BBC series of the same name, was influential. He lived in France for over fifty years.
Early life
Berger was born on 5 November 1926[1] in
Stoke Newington, London,[2][3] the first of two children of Miriam and Stanley Berger.[4]
His grandfather was from
Trieste, now Italy,[5] and his father, Stanley, raised as a non-religious Jew who adopted Catholicism,[6] had been an infantry officer on the Western Front during the First World War and was awarded the
Military Cross[3][7] and an
OBE.[8]
Berger began his career as a painter[11] and exhibited works at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s.[11][8] His art has been shown at the Wildenstein, Redfern and
Leicester Galleries in London.[2]
Berger taught drawing at
St Mary's teacher training college.[2] He later became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman.[2][12] His
Marxist humanism[13] and his strongly stated opinions on
modern art combined to make him a controversial figure early in his career.[14] As a statement of political commitment, he titled an early collection of essays Permanent Red.[15]
Berger was never a formal member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB): rather he was a close associate of it and its front, the
Artists' International Association (AIA), until the latter disappeared in 1953. He was active in the Geneva Club, a discussion group that appears to have overlapped with British communist circles in the 1950s.[16]
Publishing
In 1958, Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time,[17] which tells the story of the disappearance of Janos Lavin, a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and his diary's discovery by an art critic friend called John.[18] The work was withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from the
Congress for Cultural Freedom a month after its publication.[8] His next novels were The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom;[2] both of which presented an urban English life of alienation and melancholy. Berger moved to Quincy in
Mieussy in
Haute-Savoie, France, in 1962 due to his distaste for life in Britain.[2]
In 1972, the
BBC broadcast his four-part television series Ways of Seeing[2][11][18] and published its accompanying text, a book of the same name. The first episode functions as an introduction to the study of images; it was derived in part from
Walter Benjamin's essay "
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".[19] The subsequent episodes concern the image of woman as a sexualized object in Western culture, expressions of property ownership and wealth in European oil painting, and modern advertising.[20] The series, the first of several close collaborations with director
Mike Dibb, has had a lasting influence, and in particular introduced the concept of the
male gaze, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting. It soon became popular among
feminists, including the British film critic
Laura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema.[21]
Berger donated half the Booker cash prize to the
British Black Panthers, and retained the other half to support his work on the study on migrant workers, which became A Seventh Man; he asserted that both endeavors represented aspects of his political struggle.[2][23] In his acceptance speech at the Booker Prize ceremony, Berger said the prize's sponsor, Booker McConnell, had a long history of slavery and exploitation in the Caribbean, and this was why he wanted to donate the money to the British Black Panthers and fund the writing of his book on migrant workers.
[1]
Berger's sociological writings include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967)[24] and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975).[25]
Berger and photographer
Jean Mohr, his frequent collaborator, sought to document and understand the experiences of peasants.[26][27]
Their subsequent book, Another Way of Telling, discusses and illustrates their documentary technique and treats the theory of photography through Berger's essays and Mohr's photographs.[28] His studies of individual artists include The Success and Failure of
Picasso (1965), a survey of that modernist's career, and Art and Revolution:
Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969).[2]
In later essays, Berger wrote about photography, art, politics, and memory. He published in The Shape of a Pocket a correspondence with
Subcomandante Marcos,[34] and penned short stories that appeared in The Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. His sole volume of poetry is Pages of the Wound, though other volumes, such as the theoretical essays And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos contain poetry. His 2007 collection of essays on the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance,
Hold Everything Dear, was titled after the poem by Gareth Evans. His later novels include To the Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis,[7][35] and King: A Street Story, a novel about homelessness and shantytown life told from the perspective of a stray dog.[4][35] Initially, Berger insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page of King, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits.[36]
Berger's 1980 volume About Looking includes an influential chapter, "Why Look at Animals?"[37] It is cited by numerous scholars in the interdisciplinary field of
animal studies. The chapter was later reproduced in a
Penguin Great Ideas selection of essays of the same title.[37]
Berger's novel From A to X was long-listed for the 2008 Booker Prize.[1][38] In Bento's Sketchbook (2011) Berger combines extracts from
Baruch Spinoza, sketches, memoir, and observations in a book that contemplates the relationship of materialism to spirituality. According to Berger, what could be seen as a contradiction "is beautifully resolved by Spinoza, who shows that it is not a duality, but in fact an essential unity".[39] The book has been described as "a characteristically sui generis work combining an engagement with the thought of the 17th-century lens grinder, draughtsman, and philosopher
Baruch Spinoza, with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches".[39] Among his last works is Confabulations (essays, 2016).[7][40]
Berger married three times,[2]
first to artist and illustrator Patt Marriott in 1949; the marriage was childless and the couple divorced.[2] In the mid-1950s, he married the Russian Anya Bostock (née Anna Sisserman), with whom he had two children, Katya Berger and
Jacob Berger; the couple divorced in the mid-1970s.[2] Soon afterwards, he married Beverly Bancroft, with whom he had one child, Yves.[2] Beverly died in 2013.[2]
Berger died at his home in
Antony, France, on 2 January 2017 at the age of 90.[1][43][44]
Legacy
In July 2009 Berger donated his archive of 369 files, nine boxes and one book to the
British Library. The contents include literary manuscripts, drafts, unpublished material and correspondence.[45]
Landscapes: John Berger on Art (
Tom Overton, ed.) (2016)[81]
John by Jean: Fifty Years of Friendship (
Jean Mohr, ed.) (2016)[82]
A Sparrow's Journey: John Berger Reads Andrey Platonov (CD: 44:34 & 81-page book with Robert Chandler and Gareth Evans), London: House Sparrow Press in association with the London Review Bookshop (2016)[83]
Smoke (with Selçuk Demirel) (2017)
Seeing Through Drawing (with John Christie) (2017). The book, published by OBJECTIF, features new texts by and about John Berger plus a catalogue section of images, information and stories from the invited artists in the main exhibition held on 8 July – 26 August 2017 at Mandell's Gallery, Norwich. It contains two previously unpublished sequences of correspondence on art and communications between John Berger and his daughter Katya Berger Andreadakis along with tributes and stories from: Anne Michaels, Yves Berger, Eulàlia Bosch, Geoff Dyer, Gareth Evans, Paul Gordon and Tom Overton. The book also features a compilation of writings on the art and practice of drawing collected together by John Christie, from across John Berger's art criticism, fiction, essays and letters.
What Time Is It? (with Selçuk Demirel) (
Maria Nadotti, ed.) (2019)
Swimming Pool (with Leon Kossoff) (Introduction by Deborah Levy. Postscript by Yves Berger. Berger's Texts selected by Teresa Pintó. Book design by John Christie) (2020)
Film
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), directed by
Tilda Swinton,
Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz.
Reviews
Harkness, Allan (1983), Berger: A Seventh Man?, review of A Seventh Man and Another Way of Telling, in Hearn, Sheila G.(ed.), Cencrastus No. 12, Spring 1983, pp. 46 & 47,
ISSN0264-0856
^Berger, John; Mohr, Jean; Blomberg, Sven (2010). A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe. Verso.
ISBN978-1-84467-649-1.
Bounds, Philip "Beyond : The Media Criticism of John Berger" in Philip Bounds and Mala Jagmohan (eds), Recharting Media Studies, Peter Lang 2008,
ISBN978-3-03911-015-5
Dyer, Geoff Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger,
ISBN0-7453-0097-9.
Dyer, Geoff (Ed.) John Berger, Selected Essays, Bloomsbury.
ISBN0-375-71318-2.
Fuller, Peter (1980) Seeing Berger. A Revaluation of , Writers and Readers.
ISBN0-906495-48-2.
Hertel, Ralf and David Malcolm (eds.), On John Berger: Telling Stories. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
ISBN978-90-04-30612-7.
Hochschild, Adam Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (Syracuse University Press, 1997), "Broad Jumper in the Alps," pp. 50–64.
Krautz, Jochen Vom Sinn des Sichtbaren. John Bergers Ästhetik und Ethik als Impuls für die Kunstpädagogik am Beispiel der Fotografie, Hamburg 2004 (Dr. Kovac)
ISBN3-8300-1287-X.
Papastergiadis, Nikos Modernity as exile: The stranger in John Berger's writing (Manchester University Press, 1993)
ISBN0-7190-3876-6
Chandan, Amarjit; Evans, Gareth; Gunaratnam, Yasmin (Eds.) The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, Ripon: Smokestack Books, 2016.
ISBN978-0-9934547-4-5
Chandan, Amarjit; Gunaratnam, Yasmin (Eds.) A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger, London: Zed Books, 2016.
ISBN978-1-78360-879-9
External links
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