1
3. John Berger
Prof. Kenneth G. Hay
University of Leeds UK
2
John Berger (1926-2017)
n  b. London 19026, Studied at Central and
Chelsea School of Art and began life as a
painter.
n  Then began writing art criticism for
Tribune and The New Statesman, The
Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily
Worker, Labour Monthly and Marxism
Today.
n  His fiction includes ‘Permanent
Red” (1960), “A Painter of our
Times” (1958), The Foot of Clive” (1962),
“Corker’s Freedom” (1964); and “Art and
Revolution” (1969).
n  His Novel “G” won the prestigious Booker
Prize, and with half the prize money (he
shared it with the Black Panther
organisation) he moved to Quincy (rural
France in Haute-Savoie), where he lived
for 50 years, and worked on several
photo-essay books with photographer
Jean Mohr, documenting the lives of his
rural neighbours.”A Fortunate
Man” (1967), and “A Seventh
Man” (1975)
3
“Ways of Seeing” (1972)
n  He is perhaps best known
for his four-part television
series, ‘Ways of Seeing’,
first broadcast in 1972,
n  Berger takes up Walter
Benjamin’s ideas of
interpreting objects to reveal
their social/material
relationships, in the age of
mechanical reproduction.
n  Explores the sociology of
looking, through painting,
gender, social life - revealing
the power imbalances in art
and everyday life.
4
“A Painter of our Time” (1958)
n  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, (loosely modeled on the UK
artist Peter De Francia), and his diary's
discovery by an art critic friend called John.
n  The key theme of the book is to ask, “What is
the artist’s place in Western society? What
relation can there be between art and politics,
particularly revolutionary politics?” And what is
an artist’s primary duty at times of revolutionary
crisis - to his politics or to his art?
n  The work was withdrawn by the publisher under
pressure from the Congress for Cultural
Freedom (a CIA-funded anti-communist
organisation, based in Paris during The Cold
War), a month after its publication.
n  His next novels were “The Foot of Clive” and
“Corker's Freedom”; both of which presented an
urban English life of alienation and melancholy.
n  Berger moved to Quincy in the Haute-Savoie,
France in 1962 due to his distaste for life in
Britain. He lived there for over 50 years until his
death in 2017.
5
“Success and Failure of Picasso” (1965)
n  Sets out to explore the reality of Picasso’s achievement
behind the media hype and outrage generated by
stylistic ‘distortions’ and art world inflated prices.
n  Investigates every period of Picasso’s life and work,
from the early ‘Blue period’, through Cubism and the
compositions that culminated in “Guernica” (1937), up to
the 1960s.
n  In doing so, Berger highlights the role of the artist in the
20th-century and his/her relationship to Western
capitalist social organisation.
n  Berger is as clear in his praise for Picasso when his work
was experimental, questioning, outgoing, or politically
engaged, as he is critical of the artist when the work
becomes introspective, repetitive and less socially
engaged.
n  When Picasso moved away from social engagement,
(after the Blue Period in 1917 and apart from “Guernica”
in 1937), for Berger, he loses the moral energy to drive
his work beyond aesthetic introspection.
n  He sees Picasso as ‘trapped’ by his own ‘Midas touch’
- anything that he did could be sold for such vast sums,
that it was virtually impossible to remain critical about
what he did, or even to know how to choose what to
paint.
n  If everything one does is deemed valuable - how is one
to make choices?
6
Ways of Seeing (1972)
n  Broadcast by the BBC in 1972 as a four-part
television series
n  An introduction to the study of images. The work
was derived in part from Walter Benjamin's essay.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction".
n  The opening section deals with the relation of words
to images; how we prioritise the verbal over the
visual, when in fact the visual precedes speech.
Berger explores painting’s relation to place, to the
discourse which grows up around it and attempts to
‘explain’ it, and the modern impact of photography
and reproducibility on formerly unique images.
n  Sections 2 and 3 deal with the gendered gaze, the
power of men and the objectification of women,
explored through depictions of female bodies in
Western art. In these depictions, from the
Renaissance to Rubens, Rembrandt, and Manet,
generally speaking, it is the men who act/gaze and
the women who are observed.
n  Sections 4 and 5 deal with the social and historical
context of artworks as revealed in the approaches the
artist takes to what they depict - property, poverty,
class relations etc.
7
“Ways of Seeing” (1972)
Thomas Gainsborough, “Mr and Mrs Andrews” (c.1750),
London, National Portrait Gallery
n  The first pure landscapes, painted in Holland in the
17th-century, answered no direct social need. They
were done for pleasure or decoration, as a relatively
independent activity, which in turn encouraged an
experimental pictorial attitude.
n  By the 1750s, following the expansion of trade,
wealthy landowners in England were able to amass
huge fortunes and build stately homes, full of
paintings and antiques acquired on the ‘Grand Tour’.
n  They were able, like Mr and Mrs Andrews, able to
commission Thomas Gainsborough, one of the most
fashionable (and expensive) artists from the Royal
Academy, to depict themselves, as proud landowners,
seated in front of their considerable estate.
n  Sir Lawrence Gowing and John Berger had a rather
heated debate about this painting; Gowing defending
the subject as concerning merely the innocent and
purely philosophical contemplation of Nature; Berger
saying it was disingenuous to ignore the aspect of
Capital and class celebrated in the painting, and that
‘Nature’ was also a social construct.
8
“Ways of Seeing” (1972)
n  The last sections, 6 and 7, deal with the relation of
advertising to art.
n  The modern flood of images used for publicity means
that we are surrounded by more images and their
related slogans/texts than ever before.
n  These images and texts bombard us with, often false,
needs and drastically alter the context by which we
understand other images such as paintings.
n  Although advertisements compete with each other for
our attention, their basic message is the same: that by
consuming/buying a new product, we will transform
ourselves into a better or more enviable state, and the
only requirement is money.
n  Envy is of course a solitary and alienated kind of
emotion - it depends precisely upon you not sharing
your experiences with those who envy you
n  The illusion of consumption is based on the false
premise that all the money in the world is equitably
divided so that everyone has exactly the same
purchasing power..
n  We are ‘free’ to consume provide we have free and
equal access to capital.
n  Advertising transforms our everyday lives into one of
perceived ‘lack’ - because we lack the means to
endlessly consume, we are rendered melancholy.
Only consumption, paradoxically, can ‘cure’ our
melancholy
9
“Ways of Seeing” (1972)
n  Advertising often uses works of art as the basis of its
new message.
n  Partly this is because those people who work in
advertising often have backgrounds in fine art and art
history and are familiar with cultural tradition
n  But more importantly, culture is used in advertising
to bestow authority, grandeur, ‘class’, dignity, even
‘wisdom’to the product or service being sold.
n  An oil painting belongs to our European heritage and
its rarity and uniqueness mean that, historically, it has
acumulated enormous monetary value, and is
therefore exclusive and enviable.
n  Advertising images also draw upon the forms and
poses of their models to suggest the required
stereotype: serene mother, perfect hostess, sex-object,
material luxury, powerful man, virilty, and spatial or
geographic suggestions of distance (mystery), idyllic
nature (innocence) etc.
n  Publicity is nostalgic; it sells you the future by
alluding to the past. Its ‘credibility’ depends on you
believing that the new will be as good as or better
than the old.
n  New technology like colour photography and digital
manipulation make the range and type of publicity’s
use of imagery all the more ‘convincing. By
increasing the optical splendour of the advertised
object, its apparent tactility, we are made more aware
that we do not possess it.(yet).
10
“Ways of Seeing” (1972)
n  Berger’s Conclusion:
n  “Publicity, situated in a future continually
deferred, excludes the present and so
eliminates all becoming, all development.
Experience is impossible within it. All that
happens, happens outside it…It recognises
nothing except the power to acquire. All other
human faculties or needs are made
satisfactory to this power, All hopes are
gathered together, made homogeneous,
simplified, so that they become the intense yet
vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered
in every purchase. No other kind of hope or
satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be
envisaged within the culture of
capitalism.” (p.153)
n  To be continued by the reader…
Barbara Kruger, “I shop therefore I am”, (1989)
11
“Selected Essays and Articles: The Look
of Things” (1972)
n  Essays on travel, Che Guevara, Ossip Zadkine, Le
Corbusier, Walter Benjamin, Watteau, Romantic
notebooks, Léger, Cubism, understanding a photograph,
the politics of photomontage and on the Soviet
intervention in Czechoslovakia.
n  The essays cover a broad time-frame, and represent a
continuous perceptive/ critical set of observations on the
contemporary world
n  Draws on Benjamin and parallels some of Roland
Barthes’ musings in ‘Mythologies”.(1957)
n  Each essay is approached from a consistent humanistic,
Marxian position which rejects fragmented analysis in
order to synthesize human behaviour and experience.
n  Represents a coherent development of his idea of
freedom as expressed in specific situations, and his
intolerance of injustice and inequality in the world.For
Berger, freedom is specific to a specific situation, a work
of art, a daily act, a political event, or the life of a person.
To release this potential is to succeed; to deny, ignore or
be frightened of it is to fail.
n  Property, on the other hand, is always the denial of this
potential in that it reduces the situation, the work of art,
the life of a human being, into a single, non-dialectical,
non-ambivalent entity, whose sole meaning rests in its
possession.
n  The essays in the book are all evidence of the success or
failure to release the potential freedom contained in each
situation.
12
Sociological works and photo essays
n  Berger's sociological writings include “A
Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country
Doctor” (1967) and “A Seventh Man: Migrant
Workers in Europe” (1975).
n  Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, his
frequent collaborator, sought to document and
understand the experiences of peasants.
n  Their subsequent book, “Another Way of
Telling”, discusses and illustrates their
documentary technique and treats the theory of
photography through Berger's essays and
Mohr's photographs.
n  His studies of individual artists include “The
Success and Failure of Picasso” (1965), and
“Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny,
Endurance, and the Role of the Artist in the
USSR” (1969). Both of which balance the
artists’ individual vision with the larger sociopolitical
context within which the work was
created, and the related moral and ideological
struggles each artist faced.
13
“A Seventh Man” with Jean Mohr (1975)
n  Berger donated half the Booker Prize cash to the Black
Panther Party in Britain, and retained half to support his
work on the study on migrant workers that became “A
Seventh Man”, asserting that both endeavors represented
aspects of his political struggle.
n  The book explores, through poetry, photography and
critical analysis, the life experiences of some of the 22
million migrant workers in industrialised European
countries.
n  Today, the migrant worker experiences, within a few
years, what the working population of every industrial city
once experienced over generations - the move from the
country to the town, the relativisation of values and the
loosening of the sense of family and home, constant and
accelerated change, and constant insecurity, obliging
constant adaptation, a constantly changing work
environment, constant incursions of new technology and
an accompanying sense of fragmentation and isolation..
n  For Berger, to consider the migrant worker’s life - its
material circumstances and his inner feelings - is to be
brought face to face with the fundamental nature of
present societies and their histories.
n  To Berger, the Migrant is not peripheral to modern
experience: he is absolutely central to it.
14
“Their Labours Trilogy” (1980s)
n  In the 1970s, Berger collaborated on three films
with the Swiss director Alain Tanner:
n  He wrote or co-wrote “La Salamandre” (1971),
“The Middle of the World” (1974), and “Jonah
who will be 25 in the year 2000” (1976)
n  His major fictional work of the 1980s, the trilogy
“Into Their Labours” (consisting of the novels
“Pig Earth”, “Once in Europa”, and “Lilac and
Flag”), treats the European peasant experience
from its farming roots to contemporary economic
and political displacement and urban poverty.
Set in a small village in the French Alps, “Pig
Earth” relates the stories of skeptical, hardworking
men and fiercely independent women;
The sensuous description conveys the precise
wealth and weight of a world that is
disappearing.
n  In 1974, Berger co-founded the Writers and
Readers Publishing Cooperative Ltd in
London with Arnold Wesker, Lisa Appignanesi,
Richard Appignanesi, Chris Searle, Glenn
Thompson, Siân Williams, and others. The
cooperative was active until the early 1980s.
15
Goya’s Last Portrait (1989)
n  Goya painted a series of Royal
portraits throughout a time of
turmoil and political upheaval,
as well as a series of self
portraits, etchings and drawings
which remain a testament to
their times
n  Berger, with Nella Bielski drew
upon elements of Goya’s life
and iconography, to make a
dramatic portrait of the artist,
responding to the theatricality
and inventiveness of Goya’s
work, and transforming the artist
into an artist for our time.
16
The Shape of a Pocket (2001)
n  “The ‘pocket’ in question is a small
pocket of resistance. A pocket can be
formed when two or more people come
together in agreement. The resistance is
against the inhumanity of the new
economic order,
n  The people coming together are the
reader, me and those the essays are
about: Rembrandt, Paleolithic cave
painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient
Egyptians, and expert in the loneliness of
certain hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a
man in a radio station...
n  And unexpectedly, our exchanges
strengthen each of us in our conviction
that what is happening to the world today
is wrong, and that what is often said
about it is a lie.”
17
Later works
n  In later essays, Berger wrote about
photography, art, politics, and memory. He
published in “The Shape of a Pocket” (2001) a
correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos,
and penned short stories that appeared in The
Threepenny Review and The New Yorker.
n  His sole volume of poetry is “Pages of the
Wound”, (1994) though other volumes, such as
the theoretical essay “And Our Faces, My Heart
Brief as Photos” (1984) contain poetry.
n  His later novels include “To the
Wedding” (1995), a love story dealing with the
AIDS crisis, and
n  “King: A Street Story”, (1999) a novel about
homelessness and shantytown life told from the
perspective of a stray dog. Initially, Berger
insisted that his name be kept off the cover and
title page of “King”, wanting the novel to be
received on its own merits.
18
“Why look at Animals” (2009)
n  Berger's 1980 volume “About Looking” includes an
influential chapter, "Why Look at Animals?” It new
ground with its penetrating writings on life, art and
how we see the world around us.
n  Here he explores how the ancient relationship
between man and nature has been broken in the
modern consumer age, with the animals that used to
be at the centre of our existence now marginalized
and reduced to spectacle.
n  The book brings together seven of Berger's essays
from 1971-2001, a poem, a drawing and a new story.
n  The title essay (1977) explores the ancient
relationship between animals and humankind: an
"unspeaking companionship". But today the caged
creatures in zoos have become "the living monument
to their own disappearance" from culture.
n  In all these pieces, what concerns Berger is the loss
of a meaningful connection to nature, a connection
that can now only be rediscovered through the
experience of beauty: "the aesthetic moment offers
hope."
n  Berger's writing is strongly ‘physical’, with a
powerful sense of how things look, smell, feel. At his
best he shows how everyday experiences - a
swallow straying into a room, the performances of
primates in a zoo, a peasant carving - hold the
aesthetic key to unlock the true order of things.
19
“The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of
John Berger”(2016)
n  "The four essay films which comprise ‘The
Seasons in Quincy’ each take different aspects
of British writer and thinker John Berger’s life in
the Haute-Savoie, and combine ideas and motifs
from Berger’s own work with the atmosphere of
his mountain home.
n  Each film was created as an individual work of
art but they combine to make a feature film...
showing how film can move beyond text, and
beyond fine art, to offer a multifaceted and multilayered
portrait. These are more than
documentary films – they are exercises in
thinking in film." Derek Jarman Lab
n  'Ways of Listening', (Colin MacCabe), deals with
fathers and friendship. 'Spring', (Christopher
Roth), considers Berger's writing on our
relationship with animals. 'A Song for Politics',
(Colin MacCabe and Bartek Dziadosz), reflects
on politics through archive footage, song and a
discussion between Berger and several young
left-wing thinkers. 'Harvest', (Tilda Swinton),
revisits Quincy to meditate on belonging and
continuity with Berger and his son Yves.
n  Berlinale 2016 - World premiere
n  http://www.seasonsinquincy.com
John Berger with Tilda Swinton during the filming of ‘Harvest’ (2016)
20
Bibliography
n  Fiction
n  * A Painter of Our Time (1958)
n  * The Foot of Clive (1962)
n  * Corker's Freedom (1964)
n  * G. (1972)
n  * Into Their Labours trilogy (1991): Pig Earth (1979),
Once in Europa (1987), Lilac and Flag (1990)
n  * To the Wedding (1995)
n  * King: A Street Story (1999)
n  * From A to X (2008)
n  Plays
n  * A Question of Geography (with Nella Bielski) (1987)
n  * Les Trois Chaleurs (1985)
n  * Boris (1983)
n  * Goya's Last Portrait (with Nella Bielski) (1989)
n  Screenplays
n  * Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (with Alain
Tanner) (1976)
n  * La Salamandre (The Salamander) (with Alain Tanner)
(1971)
n  * Le Milieu du monde (The Middle of the World) (with
Alain Tanner) (1974)
n  * Play Me Something (with Timothy Neat) (1989)
n  * Une ville à Chandigarh (A City at Chandigarh) (1966)
n  Poetry
n  * Pages of the Wound (1994)
n  * Collected Poems (2014)
n  Other
n  Marcel Frishman (with George Besson) (1958)
n  Permanent Red (1960) (Published in the United States in
altered form in 1962 as Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing)
The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965)
n  A Fortunate Man (with Jean Mohr) (1967)
n  Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the
Artist in the U.S.S.R (1969)
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (1969)
n  The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles (1972)
n  Ways of Seeing[27] (with Mike Dibb, Sven Blomberg, Chris
Fox and Richard Hollis) (1972)
n  A Seventh Man (with Jean Mohr) (1975)
n  About Looking (1980)
n  Another Way of Telling (with Jean Mohr) (1982)
n  And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984)
n  The White Bird (U.S. title: The Sense of Sight) (1985)
n  Keeping a Rendezvous (1992)
n  The Sense of Sight (1993)
n  Albrecht Dürer: Watercolours and Drawings (1994)
n  Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) (1996)
n  Photocopies (1996)
Isabelle: A Story in Shorts (with Nella Bielski) (1998)
n  At the Edge of the World (with Jean Mohr) (1999)
n  Selected Essays (Geoff Dyer, ed.) (2001)
n  The Shape of a Pocket (2001)
n  I Send You This Cadmium Red: A Correspondence between
John Berger and John Christie (with John Christie) (2001).
21
Bibliography
n  * My Beautiful (with Marc Trivier) (2004)
n  * Berger on Drawing (2005)
n  * Here is Where We Meet (2005)
n  * Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and
Resistance (2007; 2nd ed. 2016)[62]
n  * The Red Tenda of Bologna (2007)
n  * War with No End (with Naomi Klein, Hanif Kureishi,
Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, Joe Sacco and Haifa Zangana)
(2007)[
n  * Meanwhile (2008)
n  * Why Look at Animals? (2009)
n  * From I to J (with Isabel Coixet) (2009)
n  * Lying Down to Sleep (with Katya Berger) (2010)
n  * Railtracks (with Anne Michaels) (2011)
n  * Bento's Sketchbook (2011)
n  * Cataract (with Selçuk Demirel) (2012)
n  * Understanding a Photograph (Geoff Dyer, ed.) (2013)
n  * Daumier: The Heroism of Modern Life (2013)
n  * Flying Skirts: An Elegy (with Yves Berger) (2014)
n  * Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Tom Overton, ed.)
(2015)
n  * Cuatro horizontes (Four Horizons) (with Sister Lucia
Kuppens, Sister Telchilde Hinkley and John Christie) (2015)
n  * Lapwing & Fox (Conversations between John Berger and
John Christie) (2016)
n  * Confabulations (Essays) (2016)
n  * Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Tom Overton, ed.)
(2016).
n  * John by Jean: Fifty Years of Friendship (Jean Mohr, ed.)
(2016)
n  * A Sparrow's Journey: John Berger Reads Andrey
Platonov (CD: 44:34 & 81-page book with Robert Chandler
and Gareth Evans), London: House Sparrow Press in
association with the London Review Bookshop (2016)
n  * Smoke (with Selçuk Demirel) (2017)
n  * Seeing Through Drawing (with John Christie) (2017). The
book, published by OBJECTIF, features new texts by and
about John Berger plus a catalogue section of images,
information and stories from the invited artists in the main
exhibition held on 8 July – 26 August 2017 at Mandell’s
Gallery, Norwich. It contains two previously unpublished
sequences of correspondence on art and communications
between John Berger and his daughter Katya Berger
Andreadakis along with tributes and stories from: Anne
Michaels, Yves Berger, Eulàlia Bosch, Geoff Dyer, Gareth
Evans, Paul Gordon and Tom Overton. The book also
features a compilation of writings on the art and practice of
drawing collected together by John Christie, from across
John Berger’s art criticism, fiction, essays and letters.