John Berger (1926-2017) was an award-winning English art critic, novelist, poet and essayist.
He won the 1972 Booker Prize with his novel G., a Genre-Busting version of the Don Juan story, and Genre-Busting became Berger's signature style. He wrote several novels, but many of his most admired works are unclassifiable combinations of essay, autobiography and reflections on art and writing and politics.
He served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946, then went to art school and tried for some years to pursue a career in painting. He kept drawing and painting all his life, but he came to prominence in the late 1950s as a controversial art critic, "controversial" because of his very explicit left-wing politics. He titled his first collection of art criticism Permanent Red, after a colour of paint but also as a nod to how left-wing he was.
His first novel A Painter of Our Time was published in 1958, and it was perceived as being so dangerously not-unfriendly to communism that the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom successfully pressured his publishers into withdrawing it. His next two novels, The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom, were less controversial but also less audacious. He became at this time a well-known figure on British television, appearing on shows whenever they wanted a token socialist. By 1962 he'd come to dislike living in Britain so much that he moved to the small rural French town of Quincy, and he lived the rest of his life in France.
He continued to write essays and fiction. In 1972 he co-created the innovative TV series Ways of Seeing, which was a critical look at how we view images, and something of a low-budget Take That! to the far more expensive and ballyhooed series about the history of art, Civilisation.
In 1972 his novel G. won the Booker Prize, and Berger scandalised half the literati in Britain by announcing that because of the Booker McConnell's involvement in sugar plantations he'd be giving half the prize money to the Black Panthers and using the other half to fund his research into the situation of migrant workers in Europe, which became his book A Seventh Man.
In the 1970s he collaborated on three movies with the Swiss director Alain Tanner. In the 1980s he wrote a trilogy about the lives of peasants, Into Their Labours, which took a clear-eyed but sparely poetic look at how the situation of peasants has changed with the rise of industrialisation and post-industrialisation.
His other novels include To the Wedding, a touching love story that dealt with the AIDS crisis, and King: A Street Story, a novel about homelessness told from the point of view of a dog. When it was first published, he had the publishers leave his name off the cover, so that it would be read on its own merits.
He loved to collaborate with people, and one of his frequent collaborators was the photographer Jean Mohr, whose photographs are an integral part of the books they worked on together.
He occasionally acted, and one of his more bizarre roles was voice-acting Archie and Albert Crisp in the GTA: London expansion of Grand Theft Auto (Classic), in 1999.
He was a good friend of Tilda Swinton, who appeared with him in the movie Play Me Something, and she co-directed a film about him, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger.
He wrote and collaborated on so many books that it would be foolish to list them all here, but here are some of the most notable:
- A Painter Of Our Time (1958, novel)
- Permanent Red (1960, art criticism)
- The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965, art criticism)
- A Fortunate Man (with Jean Mohr, 1967, a non-fiction account of an English country doctor)
- The Look of Things (1972, art criticism)
- G. (1972, novel)
- Ways of Seeing (1972, TV documentary and book about the visual arts and society)
- A Seventh Man (with Jean Mohr, 1975, non-fiction account of migrant workers in Europe)
- Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000 (with Alain Tanner, 1975, screenplay''
- Pig Earth (1979, novel)
- About Looking (1980, essays on art and society, includes his celebrated essay "Why Look at Animals?")
- Another Way of Telling (with Jean Mohr, 1982, a meditation on photography)
- And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984, a meditation on time)
- The White Bird (1985, art criticism)
- Once in Europa (1987, short stories)
- Lilac and Flag (1990, novel: this, Pig Earth and Once in Europa make up the Into Their Labours trilogy)
- Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007, writings on politics and society)
- Confabulations (2016, essays and articles on art, people and society, the last book Berger published in his lifetime)
John Berger's work provides examples of:
- Arch-Enemy: Sucus the cop in Lilac and Flag considers Flag to be this for him.
- Author Avatar: The narrator of A Painter of Our Time is an English art critic called John.
- Capitalism Is Bad: He wrote directly about this in A Seventh Man and other books, highlighting the plight of migrant workers.
- The Casanova: Deconstructed with G. in the novel of that name, in that he has sex with practically every woman he meets but he's not malicious or sleazy about it, more like Innocently Insensitive.
- Cool Teacher: Max in Jonah, who uses blood pudding to illustrate the "folds of time" to his high school students, but they seem to appreciate him nevertheless.
- Crapsack World: The world in successive books of Into Their Labours becomes more and more like this.
- Genre-Busting: G. confused some people who couldn't figure out if it was really a novel or else an essay about early 20th century history. Or both.
- Pig Earth, a collection of linked stories, contains poems in between the stories.
- Mistaken for Spies: This happens to the title character of G.. It gets him killed.
- Narrator: Berger himself was this in the series Ways of Seeing.
- Professional Butt-Kisser: Berger argued in Success and Failure of Picasso that after Picasso became world-famous, he was surrounded by these for much of his life, and that it explains how his work developed, especially towards the end of his career as a note of despair and isolation creeps in.
- Really Gets Around: The title character in G.. Justified as he's based on the legend of Don Juan: his initial is short for "Giovanni".
- Secret Diary: A Painter of our Time presents itself as the narrator finding the diary of the protagonist, Janos Lavin, a Hungarian exile living in London who's gone missing around the time of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The book consists of the diary itself and the narrator's commentary on it.
- '70s Hair: Berger sports this in Ways of Seeing.
- Sliding Scale of Animal Cast: King: A Street Story is Type 8, the title character being a dog.
- Tragic AIDS Story: Downplayed with To the Wedding, in which the female protagonist, Ninon, has AIDS and for this reason runs away from intimate relationships because whenever anyone finds it out about her, they're repelled. Eventually the guy who loves her, Gino, persuades her that he doesn't care that she has AIDS, and they get married. Also, she doesn't die within the book, although it's implied that she will certainly die relatively young.
- TV Documentary: Ways of Seeing.
