John Berger (b. 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, often used as a college text.

Born in England, 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. While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman. His left-wing, undogmatic humanist Marxism 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. His next novels 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. He moved to a small village in the French Alps, where he has ever since lived and farmed (apart from brief stints of travel). Many of his texts, from sociological studies to fiction and poetry, deal with rural peasants' experience.

In 1971 Berger hosted Ways of Seeing for the BBC and wrote its companion text, an introduction to the study of images.

His novel G., a romantic picaresque set in the Europe of 1898, won the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the prize Berger made a point of donating half his cash award 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.

Berger's sociological writings include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe. In these works, he and photographer Jean Mohr , his frequent collaborator, seek to document and to understand intimately the lived experiences of their 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, 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 Salamandre , Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 , and Messidor.

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, 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 Selected Essays contains selections from many of these; otherwise, their contents are distinct.

Berger has two children, Yves (his son by his second and current wife, Beverly) and Katya (daughter of a previous relationship). His first marriage was childless.

References

• Dyer, Geoff. Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger. ISBN 0745300979.

External links

• A partial bibliography of secondary works on Berger
• An interview with Berger from the San Francisco Chronicle
• Profile and interview from the London Telegraph
• Berger article from online Literary Encyclopedia