John Peter Berger (/ˈbɜːrdʒər/BUR-jər; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an Englishart critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novelG. won the 1972Booker Prize. His essay on art criticismWays of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to theBBC series of the same name, is hugely culturally influential and continues to be widely read today. He lived in France for over fifty years.
Berger was born on 5 November 1926[1] inStoke Newington, London,[2][3] the first of two children of Miriam and Stanley Berger.[4]
His grandfather was fromTrieste, 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 theMilitary Cross[3][7] and anOBE.[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 andLeicester Galleries in London.[2]
Berger was never a formal member of theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB): rather he was a close associate of it and its front, theArtists' International Association (AIA), until the latter disappeared in 1953. He was active in the Geneva Club, a discussion group that overlapped with British communist circles in the 1950s.[16]
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a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and his diary's discovery by an art critic friend called John.[18] The work was withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from theCongress for Cultural Freedom a month after its publication.[8] His next novels wereThe Foot of Clive andCorker's Freedom;[2] both of which presented an urban English life of alienation and melancholy. Berger moved to Quincy inMieussy inHaute-Savoie, France, in 1962 due to his distaste for life in Britain.[2]
In 1972, theBBC broadcast his four-part television seriesWays 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 fromWalter 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 directorMike Dibb, has had a lasting influence, and in particular introduced the concept of themale gaze, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting. It soon became popular amongfeminists, including the British film criticLaura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema.[21]
John Berger
Berger's novelG., apicaresque romance set in Europe in 1898, won theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize and theBooker Prize in 1972.[2][22] Berger donated half the Booker cash prize to theBritish Black Panthers, and retained the other half to support his work on the study on migrant workers, which becameA 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.[24]
Berger's sociological writings includeA Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967)[25] andA Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975).[26]
Berger and photographerJean Mohr, his frequent collaborator, sought to document and understand the experiences of peasants.[27][28]
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.[29] His studies of individual artists includeThe Success and Failure ofPicasso (1965), a survey of that modernist's career, andArt 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 inThe Shape of a Pocket a correspondence withSubcomandante Marcos,[35] and penned short stories that appeared inThe Threepenny Review andThe New Yorker. His sole volume of poetry isPages of the Wound, though other volumes, such as the theoretical essaysAnd 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 byGareth Evans.[36] Berger's later novels includeTo the Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis,[7][37] andKing: A Street Story, a novel about homelessness and shantytown life told from the perspective of a stray dog.[4][37] Initially, Berger insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page ofKing, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits.[38]
Berger's 1980 volumeAbout Looking includes an influential chapter, "Why Look at Animals?"[39] It is cited by numerous scholars in the interdisciplinary field ofanimal studies. The chapter was later reproduced in aPenguin Great Ideas selection of essays of the same title.[39]
Berger's novelFrom A to X was long-listed for the 2008 Booker Prize.[1][40] InBento's Sketchbook (2011) Berger combines extracts fromBaruch 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".[41] The book has been described as "a characteristicallysui generis work combining an engagement with the thought of the 17th-century lens grinder, draughtsman, and philosopherBaruch Spinoza, with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches".[41] Among his last works isConfabulations (essays, 2016).[7][42]
Berger married three times,[2] first to artist and illustrator Patricia (Pat) Marriott in 1949.[2] They divorced and in the mid-1950s, he married the Russian translatorAnya Bostock, with whom he had two children, Katya Berger andJacob Berger; the couple divorced in the mid-1970s.[2] He then married Beverly Bancroft, with whom he had one child, Yves.[2] Beverly Bancroft died in 2013.[2]
Berger died at his home inAntony, France, on 2 January 2017 at the age of 90.[17][1][45]
In July 2009, Berger donated his archive of 369 files, nine boxes and one book[which?] to theBritish Library. The contents include literary manuscripts, drafts, unpublished material and correspondence.[46]
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)
Lapwing & Fox (Conversations between John Berger and John Christie) (2016)[83]
John by Jean: Fifty Years of Friendship (Jean Mohr, ed.) (2016)[84]
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)[85]
Smoke (with Selçuk Demirel) (2017)
What Time Is It? (with Selçuk Demirel) (Maria Nadotti [es], ed.) (2019)
Over To You. Letters Between a Father & Son. Tate Publishing (2024)
Harkness, Allan (1983),Berger: A Seventh Man?, review ofA Seventh Man andAnother 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.
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.
Dyer, Geoff,Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger,ISBN0-7453-0097-9.
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.
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