John Berger, radical art critic, 1926-2017
By
Sandy English and David Walsh
7 February 2017
John Berger, one of the most prominent left-wing figures in the field of English-language art criticism for over 60 years, died January 2 at the age of 90.
Berger authored dozens of books of art criticism and commentary, including, notably, The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), Art and Revolution (1969), Ways of Seeing (1972), which was based on a four-part BBC documentary that brought him to the attention of a broad public, About Looking (1980) and The Shape of a Pocket (2001). He also devoted works to Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Honoré Daumier and portraiture, among other subjects. In essays, Berger discussed scores of artists and artistic problems. His final collection of pieces, Landscapes, was published in 2016. His criticism was among the most influential of his generation and that influence extended beyond the immediate field to the wider art-appreciating public.
Berger was also a social essayist, novelist and screenwriter, publishing, among other works of poetry and fiction, A Painter of Our Time (1958), G. (1972), which won the Man Booker Prize (he contributed half the prize money 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 Y ear 2000 (1976).
Berger was an engaging and often intriguing writer and commentator. He was unquestionably gifted with considerable powers of observation and developed, through social and intellectual experience, the ability to look beneath the surface of things. He was frequently a debunker of conventional wisdom and, what’s more, a genuine opponent of conformism. An…