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John Berger

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John Peter Berger (born November 5, 1926) is an art critic, novelist, painter and author. The best-known among his many works include the novel G., winner of the 1972 Booker Prize, and the introductory essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a significant BBC series of the same name, and often used as a college text.

Biography

Born in Highams Park, London, England, Berger attended St Edward's School in Oxford. "His father, S.J.D. Berger, O.B.E., M.C., had been an infantry officer on the western front during the First World War."[1] Berger served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946; he then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London. "Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s."[1] "His art has been exhibited at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career."[2]

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 from 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 USSR achieved nuclear parity he had felt constrained not to criticize its policies; afterwards his attitude toward the Soviet state became considerably more critical.

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 After being available for a month, the work was withdrawn by the publisher, under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom [1]. 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 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.

His novel G., a romantic picaresque set in the Europe of 1898, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the Booker award 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.

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).[3]

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. Many of Berger's essays as well draw on his rural neighbors.

In recent essays Berger has written of photography, art, politics, and memory; he has published in The Shape of a Pocket a correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos, and written short stories appearing in venues like the Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. His sole volume of poetry is Pages of the Wound, though other volumes such as the dense theoretical essay And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos contain poetry as well as prose.

Berger's recent novels include To the Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis that stems from his own familial experience, and King: A Street Story, a novel on homeless and shantytown life told from the perspective of a street dog. Berger initially insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page of King, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits. ]]] His essays and criticism are available in many different volumes, including About Looking, Photocopies, The Shape of a Pocket, The Sense of Sight, and Keeping a Rendezvous. The 2001 collection Selected Essays contains selections from many of these; otherwise, their contents are distinct.

After a childless first marriage, Berger has three children: Jacob, a film director; Katya, a writer and film critic; and Yves, an artist.

Sources

  1. ^ a b "John Berger", Literary Encyclopedia
  2. ^ Profile of Berger at OpenDemocracy.net
  3. ^ Christian Dimitriu, Alain Tanner, Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1985, pp. 125-134.

General references

  • Dyer, Geoff. Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger. ISBN 0-7453-0097-9.
  • Dyer, Geoff (Ed.). John Berger, Selected Essays, Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-375-71318-2.

Bibliography

  • A Painter of Our Time
  • Permanent Red
  • The Foot of Clive
  • Corker's Freedom
  • A Fortunate Man
  • Art and Revolution
  • The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
  • The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
  • Ways of Seeing
  • Another Way of Telling
  • A Seventh Man
  • The Success and Failure of Picasso
  • G.
  • About Looking
  • Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag. A Trilogy)
  • And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
  • The White Bird (U.S. title: The Sense of Sight)
  • Keeping a Rendezvous
  • Pages of the Wound
  • Photocopies
  • To the Wedding
  • King
  • The Shape of a Pocket
  • Selected Essays (Geoff Dyer, ed.)
  • I Send You This Cadmium Red (with John Christie)
  • Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger)
  • Here is Where We Meet
  • Hold Everything Dear
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