John Berger was born on 5 November 1926, making this year his centenary. Next year will be the tenth anniversary of his death. It seems a good time to look back and take stock of one of the 20th century’s most persuasive and challenging voices in art and literature, and one of only two writers on art who also wrote a Booker Prize-winning novel (the other was Anita Brookner).
The story of Berger’s 1972 Booker Prize speech, after winning for his novel G., is told by Tom Overton in his thoroughly engaging biography, John Berger: From Life, published in August this year. To a stunned and affronted audience at the prize ceremony, Berger announced he was donating half the considerable prize money to a British chapter of the Black Panthers, as a protest against the labour exploitation in British Guiana that had made the Booker McConnell fortune. It is hard to imagine an acceptance speech nowadays without acknowledgment of the reputation-laundering that is still widespread in cultural sponsorship. Berger’s bravery in making such a stand, which can hardly have been easy, is one aspect of his legacy worth remembering.
This legacy—why Berger matters—is the subject of the smattering of centenary events but is also brought into focus by their dearth. The only anniversary exhibition in Britain devoted to Berger is a small display of his drawings at Mandell’s Gallery in Norwich (until 21 November), co-curated by the artists John Christie and Martin Battye. Berger’s drawings are those of a writer intent on seeing the world around him, gathering images and experiences, but also of an artist who knows that the best way to look is to draw.
Berger’s popular legacy lies with his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, which remains, quite remarkably, a bestseller—“one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language”, says its publisher, Penguin. Anyone rereading the book now might pause at such a description. Berger was hardly the first to show how images are constructed by viewers, and reflect their prejudices, but he was the first to publish a book that communicated this idea so effectively, combining relentless polemic with brilliant design (thanks to Richard Hollis). It also helped that the book was based on a successful television series and contained numerous pin-up images to back up the argument that Old Master painting, through patterns of privilege and possession, relates directly to contemporary advertising.
Yet the arguments feel dated and even slack, quite unlike Berger’s later writing on art. His attacks on Seymour Slive’s interpretation of Frans Hals, and on Kenneth Clark’s book The Nude, are grounded in a personal dislike of art historians. What Gen Z art students will make of his attack on the “disingenuousness that bedevils the subject of art history”, picking apart Lawrence Gowing’s nitty argument that the figures in Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (around 1750) are not just enjoying nature but being philosophical about it, is anybody’s guess.
Art against the profit motive
And yet the questions Berger asks about how we value works of art, and how they exist as part of our lives and the world in which we live, are still utterly relevant. They are part of what Overton describes as the idea central to all his writing: how we live with the dead, how the past surrounds us and keeps us company. Berger spent his life tilting against a world “ordered with the logic of profit, always looking forward, never back”, Overton writes, a world therefore bent on neglecting the past and forgetting the dead.
It is an idea explored in Berger’s short story The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, from the novel Pig Earth, about peasant life in France at the turn of the 20th century. And it appears in the leaps of imagination and connections he draws between art from different periods in the writings collected in Portraits: John Berger on Artists: on Fayum portraits seen from a century of exile and emigration, or his description of drawing Antonello da Messina’s astonishing 1475 Christ Crucified in the National Gallery, while recalling hearing pianist Myra Hess playing in the same gallery in 1942 (before being thrown out for swearing at a security guard), or his account of Jean-François Millet, “a moralist in the only way a great artist can be, by the power of his identification with his subjects”, in his case the experience of peasants working the land.
Berger’s legacy is his remarkable ability to link art with the most important questions of our time, and so to redeem it from the clutches of the market and specialists alike.
• John-Paul Stonard is an author and art historian