John Berger was a British art critic, novelist, essayist, screenwriter and Marxist cultural thinker whose work reshaped how generations understood the relationship between art, power and society. For more than sixty years, he was one of the most prominent left-wing voices in English-language art criticism, insisting that art is the creation of actual people in given social contexts and not a timeless, universal abstraction. Berger died on January 2, 2017, at the age of 90; as we mark his birth centenary, born in London on November 5, 1926, his legacy remains unusually vital.
Berger authored dozens of books showcasing art criticism and commentary. Notable among these are "The Success and Failure of Picasso" (1965), "Art and Revolution" (1969), "Ways of Seeing" (1972), "About Looking" (1980) and "The Shape of a Pocket" (2001). He also devoted works to Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Honoré Daumier and portraiture. In his essays,
Berger examined scores of artists and artistic problems. His final collection, "Landscapes", was published in 2016. He was also a social essayist, novelist and screenwriter, publishing "A Painter of Our Time" (1958), "G." (1972)—which won the Man Booker Prize, half of which he donated to the Black Panther Party—and the "Into Their Labours" trilogy (1979–1990). He wrote several screenplays with and for Swiss director Alain Tanner, including "Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000" (1976).
Berger was born to lower-middle-class Jewish parents and raised in moderate comfort. At eleven, he secured a scholarship to St Edward's, a prestigious boarding school in north Oxford, an institution whose claustrophobic atmosphere he deeply resented. He repeatedly argued with classmates and teachers, adopting radical stances to invite their wrath. At sixteen, he returned to London to study art, first at the Central School of Art and Design and then at Chelsea College of Arts.
After college, Berger spent a year struggling as a professional artist before making his mark at the BBC World Service, providing descriptions of great artworks for listeners at the peripheries of the crumbling British Empire. This work captured the attention of T. C. Worsley, literary editor of the New Statesman, ushering in a decade where Berger worked as a controversial but highly respected art critic. His writing from this period was concise and viable, employing an explicitly Marxist lens tempered by European thinkers like Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin.
What fascinated Berger most was how economic forces define the meaning of art produced in any given society. He was immediately skeptical of the Abstract Expressionists and issued a particularly scathing evaluation of Jackson Pollock, claiming the American painter remained unable to "see or think beyond the decadence of the culture to which he belongs." This was one of the moments in Berger's criticism where his resistance to postwar abstraction departed from his self-professed radicalism, characterizing his constant toeing of the line between progressive idealism and respect for tradition.
In 1954, he began writing art criticism for the New Statesman, where he was harassed by anticommunists. Some of these essays were collected in "Permanent Red" (1960). In "The Ideal Critic and the Fighting Critic," he unleashed a tirade against sentimentalism, declaring, "The worst of Victorian painting sentimentalised spiritual yearning; the worst of Soviet painting sentimentalises the achievements of labour; we, at our worst, sentimentalise cheesecake." He identified that the specific meaning of a work of art evolves as years pass, depending on who is looking at it when—breeding the groundwork for a historical relativism that defined his life's work.
The year 1972 saw the debut of his four-part documentary, "Ways of Seeing", on BBC television, which won him the adulation of a broader audience. This landmark series and book dismantled the traditional mythology of Western art. In part a response to Sir Kenneth Clark's BBC series "Civilization", which defined truth and beauty as the basis of great art, Berger argued that the wealth accumulated by the capitalist class played the pivotal role in the 500-year history of oil painting. He exposed how oil painting, commercial advertising and class ownership collude to shape public consciousness, famously dissecting how power, property and the male gaze operate through visual media.
For Berger, a work of art is not a means of knowing the world objectively, but merely manifests the prevalent ideology at the time the painter lived and worked. Once detached from those circumstances, it turns into an object of wealth held by affluent individuals or museums.
Berger's Marxism was never detached or academic, though it was complex. In "Art and Revolution" (1969), he clinically explored unresolved problems in his political outlook through a balanced appraisal of Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny. The work was dedicated to Isaac Deutscher, and Berger subscribed to the latter's view that Stalinism was "barbarous" but historically "progressive." While Berger expressed sympathy for Trotsky's positions, he discarded Trotsky's views on art and literature, treating them as irrelevant. He veered toward circles oriented to Soviet or Chinese Stalinism and never fully ruptured from them, representing a generation of disillusioned European leftists.
However, his compassion for the oppressed remained fierce. One of the most frequently undermined aspects of his thought was his commitment to Palestinian liberation. "I'm not ashamed of being a Jew," he wrote in 1967, "but I'm profoundly ashamed of Israel." In 2003, he made his first journey to Palestine, recalling it in the essay "A Moment in Ramallah", where he described photographs memorializing those killed in the second intifada with the same care usually given to portraits by Picasso or Rembrandt.
He deftly shifted from art criticism to a discussion of asymmetries of power, contrasting Apache helicopters and F-16s with catapults and slingshots.
In the late 1980s, Berger moved to the French Alps to live among peasant communities, writing a trilogy chronicling their historical migration and struggle. Later works, such as "Hold Everything Dear", reflected on global anti-imperialist resistance. His fiction tended to focus on intimate situations set against historical events or social processes: a peasant migrating to a factory, an exiled left-wing Hungarian artist during the 1956 uprising, or a Don Juan on the eve of the First World War.
It is often forgotten that Berger was an accomplished poet, and the essays in "Landscapes" are characterized by an unwavering commitment to experimentation and genre-bending. His impact on contemporary writers and critics is massive; Rebecca Solnit, Geoff Dyer, Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson and Teju Cole all owe him a profound debt. Berger was frequently a debunker of conventional wisdom and a genuine opponent of conformism. When asked before the millennium to choose a painting describing the present moment, he chose Hieronymus Bosch's depictions of hell, noting they provided a "strange prophecy" of a world of globalization where there is "only the clamor of the disparate, fragmentary present." It is a testament to his enduring legacy that his work remains so vital in our increasingly disparate world.
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*Freelance journalist
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