John Peter Berger (pronounced BUR-jər; November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter, and poet. His novel G. won the Booker Prize in 1972. His essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, was written to support a BBC television series with the same name. This essay had a major influence on culture and is still widely read today. He lived in France for more than fifty years.
Early life
Berger was born on November 5, 1926, in Stoke Newington, London. He was the oldest of two children of Miriam and Stanley Berger.
His grandfather was born in Trieste, which is now part of Italy. His father, Stanley, was raised as a Jew who did not follow religious traditions but later became a Catholic. During World War I, Stanley served as a soldier in the infantry on the Western Front and was awarded the Military Cross and an OBE.
Berger attended St Edward's School in Oxford. During World War II, he served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946. After the war, he enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design in London.
Early career
Berger began his career as a painter and showed his paintings at several London galleries in the late 1940s. His art was displayed at the Wildenstein, Redfern, and Leicester Galleries in London.
He taught drawing at St Mary's teacher training college. Later, he became an art critic and wrote many essays and reviews for the New Statesman. His Marxist views on literature and strong opinions about modern art caused debate early in his career. He named an early collection of essays Permanent Red to show his political beliefs.
Berger was not an official member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Instead, he was a close friend of the party and its group, the Artists' International Association (AIA), until AIA ended in 1953. He was part of the Geneva Club, a discussion group that connected with British communist groups in the 1950s.
Published work
In 1958, Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, which tells the story of Janos Lavin, a fictional Hungarian painter who disappears, and his diary, which is later found by a friend who is an art critic named John. The book was taken off the shelves by the publisher one month after it was released, due to pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. His next novels, The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom, both describe the lives of people in urban England, showing themes of loneliness and sadness. In 1962, Berger moved to Quincy in Mieussy, Haute-Savoie, France, because he disliked living in Britain.
In 1972, the BBC broadcasted Berger’s four-part television series Ways of Seeing and published a book with the same name. The first episode introduces how to study images and was partly based on an essay by Walter Benjamin titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Later episodes discuss how women are often shown as sexual objects in Western culture, how wealth and ownership are shown in European paintings, and how modern advertising works. This series, which marked the start of a long partnership with director Mike Dibb, had a lasting impact. It introduced the idea of the "male gaze," which Berger used to analyze how women are portrayed in European art. The series became popular among feminists, including Laura Mulvey, a British film critic, who used it to examine how women are shown in movies.
Berger’s novel G, a story set in Europe in 1898, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. He gave half of the Booker Prize money to the British Black Panthers, a group fighting for civil rights, and kept the other half to support his research on migrant workers, which later became the book A Seventh Man. Berger explained that both actions were part of his political work. In his speech at the Booker Prize ceremony, he noted that the prize’s sponsor, Booker McConnell, had a history of slavery and exploitation in the Caribbean, which is why he donated the money.
Berger’s books about society include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). He often worked with photographer Jean Mohr to document the lives of peasants. Their book Another Way of Telling explains their methods of photography and includes Berger’s essays and Mohr’s photographs. Berger also wrote about artists, such as in The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), which covers Picasso’s career, and Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969).
In the 1970s, Berger wrote or co-wrote three films with Swiss director Alain Tanner: La Salamandre (1971), The Middle of the World (1974), and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976). His major fictional work of the 1980s was the trilogy Into Their Labours, made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag. These books explore the lives of European peasants, from farming traditions to modern struggles with poverty and displacement. In 1974, Berger helped start the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Ltd in London with others. The group operated until the early 1980s.
In later years, Berger wrote about photography, art, politics, and memory. He published a book of letters with Subcomandante Marcos, and his short stories appeared in The Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. His only poetry book is Pages of the Wound, though other books, like And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, include poems. His 2007 book Hold Everything Dear, about art as a tool for political change, was named after a poem by Gareth Evans. His later novels include To the Wedding, a love story about the AIDS crisis, and King: A Street Story, a novel about homelessness and life in slums told from the perspective of a stray dog. Initially, Berger wanted his name removed from the cover and title page of King, so people would judge the book based only on its content.
Berger’s 1980 book About Looking includes a famous chapter titled "Why Look at Animals?" This chapter is often used in academic studies of animals. It was later included in a Penguin collection of essays with the same title. His novel From A to X was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize. In Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), Berger mixes quotes from Baruch Spinoza, sketches, personal stories, and observations to explore how materialism and spirituality are connected. He wrote that Spinoza’s ideas show these concepts are not opposites but part of the same whole. The book has been described as a unique work that combines Spinoza’s philosophy with art and personal reflections. Among his final works is Confabulations (2016), a collection of essays.
Other work
In 1999, Berger played the roles of twin brothers Archie and Albert Crisp in the video game Grand Theft Auto: London 1969.
He was part of the Support Committee of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
Personal life
In 1949, Berger married Patricia (Pat) Marriott, who was an artist and illustrator. They later divorced.
His second wife was Rosemary Sibell Guest, who was formerly married to Gilbert Boyd, 6th Baron Kilmarnock.
In the mid-1950s, Berger married Anya Bostock, a Russian translator. They had two children together, Katya Berger and Jacob Berger. The couple divorced in the mid-1970s. He later married Beverly Bancroft, with whom he had one child, Yves. Beverly Bancroft passed away in 2013.
Berger died at his home in Antony, France, on January 2, 2017, at the age of 90.
Legacy
In July 2009, Berger gave his collection to the British Library. This collection includes written works, early drafts, research notes, unpublished materials, letters, newspaper clippings, and work-related documents. The collection has some early examples of Berger’s graphic art, but most of it focuses on written works. The collection is organized mainly by Berger’s wife, Beverly. The physical collection includes 369 files, 9 boxes, and 1 book.
Awards
- In 1972, the Booker Prize was awarded.
- In 1972, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize was awarded.
- In 1991, the Petrarca-Preis was awarded.
- In 2009, the Golden PEN Award was awarded.
Literary works
- A Painter of Our Time (1958)
- Marcel Frishman (with George Besson) (1958)
- The Foot of Clive (1962)
- Corker's Freedom (1964)
- G. (1972)
- Into Their Labours trilogy (1991): Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1987), Lilac and Flag (1990)
- To the Wedding (1995)
- King: A Street Story (1999)
- Here is Where We Meet (2005)
- From A to X (2008)
- A Question of Geography (with Nella Bielski) (1987)
- Les Trois Chaleurs (1985)
- Boris (1983)
- Goya's Last Portrait (with Nella Bielski) (1989)
- Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (with Alain Tanner) (1976)
- La Salamandre (The Salamander) (with Alain Tanner) (1971)
- Le Milieu du monde (The Middle of the World) (with Alain Tanner) (1974)
- Play Me Something (with Timothy Neat) (1989)
- Une ville à Chandigarh (A City at Chandigarh) (1966)
- Pages of the Wound (1994)
- Collected Poems (2014)
- The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles (1972)
- About Looking (1980)
- A Fortunate Man (with Jean Mohr) (1967)
- Keeping a Rendezvous (1992)
- Photocopies (1996)
- Selected Essays (edited by Geoff Dyer) (2001)
- Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007; 2nd edition 2016)
- Why Look at Animals? (2009)
- Confabulations (Essays) (2016)
- Meanwhile (2008)
- 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)
- Permanent Red (1960) (Published in the United States in altered form in 1962 as Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing)
- The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965)
- Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R. (1969)
- The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (1969)
- Ways of Seeing (with Mike Dibb, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox and Richard Hollis) (1972)
- The Sense of Sight (1985)
- Albrecht Dürer: Watercolours and Drawings (1994)
- Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) (1996)
- The Shape of a Pocket (2001)
- Berger on Drawing (2005)
- Lying Down to Sleep (with Katya Berger) (2010)
- Bento's Sketchbook (2011)
- Understanding a Photograph (edited by Geoff Dyer) (2013)
- Daumier: The Heroism of Modern Life (2013)
- Portraits: John Berger on Artists (edited by Tom Overton) (2015)
- Landscapes: John Berger on Art (edited by Tom Overton) (2016)
- Seeing Through Drawing
- A Seventh Man (with Jean Mohr) (1975)
- Another Way of Telling (with Jean Mohr) (1982)
- And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984)
- The White Bird (U.S. title: The Sense of Sight) (1985)
- Isabelle: A Story in Shots (with Nella Bielski) (1998)
- At the Edge of the World (with Jean Mohr) (1999)
- I Send You This Cadmium Red: A Correspondence between John Berger and John Christie (with John Christie) (2001)
- My Beautiful (with Marc Trivier) (2004)
- The Red Tenda of Bologna (2007)
- War with No End (with Naomi Klein, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, Joe Sacco and Haifa Zangana) (2007)
- From I to J (with Isabel Coixet) (2009)
- Railtracks (with Anne Michaels) (2011)
- Cataract (with Selçuk Demirel) (2012)
- Flying Skirts: An Elegy (with Yves Berger) (2014)
- Cuatro horizontes (Four Horizons) (with Sister Lucia Kuppens, Sister Telchilde Hinkley and John Christie) (2015)
- Lapwing & Fox (Conversations between John Berger and John Christie) (2016)
- John by Jean: Fifty Years of Friendship (edited by Jean Mohr) (2016)
- 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)
- Smoke (with Selçuk Demirel) (2017)
- What Time Is It? (with Selçuk Demirel) (edited by Maria Nadotti) (2019)
- Over To You. Letters Between a Father & Son. Tate Publishing (2024)
- The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), directed by Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth and Bartek Dziadosz.
- Taskafa: Stories of the Street (2013), directed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
- Visioni di case che crollano (Case sparse) (2002), directed by Gianni Celati.
Reviews
Allan Harkness (1983), "Berger: A Seventh Man?" a review of "A Seventh Man" and "Another Way of Telling," in Sheila G. Hearn (ed.), Cencrastus, Number 12, Spring 1983, pages 46 and 47, ISSN 0264-0856.
Date
John Peter Berger (pronounced BUR-jər; November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter, and poet. His novel G. won the Booker Prize in 1972. His essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, was written to support a BBC television series with the same name. This essay had a major influence on culture and is still widely read today. He lived in France for more than fifty years.
Early life
Berger was born on November 5, 1926, in Stoke Newington, London. He was the oldest of two children of Miriam and Stanley Berger.
His grandfather was born in Trieste, which is now part of Italy. His father, Stanley, was raised as a Jew who did not follow religious traditions but later became a Catholic. During World War I, Stanley served as a soldier in the infantry on the Western Front and was awarded the Military Cross and an OBE.
Berger attended St Edward's School in Oxford. During World War II, he served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946. After the war, he enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design in London.
Early career
Berger began his career as a painter and showed his paintings at several London galleries in the late 1940s. His art was displayed at the Wildenstein, Redfern, and Leicester Galleries in London.
He taught drawing at St Mary's teacher training college. Later, he became an art critic and wrote many essays and reviews for the New Statesman. His Marxist views on literature and strong opinions about modern art caused debate early in his career. He named an early collection of essays Permanent Red to show his political beliefs.
Berger was not an official member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Instead, he was a close friend of the party and its group, the Artists' International Association (AIA), until AIA ended in 1953. He was part of the Geneva Club, a discussion group that connected with British communist groups in the 1950s.
Published work
In 1958, Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, which tells the story of Janos Lavin, a fictional Hungarian painter who disappears, and his diary, which is later found by a friend who is an art critic named John. The book was taken off the shelves by the publisher one month after it was released, due to pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. His next novels, The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom, both describe the lives of people in urban England, showing themes of loneliness and sadness. In 1962, Berger moved to Quincy in Mieussy, Haute-Savoie, France, because he disliked living in Britain.
In 1972, the BBC broadcasted Berger’s four-part television series Ways of Seeing and published a book with the same name. The first episode introduces how to study images and was partly based on an essay by Walter Benjamin titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Later episodes discuss how women are often shown as sexual objects in Western culture, how wealth and ownership are shown in European paintings, and how modern advertising works. This series, which marked the start of a long partnership with director Mike Dibb, had a lasting impact. It introduced the idea of the "male gaze," which Berger used to analyze how women are portrayed in European art. The series became popular among feminists, including Laura Mulvey, a British film critic, who used it to examine how women are shown in movies.
Berger’s novel G, a story set in Europe in 1898, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. He gave half of the Booker Prize money to the British Black Panthers, a group fighting for civil rights, and kept the other half to support his research on migrant workers, which later became the book A Seventh Man. Berger explained that both actions were part of his political work. In his speech at the Booker Prize ceremony, he noted that the prize’s sponsor, Booker McConnell, had a history of slavery and exploitation in the Caribbean, which is why he donated the money.
Berger’s books about society include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). He often worked with photographer Jean Mohr to document the lives of peasants. Their book Another Way of Telling explains their methods of photography and includes Berger’s essays and Mohr’s photographs. Berger also wrote about artists, such as in The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), which covers Picasso’s career, and Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969).
In the 1970s, Berger wrote or co-wrote three films with Swiss director Alain Tanner: La Salamandre (1971), The Middle of the World (1974), and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976). His major fictional work of the 1980s was the trilogy Into Their Labours, made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag. These books explore the lives of European peasants, from farming traditions to modern struggles with poverty and displacement. In 1974, Berger helped start the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Ltd in London with others. The group operated until the early 1980s.
In later years, Berger wrote about photography, art, politics, and memory. He published a book of letters with Subcomandante Marcos, and his short stories appeared in The Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. His only poetry book is Pages of the Wound, though other books, like And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, include poems. His 2007 book Hold Everything Dear, about art as a tool for political change, was named after a poem by Gareth Evans. His later novels include To the Wedding, a love story about the AIDS crisis, and King: A Street Story, a novel about homelessness and life in slums told from the perspective of a stray dog. Initially, Berger wanted his name removed from the cover and title page of King, so people would judge the book based only on its content.
Berger’s 1980 book About Looking includes a famous chapter titled "Why Look at Animals?" This chapter is often used in academic studies of animals. It was later included in a Penguin collection of essays with the same title. His novel From A to X was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize. In Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), Berger mixes quotes from Baruch Spinoza, sketches, personal stories, and observations to explore how materialism and spirituality are connected. He wrote that Spinoza’s ideas show these concepts are not opposites but part of the same whole. The book has been described as a unique work that combines Spinoza’s philosophy with art and personal reflections. Among his final works is Confabulations (2016), a collection of essays.
Other work
In 1999, Berger played the roles of twin brothers Archie and Albert Crisp in the video game Grand Theft Auto: London 1969.
He was part of the Support Committee of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
Personal life
In 1949, Berger married Patricia (Pat) Marriott, who was an artist and illustrator. They later divorced.
His second wife was Rosemary Sibell Guest, who was formerly married to Gilbert Boyd, 6th Baron Kilmarnock.
In the mid-1950s, Berger married Anya Bostock, a Russian translator. They had two children together, Katya Berger and Jacob Berger. The couple divorced in the mid-1970s. He later married Beverly Bancroft, with whom he had one child, Yves. Beverly Bancroft passed away in 2013.
Berger died at his home in Antony, France, on January 2, 2017, at the age of 90.
Legacy
In July 2009, Berger gave his collection to the British Library. This collection includes written works, early drafts, research notes, unpublished materials, letters, newspaper clippings, and work-related documents. The collection has some early examples of Berger’s graphic art, but most of it focuses on written works. The collection is organized mainly by Berger’s wife, Beverly. The physical collection includes 369 files, 9 boxes, and 1 book.
Awards
Literary works
Reviews
Allan Harkness (1983), "Berger: A Seventh Man?" a review of "A Seventh Man" and "Another Way of Telling," in Sheila G. Hearn (ed.), Cencrastus, Number 12, Spring 1983, pages 46 and 47, ISSN 0264-0856.
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