John Peter Berger (born
5 November 1926) is an
English art critic, novelist, painter, poet and author. His novel G. won the
1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism
Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a
BBC series, is often used as a university text.
Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of
London galleries in the late
1940s.[2] His art has been exhibited at the
Wildenstein, Redfern and
Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career.[3]
While teaching drawing (from 1948 to
1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the
New Statesman. His
Marxist humanism and his strongly stated opinions on modern art made him a controversial figure early in his career. He titled an early collection of essays
Permanent Red, in part as a statement of political commitment, and later wrote that before the
Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the
United States he had felt constrained not to criticize the former's policies; afterwards his attitude toward the
Soviet state became considerably more critical.
After a childless first marriage, Berger has three children:
Jacob, a film director;
Katya, a writer and film critic; and Yves, an artist.
In
1958 Berger published his first novel, A
Painter of
Our Time, 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. The book's political currency and detailed description of an artist's working process led to some readers mistaking it for a true story. After being available for a month, the work was withdrawn by the publisher, under pressure from the
Congress for Cultural Freedom.[4] The novels immediately succeeding A Painter of Our Time were The
Foot of
Clive and Corker's
Freedom; both presented an urban
English life of alienation and melancholy. In 1962 Berger's distaste for life in
Britain drove him into a voluntary exile in
France.
In 1972 the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing (directed by
Mike Dibb) and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images. The work was in part derived from
Walter Benjamin's essay
The Work of
Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.
Berger's novel G., a romantic picaresque set in
Europe in 1898, won both the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the
Booker Berger made a
point of donating half his cash prize to the
Black Panther Party in Britain, and retaining half to support his work on the study of migrant workers that became
A Seventh Man, insisting on both as necessary parts of his political struggle.[5]
Many of his texts, from sociological studies to fiction and poetry, deal with experience. Berger's sociological writings include A
Fortunate Man: The Story of a
Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man:
Migrant Workers in Europe (
1975). His research for A Seventh Man led to an interest in the world which migrant workers had left behind: isolated rural communities. It was his work on this theme that led him to settle in
Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie, where he has lived and farmed since the mid-1970s. Berger and photographer
Jean Mohr, his frequent collaborator, seek to document and to understand intimately the lived experiences of their peasant subjects. Their subsequent book
Another Way of Telling discusses and illustrates their documentary technique and treats the theory of photography both through Berger's essays and
Mohr's photographs. His studies of single artists include most prominently
The Success and
Failure of
Picasso (
1965), a survey of the modernist's career; and
Art and Revolution:
Ernst Neizvestny,
Endurance, and the
Role of the
Artist, on the
Soviet dissident sculptor's aesthetic and political contributions
.
In the 1970s Berger collaborated with the
Swiss director
Alain Tanner on several films; he wrote or co-wrote
La Salamandre (
1971),
The Middle of the World (
1974) and
Jonah who will be 25 in the year
2000 (
1976).[6] His major fictional work of the
1980s, the trilogy Into Their Labours (made up of the novels Pig
Earth,
Once in
Europa, and
Lilac and
Flag), treats the
European peasant experience from its farming roots into contemporary economic and political displacement and urban poverty.
- published: 16 Sep 2012
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