Berger, John Peter (1926- ) novelist, art critic, screenwriter

John Berger, a committed Marxist, is a novelist, painter, and art historian famous for his study of the peasant communities of the French Alps and for his influential studies of perception and art. Born in London, he attended the Central School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art in London and taught drawing from 1948 to 1955. In 1952 he began writing influential art criticism with marxist overtones for London’s New Statesman.

Berger’s first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958), written in journal entry form, is a character study of an aging, bitter painter who struggles with financial worry and a loveless marriage. The book was praised for its realistic depiction of the life of an artist.

Berger earned the 1972 Booker Prize for G.: A Novel. Set during the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the novel tells the story of a young man’s sexual encounters in Europe. Berger was heralded for the compassion with which he explored how men and women relate to one another and their search for intimacy. The novel also earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Berger’s most influential work is often considered to be Ways of Seeing (1972), a study of art based on the BBC television series of the same name. In this book he analyzes not only art but also the very meaning of perception—what we see and how we see it. In his examination of how image relates to text, Berger writes, “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”

Particularly relevant even three decades after the book’s publication is Berger’s discussion of images in the mass media. He suggests that the images of advertising are “of the moment”—that is, they speed past the viewer and transmit their message of capitalism on a subconscious level. Art, Berger argues, was once an expression of what an artist saw or possessed. Advertising is about what one does not have but thinks one needs.

In the 1970s Berger moved to a small village in the French Alps and became fascinated with the culture of the peasants who lived there. He soon explored this culture in his writing. Pig Earth (1979) was the first of Berger’s Into Their Labours trilogy, which also includes Once in Europa (1983) and Lilac and Flag: An Old Wives’ Tale of a City (1990). These books are told through the stories passed on to him by French peasants and examine the changes in their way of life as they move from their isolated rural community to the city. Critic Harrington B. Laufman writes that in Pig Earth “[t]he ‘fiction’, that is the re-told tales, are the book’s strength. It is unclear where the village story-tellers’ tales end and Berger’s elaboration (if any) begins. These seamless stories transported me to an earthy, physical world of self-reliance amidst the close community of the village.”

In collaboration with the Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner, Berger wrote the screenplay for Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), which film critic Leonard Maltin called a “[s]ensitive, literate, engaging comedy about eight individuals affected by the political events of the late ’60s.”

Berger continues to write and paint. His paintings have been shown all over the world.

Other Works by John Berger:
- About Looking. New York: Vintage, 1992.
- The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Vintage, 1993.
- To the Wedding: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 1996.

A Work about John Berger:
- Dyer, Geoff. The Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger. New York: Pluto Press, 1988.