A Writer of Our Time : The Life and Work of John Berger

People talk about being “right brained” or “left brained” as if you can’t be both. Such categories, of course, are not only cognitive but cultural, the constitutive divisions of Western philosophy—mind and body, vision and language, feeling and reason, image and word—having long since migrated into our everyday professional lives. We take it for granted, for instance, that the visual arts will be taught in one building while the humanities (what used to be called belles lettres) are taught in another. Or that the editorial department of a publisher will be housed in one office and the design department somewhere else. People who are good at accounting are not supposed to make good poets. Nor are philosophers meant to tell stories about real people. Among fiction writers, especially, there seems to be an unshakeable tendency to pit the abstract against the tangible, so as to do away with the first. The division between “critical” and “creative” is now so entrenched at an institutional level—each professor assigned a tag, each class allotted a domain—that it can seem to students as if such categories were pre-existing in nature.

In his own time John Berger was certainly one of them. Throughout his boyhood he experienced what he would later call a “divided loyalty”: a powerful inner tension between the world of appearances and the world of concepts. His first journals were full of sketches and poems, side by side, in equal numbers. In his twenties he made his money putting words to paper, but had been trained to put paint to canvas, and he never gave up drawing. “As the difficulties of thinking and writing became my primary conscious concern,” he said, “my primary reality became the visual one.”

Reviewing painting both harnessed and exacerbated this division. The literary critic can sidle up to her object of study: the two share the same medium. The art critic, by contrast, is always to a certain extent operating synaesthetically, using language to evoke and evaluate what is fundamentally non-linguistic. When Berger gave up art criticism his early fiction stalled precisely because he seemed unable to corral his unusual double talent into the traditional forms of literature. It was as if he was standing on one leg rather than walking with the two he had.

Then, in the early 1960s, he began to work in television. The experience proved definitive. Television not only helped him pay his bills and expand his influence; it immersed him in technical methods whose intrinsic means of composition reconciled the very schism he had struggled with. By writing scripts with a special awareness of how his voice-over would be paired with the image-track, his skill with words could be put in dialogue with a new visual dimension. Image and language formed a fresh circuit on the screen: early television was often called “radio with pictures.”

Television suited Berger in another way. As a presenter he had presence. Arriving in leather and zips at Lime Grove Studios in West London, he was handsome and magnetic and could speak in a direct way to a coveted new audience: the so-called “average man.” When the BBC’s monopoly was broken up, and Granada Television formed, he hosted two shows for the network, Drawn from Life and Tomorrow Couldn’t Be Worse, in which he talked to ordinary people about art. Later in the 1960s, he worked closely with Michael Gill (the director, subsequently, of Civilisation) to make special episodes for Huw Wheldon’s influential arts magazine, Monitor: one on Léger and another on the postman-architect Ferdinand Cheval, both filmed in the south of France. In other episodes Berger would be asked to share his thoughts on painters of the Western canon, from Bellini to Picasso.

At the New Statesman Kingsley Martin had been his mentor; at the BBC he had Wheldon. An imposing Welshman and the “philosopher king” of British arts programming (he was later knighted), Wheldon encouraged an impressive roster of young intellectuals to embrace the medium. “I fantasized this notion,” he later said, “that if Freud and Marx and Darwin lived in the 1950s and 1960s, instead of the 1850s and 1860s, we would have had an occasional television series from them as well as books.”

Wheldon’s entire philosophy, though, derived from the axiom that television, when successful, was wholly different from a book, that it should instead represent (his motto and mantra) “an individual and indivisible marriage of word and picture.” The workflow he supervised—scriptwriting, drafting shot lists; then filming, selecting, cutting, assembling, reassembling, and dubbing—was laborious, but allowed for new experiments to flourish. The open arrangement proved especially favorable for art critics. What had been a near-timeless practice for art historians—to lecture in front of a slide or painting, drawing a group’s attention to this detail or that—took on new technical life. “I have often been puzzled as to why the painting, even in monochrome, seems so vivid on television,” Wheldon said at one of his lunchtime lectures. “Perhaps the actual act of scanning, invisible to the naked eye, is in some way energizing the otherwise so still, still picture. It is uncompromisingly not the picture. It is undeniably a reproduction, but a reproduction like no other.” If the program was successful the result was a preternatural unity. “It is as if the words are in the picture; and the picture itself speaks through the words of a man who cares for nothing during that time but what is, and only what is, relevant to that picture.”

Through his work for television Berger became creatively conscious for the first time of a more general possibility—what he called the “speaking image.” He realized the idea of his divided loyalty was false—and, what’s more, that it was precisely by moving between forms, whether materially or imaginatively, within the same work or from work to work, that his disparate talents could most fruitfully find expression. (Tellingly, Berger’s best-known polemic, Ways of Seeing, is both a TV broadcast and a book, the second adapted from the first.) The expanded media environment of the postwar years was thus doubly formative: it raised the subject not only of cultural democratization, but also of media translation and difference. By making television programs about painted or sculpted artworks, critics such as Berger faced the question on an everyday working basis. It was a question, in turn, they often made central to their programming.

Berger’s first television appearance, for example, occurred alongside Kenneth Clark as part of Clark’s ATV Midland series Is Art Necessary? The episode was predicated on a question: Could painting still fulfill a popular purpose in the age of mass communication and modern art? During the live broadcast (which remains essential viewing for those interested in the Berger–Clark relationship), the pair discuss a trio of images: Picasso’s Guernica, a beach scene by Guttuso, and a printed advertisement for Guinness.

“Several forms do nonetheless remain hard to explain to the average man,” Clark says of Guernica. ‘I mean, this can have an impact on an ordinary person but it cannot be popular, it can really only be understood by people who’ve trodden the long hard road of modern art, don’t you think?’

“Yes, yes, yes, possibly,” says Berger. They move to the Guttuso painting. The broadcast cuts between the two men and close-ups of the painting as they look at it. What they say becomes an inquisitive frame around what we see.

“Guttoso is a Communist,” Clark remarks. “What difference does that make? Why do those painters who are endeavoring to bring back storytelling in art belong either to the communists or to the left? Is that because they seek to make people think a certain thing?”

“Yes,” Berger replies, “as soon as you have this purpose which is shared by both the likely public and the artist you’ll begin to get communication. In the West, of course, the only art used for a purpose is commercial advertising.”

Programs like these were self-reflexive, combining filmic representations of the art in question with conversations about what it meant to film art, and what art could do or not do in the age of film. Technically, they moved on two levels: image and sound. The production team would be tasked with visually conveying a painting, usually through an establishing shot of the whole work followed by close ups strung together through either panning or cutting. Meanwhile a second aural layer added sound and language to the artwork’s silence. As Berger later noted in Ways of Seeing (the book, not the program): “When a painting is reproduced by a film camera it inevitably becomes material for the filmmaker’s argument . . . The painting lends authority to the filmmaker. This is because the film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession, constructs an argument which becomes irreversible.”

From A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger. By Joshua Sperling.  Verso Books, 2018. 

Why Look at Art when you could Watch TV? LitHub , November 26, 2018.

Verso Books

As early as the mid-1950s, the art critic John Berger complained about the ways in which art was shown, taught, and written about. The art world — a term he deplored — was too insular, and the art historians and critics did very little to mitigate this. Perhaps most crucially, they failed to share art’s profound connections to human experience. It was no wonder that people expressed little interest in artworks, Berger said in a 1956 article for the New Statesman, because they’ve been led to believe “that such works as do exist have nothing to say to them.” Today, Berger’s demands appear more urgent and his criticisms only truer.

A new biography on Berger — the first published since his death in January of 2017 — reveals a writer who to this day speaks most eloquently and passionately to our frustrations, fears, hopes, and desires. The book, authored by Joshua Sperling and published by Verso, is titled A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger. At Sperling’s Los Angeles book launch, where I led a conversation with him, he explained that the title is a riff on Berger’s first novel, A Painter of Our Time. But the label of “a writer of our time” is also earned.

Early on, we are introduced to Berger as a fierce art critic and adamant Marxist in his 20s, raising controversy with his attacks on London’s old-school “museum critics.” Berger did not identify with the fashionable abstract art of the day — it was alienating and apolitical (in fact, for the rest of his life, he showed limited interest for abstract art). Instead, he advocated for a return to social realism: paintings depicting tangible, everyday life. And his call was heard, as he went on to foster a generation of British artists who would eventually be known as the “Kitchen Sink” painters, even organizing an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Moving into his 30s and the 1960s, Berger let go of his grip on social realism and opened his horizons to modernist art. Disappointed with the work of contemporary artists, including those he had cultivated, he turned his attention to artists like Manet, Picasso, and van Gogh. “No longer championing the coming art of the future,” Sperling writes, “he now championed what was lost but revolutionary in the art of the past.” And it seems, with few exceptions, that Berger’s eye stayed on the past for the remainder of his art writing career.

Today it might seem strange for an art critic to focus most of their energies on dead artists. But Berger found clarity in the past. As he once articulated in a 1973 essay on the 16th-century Grünewald altarpiece, engaging with artworks from even centuries ago helps to illuminate our present condition simply by paying attention to our reactions and how we look. “I was anxious to place it historically,” he writes of his initial encounter with the altarpiece. “Now I have been forced to place myself historically.” While Berger was no longer wedded to a social realist aesthetic, he carried with him a belief from his early criticism: that meaningful art will always connect with some aspect of human experience.

But Berger also accomplished something more: he restored a sense of connection to the past in a capitalist culture that was anxiously moving forward. “In an age otherwise characterized by belatedness and alienated repetition, his whole project was to return art to its origins, to rediscover the aura of shared moments and places, and to reinvest experience with a sacred meaning that the instant culture of capitalism had removed from it,” Sperling sensitively observes of Berger’s famous 1972 television program Ways of Seeing, in which he spoke about canonical works of art in a personable way. “It was a personal, artistic and intellectual programme of reenchantment.”

Berger continues to enchant me (and not just because he was very handsome). If you, like me, have taken an art history class, you might remember the ways in which paintings are coldly dissected into diagonals and paths of light. Or how they are relegated to movements and memorized into compartments. Berger, on the other hand, brings the past into the present. He places trust in what we see on our own terms, rather than spoon-feeding us art historical terms.

Throughout the biography, Sperling illuminates how Berger’s own life and social circumstances interweaved into and informed his writing. For me, A Writer of Our Time put much of what I love about Berger into context. And this is especially true in the last couple of chapters, which make up the most beautiful section of the book.

Moving into his 40s and the 1970s, Berger became, in Sperling’s words, “softer.” He became invested in ideas of love and hope, and how art could bring us unity and wholeness in fragmented times. This shift also coincides with Berger’s move to rural France, where he would settle for the remainder of his life. He had never identified with the British — in fact, he had many qualms with them — and it wasn’t until the age of 48, in the village of Quincy, that he felt like he belonged. “I feel at home here in a way I have felt nowhere else,” he said in 1981.

Suddenly it becomes clear that Sperling has been building to this point: the significance of place in Berger’s life and work. On the one hand, he finally felt grounded in a community — he had gained “not only a home but an anchor,” as Sperling puts it. In a fast-paced world, “he was after something durable” and found it. On the other hand, Berger became increasingly interested in how place informed a painter’s vision and how their environs showed up on the canvas, like how the frothy sinks of J.M.W. Turner’s father’s barbershop manifested in his paintings of waves. “Painting, for Berger, was rooted in the experience of sight, and sight was rooted in the local and particular,” Sperling writes. “Visibility takes place somewhere.” (Whereas abstraction was “placeless.”)

Perhaps Berger turned softer because he had finally found resolution: he was no longer searching for a sense of place. But up until that point, paintings — his greatest love — had been the most hospitable, offering him that durability he was after. In the 1990 essay “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” — an essay that I find myself returning to again and again — he describes the 20th century as “the century of disappearances,” marked by mass emigration, both forced and voluntary. This, he says, explains why film, the most ephemeral of art forms, is the art form of that century. Against this backdrop, paintings provide us with a sense of permanence and place, because they are “static and changeless.”

For some, Berger’s fixation on painting might seem old-fashioned. Others might rightly note that in some ways he was not a writer of our time, particularly in his narrow focus on Western art. But what continues to resonate, at least for me, is Berger’s broader vision for our relationship to art: that it can be deeply revealing of our history, where we came from, and where we strive to belong. In an age of flashy, obscenely expensive art, it is easy to forget this. In that sense, Berger’s writing still serves as a compass to realizing that amidst our scattered, continually shifting lives we can find momentary shelter in art.

How John Berger Restores Our Relationship to Art. By Elisa Wouk Almino. Hyperallergic , January 30, 2019. 

The Doyens of the 1950s art world, gallerists, critics, and artists alike, often flush with the CIA’s anticommunist cash, kept politics at bay by emphasizing the autonomy and neutrality of art. John Berger disagreed. As an art critic for The New Statesman who refused to keep politics out of art, he found himself at the center of controversy after controversy.

Joshua Sperling’s A Writer of Our Time, the first biography of John Berger to appear since his death, begins in the midst of this exciting period. Still in his 20s, Berger was metamorphosing from student at the Chelsea School of Art into a prominent art critic. Sperling’s biography focuses on Berger’s work, keeping his personal life an embroidery at the edge of the narrative.

“The name of his cause,” writes Sperling, “was realism; opposing it was modernism.” Realism was the official aesthetic of the Communist Party in several countries, but though he was sympathetic to the Party, Berger championed realism for his own aesthetic reasons. When he was an art student, Sperling tells us, Berger was influenced by the Euston Road School, “a short-lived prewar academy that had favoured tradition, naturalism and the ‘poetry in the everyday’.” His own art followed that pattern, with a special focus on paintings of people engaged in ordinary work. Then, as an art critic, he promoted a set of young British realists who exhibited similar tendencies. They came to be called the Kitchen Sink painters.

In Berger’s opinion, art communicated to a viewer what seeing had disclosed to an artist. Seeing was the ever-fruitful source of art, and severing art from that source was a dead end. Berger clung to this axiom for his entire life, and it led him in a surprising variety of directions. In his 20s, it meant he preferred artists who portrayed what they saw in the street to artists who indulged in abstraction.

This aesthetic standard also appealed to postwar Britain. Berger was popular beyond the left. He was even invited to curate a show at the Whitechapel Gallery. It was a chance to demonstrate what he had argued in his articles. It proved “one of the most influential [exhibits] of the decade,” writes Sperling: “Many programmers and gallerists were […] won over. For a few years, thickly rendered paintings, full of impasto and brownish-grey in palette, came into vogue: pictures of northern industry, men at work, football, street and domestic scenes.”

But eventually, Berger’s Kitchen Sink painters began to disappoint him, both politically and aesthetically. The movement produced no one of particular note, and its members were not as committed to the left as he had hoped.

In the late 1950s, it became difficult to be a communist-adjacent polemicist. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” had revealed Stalin’s crimes, and then Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, bringing a new era of doubt and ambiguity to the global left. Berger left his berth at The New Statesman to explore those doubts and ambiguities in fiction.

He also left England. From the 1960s onward, his life became more European and his work exploded with variety. He wrote novels. First, A Painter of Our Time, in which an artist grapples with his relationship to leftist politics, and eventually the Booker-winning G., an experimental narrative in which a Don Juan–like protagonist comes to political consciousness through his sexual escapades across Europe. He also collaborated with the photographer Jean Mohr to create three documentary photo-essays about, respectively, “rural medicine, migrant labour and mountain peasants.” He collaborated on screenplays with the filmmaker Alain Tanner. He wrote profiles of European leftist intellectuals. Eventually, he returned to writing about art.

Berger’s new interest, however, was art history. Once an avowed anti-modernist, he shocked his readers by announcing that Cubism was the most important and genuinely revolutionary recent development in art. Not because the Cubists themselves were politically radical, but because their aesthetic revolution was the appropriate correlate to political revolution. Cubism, he wrote, was “the only example of dialectical materialism in painting.” This revisionist announcement met with an explosion of disagreement from the left. Some people assumed his position meant he had become an anticommunist. Sperling explains why his view was so shocking:

  “The traditional narrative of nineteenth-century modernism follows the rise of the avant-garde away from mimesis towards an aesthetic of subjectivity, abstraction and pure sensation. Both liberals and Marxists shared this view; what they disagreed over was whether it was good or bad.”

The Marxists thought it was bad, and now Berger was telling them it was good. His about-face stems from his deeper, unchanged commitment to seeing:

“The point of departure for Berger was the work of [Juan] Gris who, he says, was ‘as near to a scientist as any modern painter’. Disciple rather than innovator, the Spanish artist worked from a formula derived from the discoveries of [Pablo] Picasso and [Georges] Braque, and so became, in Berger’s words, ‘the purest and most apt of all the Cubists’. From his canvases more general principles can be gleaned. ‘The real subject of a cubist painting is not a bottle or a violin’, Berger hypothesized, ‘the real subject is the functioning of sight itself.’ The transposition had profound philosophical implications. The static empiricism of fixed appearances had given way to a new union: the Cartesian categories of mind (self-consciousness) and matter (extension in space) were brought together by the painters in their work. As in phenomenology, sensory experience was both in and of the world. As in post-classical physics, measurement and nature were now entangled in a kind of quantum dance. Looking at cubist painting was, for Berger, like looking at a star. ‘The star exists objectively, as does the subject of the painting. But its shape is the result of our looking at it.”

Seeing, more than anything, was the substance of Berger’s career. It extends backward to his first creative aspirations as an artist. He never gave up sketching, often including his drawings in later books. Seeing also formed the method for his essays, where he often describes an act of seeing and the thoughts that arose from it.

While Berger’s range as a writer was broadening and his thinking as a critic deepening, he also transformed his life. It is here that I wish Sperling had been more detailed, and explored the influences on and specifics of Berger’s personal life, but he does give us a glimpse:

 “At the start of the [1960s], it had been as if Berger was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, testing the balance of a new, more Mediterranean bearing — further from the chattering classes but closer to the land and to history — before making the final jump. As the sixties swung towards its apogee he made the jump: he committed to it. He passed weeks in a stone hovel in the shade of the Luberon mountains, among fig trees, fruit orchards, chickens, dogs, cicadas and owls, working the land in the morning and reading philosophy in the afternoon. It was a new life of continental thought and feeling — the feeling of thought — he had found (and curated) for himself, a life of lavender and onions, terra cotta and shared meals. He took philosophical modernism outdoors, letting it bronze his skin. In the process, he tried to live out what [Martin] Heidegger had called for but may never have personally achieved: the return of philosophy to life. The revolution had to be lived all the way down.”

It’s odd that Sperling cites the Nazi philosopher Heidegger here when the thinker whose vision of life is called up and even echoed in Sperling’s sentences is Karl Marx. Marx described the communist vision of the good life this way: “[I]t [becomes] possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind.” Berger seems to have sought out a way of life that prefigured this utopia. Later, he would fully commit to it, settling down in the rural village of Quincy, outside Geneva.

As he got older, Berger’s stories grew shorter and his essays more observant — humbler. His texts became filled with descriptions of nature and animals, preoccupied with time and love. His comments late in life about the war on terror, about poverty, colonialism, nationalism, environmental degradation, and bigotry, attained a new gravity.

There is one major exception to the trend of Berger’s work after he left England: the famous art historical TV documentary Ways of Seeing. Produced in 1972, it was a throwback to the combative John Berger of The New Statesman’s art pages. It is a blunt takedown of Western art as a cultural expression of classism, racism, and misogyny, and of academic art criticism as a conspiracy of obfuscation. Ways of Seeing became a staple of the classroom, and has, indeed, come to define our predominant ways of seeing. Ideology critique of the kind it models has become one of the major forms of critical discourse about art. Berger’s TV show did more in a few episodes to destroy the cultural assumption that art is autonomous than his decade writing for The New Statesman. One could be forgiven for assuming, on the basis of Ways of Seeing, that Berger believed the art of the past needed only to be unmasked and debunked.

But in fact, since Berger’s reappraisal of Cubism, he had begun a quest, as Sperling puts it, to find “what was lost but revolutionary in the art of the past.” It’s too bad that the thousands exposed to the still-ubiquitous Ways of Seeing likely won’t also encounter Berger’s decades of writing in search of this lost ordnance. (A good place to start would be the recent collection of his essays on painters, Portraits, which has been arranged by Tom Overton into a kind of history.) Berger believed that art was not just an expression of and apology for oppression — though it certainly can be, and often is — but a smuggler through time of visions of human dignity and hopes of liberation.

Across the 90 years of John Berger’s life, he was by turns, and sometimes at the same time, an art critic and novelist, documentarian and screenwriter, farm laborer and historian, poet and polemicist. He invited controversy and also modeled the writer in seclusion. He wrote about struggles for liberation around the globe and also spent the last 40 years of his life in an obscure village. In the 1950s he scandalized his colleagues by dragging politics into aesthetics, attacking modernism; and in the 1960s he scandalized his comrades by dragging aesthetics into politics, defending modernism. He wrote one of the most avant-garde novels ever to win a Booker Prize, and then he devoted the better part of his career to the anecdote, sketch, and folk tale. He made a documentary about art history which defined art criticism as the unmasking of ideologies concealed in visual culture, and he wrote dozens of essays about how great works of art transcend their context. Does this mass of apparent contradictions add up to anything? The trick for any would-be biographer of John Berger is to find the unity in variety.

Joshua Sperling is up to the task. At the beginning of A Writer of Our Time, he sums up the unity of Berger’s career like this: “He is the only postwar writer I know of to have so powerfully and obstinately refused to separate a loyalty to both the general and the particular, to what was happening politically and morally in the world and what was happening physically just outside his window.”

The Window and the World: On Joshua Sperling’s “A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger” By Robert Minto. Los Angeles Review of Books , December 12, 2018.

John Berger was one of the most various of writers and men: art critic, essayist, novelist, poet and much-missed friend of the shop. In A Writer of Our Time (Verso), Berger’s first full biographical study, Joshua Sperling traces Berger’s development from his roots as a postwar arts student and cultural journalist amid the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic, to the long hangover after the New Left and Berger’s reinvention as a rural storyteller.

Joshua Sperling was in conversation with Leo Hollis, editor at Verso, whose most recent book is Cities are Good for You.  London Review Bookshop , November 22, 2018.