{"id":106364,"date":"2017-01-03T17:51:35","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T22:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106364"},"modified":"2017-01-03T18:14:55","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T23:14:55","slug":"john-berger-1926-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/03\/john-berger-1926-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"John Berger, 1926\u20132017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0pDE4VX_9Kk?rel=0&amp;showinfo=0\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEvery artist\u2019s work changes when he dies,\u201d John Berger wrote in his essay on Alberto Giacometti. \u201cFinally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive \u2026 [His work] will have become evidence from the past, instead of being \u2026 a possible preparation for something to come.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Berger <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2016\/oct\/30\/john-berger-at-90-interview-storyteller?CMP=twt_gu\" target=\"_blank\">died yesterday at age ninety<\/a>. A painter who traded his brush for a pen, he became an art critic for the people, telling stories with a revolutionary spirit. The \u201cevidence\u201d of his tireless work will be his published writing, including more than fifty books: criticism, novels, poetry, and screenplays. In his final years, fans and disciples could seek him out in the small French Alpine town of Quincy, where he\u2019d lived since 1974, having left a robust public life to lend his labor to \u201cpeasants\u201d\u2014his favored word for the villagers\u2014so he could \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1987\/11\/29\/magazine\/living-and-writing-the-peasant-life.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">write about them in this way\u2014to understand their experience of their world<\/a>.\u201d From those who made the pilgrimage, we have gotten intimate interviews with the aging writer, full of retrospection. Berger had ample time to prepare his legacy. He donated his archives to the British Library in 2009; Verso Books has recently published two collections of his writing, <em><i>Landscapes <\/i><\/em>and <em><i>Portraits<\/i><\/em>; a documentary about his life in France, <a href=\"http:\/\/seasonsinquincy.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em><i>The Seasons in Quincy<\/i><\/em><\/a>, was released last year; and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zedbooks.net\/shop\/book\/a-jar-of-wild-flowers\/\" target=\"_blank\">a new book by writers indebted to Berger<\/a> has now become a posthumous honor.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>All the while, he\u2019s remained best known for <em><i>Ways of Seeing<\/i><\/em>, the 1972 BBC series and book\u2014perhaps the most bold, clear, and widely renowned explanation of art\u2019s entanglement with capitalism. \u201c<em><i>Ways of Seeing<\/i><\/em>\u00a0was a collaboration,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/2015\/06\/i-think-dead-are-us-john-berger-88\" target=\"_blank\">Berger said of the project in<em>\u00a0New Statesman<\/em> in 2015<\/a>. \u201cWe wanted people to ask questions. It\u00a0was the opposite of the ivory tower.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Berger resisted and arguably even vanquished the academic condescension toward artists and the public. Instead, he felt indebted: to the former\u2019s intentions, to the latter\u2019s ability to relate to art through lived experience. In the preface to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Portraits-John-Berger\/dp\/1784781762\" target=\"_blank\"><em><i>Portraits<\/i><\/em><\/a>, he writes, \u201cHaving looked at a work of art, I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively enter the studio in which it was made \u2026 I address the artist whom I maybe know, or who may have died centuries ago \u2026 There\u2019s never a conclusion \u2026 I\u2019m always in doubt. One thing, however, I\u2019m sure about, and that is my gratitude to all the artists for their hospitality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>In his preface to <em><i>Permanent Red<\/i><\/em>, his first published collection, Berger wrote with fervor, \u201cEver since I was a student, I have been aware of the injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, wastefulness and alienation of our bourgeois society as reflected and expressed in the field of art. And my aim has been to help, in however small a way, to destroy this society.\u201d Famously, upon discovering that the Booker Prize he had won in 1972 for his novel <em><i>G<\/i><\/em> was connected historically to the slave trade, he donated half his award to the Black Panther Party, the other half going to his project on migrant labor in Europe, <em><i>A Seventh Man.<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n<p>For Berger, every piece, no matter how playful, had high stakes. When he went as far as to connect Hieronymus Bosch with the \u201ceconomic fascism\u201d of globalization, then, he was not engaging in interpretive theatrics. He saw the horizonless, claustrophobic hell of Bosch\u2019s <em><i>Millennium Trilogy<\/i><\/em> as a prophesy of our lived reality. \u201cWhat the painting by Bosch does,\u201d he writes, \u201cis to remind us\u2014if prophecies can be called reminders\u2014that the first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world-picture implanted in our minds.\u201d We must find a horizon, he wrote, and the way to do that is to \u201crefind hope.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This solution, refinding hope, appears again and again throughout his writing, like a series of sturdy knots connecting the bedsheets by which we might escape from prison or descend from the ivory tower. In an essay on K\u00e4the Kollwitz, he wrote, \u201cA sense of belonging to what-has-been and to the yet-to-come is what distinguishes man from other animals. Yet to face History is to face the tragic. Which is why many prefer to look away. To decide to engage oneself in History requires, even when the decision is a desperate one, hope.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is Berger\u2019s own prophesy-reminder, the one that says, like he does of Giacometti, that his work is preparing for \u201csomething to come.\u201d Berger believed that revelations happen away from museum walls. He brought them back to the art like souvenirs with stories attached, told with giddy intimacy as if to an eager loved one. Politics is one of his often visited destinations. But though Berger treated art as History and History as political struggle, he did not believe in propaganda. In his first novel, 1958\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Painter-Our-Time-John-Berger\/dp\/0679737235\" target=\"_blank\"><em><i>A Painter of Our Time<\/i><\/em><\/a>, the main character\u2014a painter, a socialist, and a Hungarian \u00e9migr\u00e9\u2014writes, \u201cYou can\u2019t work for anything under the cover of art \u2026 Art does not cover\u2014it reveals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>In <em><i>The Shape of a Pocket<\/i><\/em>, there\u2019s a piece on the Fayum portraits, painted in ancient Egypt to identify mummies. Berger puts his finger on what makes these faces different from any other portraits in history: since they weren\u2019t meant for public display but only for the tomb, their painter was \u201cDeath\u2019s painter, or perhaps more precisely, Eternity\u2019s painter.\u201d He compares these intimate faces to those in advertising, images of people designed solely to be consumed, our contemporary \u201cproof of being alive.\u201d And then, unexpectedly, he says the Fayum portraits remind him of our time, of<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em><i>the<\/i><\/em> century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say, a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings. The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together, and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled, but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed and more precious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He turns back to the Fayum portraits, which are, he writes, \u201cflawed because very evidently hand-made. More precious because the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Berger, the many pieces of whom we will have to collect and fit together from now on, can be found in a condition as youthful and present as these portraits: he\u2019s on YouTube. He gazes directly at us, urgently but patiently explaining the mediation of media and capital, popping art\u2019s aura with, memorably, a razor blade. He uses it to carve Venus\u2019s face from Botticelli\u2019s canvas in the National Gallery. The hole it leaves behind isn\u2019t far from \u201cthe shape of a pocket,\u201d the title he gave the collection containing the Fayum essay. That phrase refers to \u201call the various pockets of resistance against the new order which are developing across the globe.\u201d It\u2019s a moving image, one that might well describe Berger\u2019s enduring readership. His work survives him to perpetuate the same spirit he found in the Fayum portraits: \u201cImages of men and women \u2026 declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Berger wrote with an awareness \u201cof the injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, wastefulness and alienation of our bourgeois society as reflected and expressed in the field of art.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[26477,35,21495,9241,2300,478,26474,865,26476,4972,26473,573,26478,11989,8306,17169,26472,26475,4975],"class_list":["post-106364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-a-painter-of-our-time","tag-art","tag-art-critics","tag-artists","tag-bbc","tag-criticism","tag-fayum","tag-france","tag-french-alps","tag-g","tag-giacometti","tag-john-berger","tag-kathe-kollwitz","tag-obituaries","tag-portraits","tag-quincy","tag-the-seasons-in-quincy","tag-the-shape-of-a-pocket","tag-ways-of-seeing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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