In his memoirs, Giacomo Casanova, the 18th-century writer and libertine, made a helpful distinction between “stupid” people and “fools.” Those who are stupid, he opined, were generally honest and merely lacking in education: “They are like eyes that, if not for their cataracts, would be very beautiful.” Fools, however, he couldn’t abide. He found them conceited and insolent. Worst of all, he wrote, “I feel like a fool whenever I find myself in their company.”
We are all, I take Casanova to be saying, stupid to some degree. But it takes a special kind of obliviousness to be a fool.
The novelist and art critic John Berger was neither insolent nor conceited, and he was less stupid than most of us. But he undoubtedly had a foolish streak.
Berger would have turned 100 this year. He is the subject of a new biography, John Berger: From Life, by Tom Overton, an archive curator at the Barbican Centre, in London, and nearly a decade after his death, at age 90, many of his books are being reissued. Berger was an experimentalist. Apart from his art criticism and fiction, he wrote screenplays, painted, and drew. But he is best known for Ways of Seeing, a 1972 TV series about art and power that is still a staple of art education more than 50 years after it was first aired on the BBC.
To rewatch Ways of Seeing, which consists of four 30-minute episodes, is to realize how immensely influential it has been. Like a brilliant college lecturer, Berger methodically builds arguments around four themes: the effects of reproduction on original artworks; art’s role in the objectification of women; the part art has played in establishing social status and ownership; and the reality-distorting role of modern advertising. Berger gets his points across with almost electrifying immediacy. When he presents directly to the camera, you can feel his magnetism instantly. His flaring eyes, mobile brow, and slight difficulty pronouncing the r sound convey his intelligence and moral seriousness with almost comical exaggeration. But Berger’s particular species of charisma was inseparable from his earnestness, which had a relentless quality. Behind it lurked a sort of wet-eyed, slightly indiscriminate craving for human connection.
Berger created Ways of Seeing with the producer and director Mike Dibb. A subsequent book, adapted from the series, was a collaboration credited to Berger and four others. The series was interpreted by some as a rebuke to Civilisation, a 13-part documentary from 1969 about European visual culture that was commissioned for the BBC by David Attenborough and presented by Kenneth Clark. But Berger’s early career owed a great deal to Clark, an acclaimed art historian who had been the director of London’s National Gallery, and his shorter TV series was a different project with a narrower aim.
[Read: The seminal TV series that changed how we see]
The title was very much to the point. As if in emulation of his father, who tended to soldiers with damaged eyesight during World War I, he saw himself as removing cataracts from people’s eyes. Berger wrote from a position of principled belief and always from the heart. He was a Marxist who wanted to rescue people from their naivete about the workings of capitalism. In the introduction to Permanent Red, his first collection of essays, he was forthright about his criteria for judging art: “The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?”
It’s this quality of yearning—for love, for justice, for compassion—that is still the main reason to read Berger. In his essays and reviews, something deeper than aesthetic judgment always feels at stake. But when you compare his art writing with that of his sharper, less sentimental contemporaries—Susan Sontag, Robert Hughes, Peter Schjeldahl, Janet Malcolm—you’re reminded of Berger’s tendency to belabor the obvious. A plodding, pedagogical flavor compromises much of his criticism (“to return now to our original question”), as if he worried that too much humor or writerly flair might nibble away at his class credentials.
Berger understood that images play a huge role in projecting the influence of capital and making wealth enviable. Ways of Seeing demonstrated this in its four pithy episodes. It was an effort to awaken the public to the ways in which injustice was embedded in both the art in our museums and the imagery disseminated across Western culture. Berger derived his insights not only from Karl Marx but also from Marxist thinkers in the 20th century, including his friend Frederick Antal, the pioneering Hungarian art historian who wrote about the social background of Florentine art during the Renaissance; Georg Lukács, the Leninist literary critic and philosopher; and Walter Benjamin, the great media theorist and cultural critic. But Berger’s 1970s-style “consciousness-raising” was aimed at a broad public and proved very successful. Even now, when his critiques have become platitudes, to hear him speak about the male gaze or the depredations of advertising is to feel these notions reinfused with amplitude and urgency.
Ways of Seeing catapulted the show’s presenter to fame. That fame turned to notoriety later in 1972, when Berger’s experimental novel G.—about a Casanova-like character caught up in political events around the turn of the 20th century—won the Booker Prize. The book, which Berger spent five years writing, is dedicated to his partner Anya Bostock, an acclaimed translator, and to “her sisters in Women’s Liberation.” This was painful—for Bostock, anyway—because while writing it, Berger had begun an affair with another woman, Annar Cassam. Bostock believed that G., with its libertine hero, was partly Berger’s attempt to use fiction to understand his own behavior. (G. might be better recalled today for Berger’s Booker Prize–acceptance speech, in which he criticized the company behind the prize for historically profiting from enslaved labor in the Caribbean; his protest was an attempt, he said, to “turn this prize against itself.”)
Overton’s biography provides a useful critical overview of Berger’s writing, as well as of his work for television and radio. Its author, who became close friends with Berger when he cataloged the latter’s archive for the British Library, refers to his subject throughout as “John.” But intermittently, Overton switches to “you,” addressing Berger as if he were still alive and might be able to account for himself. The habit kicks in when Overton is most dismayed by what he has learned about Berger’s unfeeling treatment of his various lovers or of his son Jacob, who made a film that drew on Berger’s life—just as Berger had often used others’ lives in his writing—resulting in a rift that lasted years.
Overton’s use of direct address appears to be his way of enacting the special difficulty he faces as Berger’s biographer, effectively letting us listen in as he asks, What do I owe to my subject, who was my friend but is now dead? The question of what we owe the dead obsessed Berger. His preoccupation had its roots in his father’s experiences during World War I. In the wake of that catastrophe, the British fixated on memorializing the dead. Monuments were erected in nearly every village square.
Born in 1926, Berger came to believe that humans live along two axes: the horizontal line, which relates to one’s physical place in the world, and the vertical line of time, which connects the living with the dead and those yet to be born. His understanding of the importance of place fed into his writing about migrants displaced by war and the movements of capital. But for Berger, that relationship between the living and the dead was, “almost as soon as he began to think about it, the very core of politics.” “The one question of his work,” Overton believes, “was: how do we live with the dead?”
The question is obviously profound. It goes to the core of how most cultures have seen and organized themselves. And yet in Berger’s hands, it betrays a proclivity for nostalgia that can be a weakness. To feel too much solidarity with the dead, after all, might be one way to avoid one’s responsibility to the proximate living.
Most things that Berger wrote were connected to art in one way or another. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, centers on two characters who bond over a painting by Goya in the National Gallery. By the time it was published, in 1958, Berger was ending his second marriage and in the throes of a long romantic relationship with Bostock. He’d begun that decade discussing pictures in the National Gallery for the BBC West African Service and soon started writing exhibition reviews and essays for a variety of publications. Permanent Red appeared in 1960. In 1962, Berger left Britain to begin more than a decade of mobile living from a base in Geneva, where Bostock worked as a translator for the United Nations. This roiling period, personally and politically, came to an end in the early 1970s, soon after Ways of Seeing and G. were released, when he settled in the village of Quincy in the French Pyrenees.
Three captivating books, known as the Into Their Labours trilogy, emerged from this period. The first of them, Pig Earth, consists of stories alternating with poems. The trilogy shows Berger at his best: direct, visceral descriptions of real things; a frank engagement with death, birth, and sex; and an acute sensitivity to the rhythms of others’ lives.
Even as Berger, like any good Marxist, longed for revolution and promoted solidarity, he was a traditionalist at heart. In art, he liked realism and distrusted abstraction, all the more so as he learned about the CIA’s involvement in promoting abstract expressionism as a form of Cold War soft power. In the 1950s, he had championed the so-called kitchen-sink school of British realists, who have since been largely forgotten. He failed to see merit in the work of more powerful painters, such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, perhaps because their existentialist, amoral worldviews didn’t align with his own brand of progressive humanism.
[Read: The conundrum of Lucian Freud’s portraits]
Overton puts a nice but unconvincing spin on Berger’s blind spots, writing, “John’s focus on deep time, on the necessity of the company of the past, could obscure his view of the contemporary.” For an art critic, that feels like a problem. Berger adored Stanley Spencer (“by far and away one of the most important English artists of our time”) and was impressed by the art he saw on a 1953 visit to Moscow, co-organized by the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Union of Soviet Architects. “I believe that they are creating the foundations of a true tradition,” he wrote, “whereas we, for the most part, are destroying the tradition we inherited.”
Berger’s career as an art critic is a reminder that, although certain kinds of naivete deserve to be indulged because they are aligned with compassion, other kinds can become exasperating. Despite mounting evidence of Joseph Stalin’s brutality and the disaster of totalitarianism, Berger, like many Marxists in the West, continued to romanticize the Soviet Union, visiting for a second and third time in 1961 and 1966.
“In the early 1950’s,” he explained in a 1979 preface to a reissue of Permanent Red, “the USSR represented, despite all its deformations, a great part of the force of the socialist challenge to capitalism.” Berger’s next sentence—“It no longer does”—was welcome. But his later responses to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union were grudging and mealymouthed. Reading them, I found it impossible not to feel that Berger wore ideological blinkers that limited his compassion for the millions who had suffered under the Soviet empire, including countless fellow writers and artists.
A similar blinkeredness seemed to drive Berger’s response to the fatwa against the author Salman Rushdie. When Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie’s murder after the publication of The Satanic Verses, Berger took the side of the leader of a theocratic, deeply misogynistic state against a fellow Booker Prize–winning author, who now lived in fear for his life. Berger, in an essay, praised the Quran—Overton notes that, at the time, Berger more and more “thought the real hope of resisting the American world order might lie with Islam”—and dismissed Rushdie’s book, whose portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad had prompted backlash, as “a rather arrogant fiction about playing at being God.” Pitting the two books against each other, Berger noted, “The first is a book about responsibility, the second is a story about irresponsibility.”
[Read: Salman Rushdie strikes back]
The writer Christopher Hitchens, a friend of Rushdie’s, observed at the time, “There has long been a Berger scale for fatuity, but that piece, even in the judgment of seasoned seismographers, went clear off the graph.” Berger felt that he was showing sympathy for those who were hurt by Rushdie’s novel—although how many of them had actually read the book is unclear. But Berger was naive about the motivations behind the fatwa. (It was issued at a moment when Iran was in a power struggle with Saudi Arabia for dominance in the Muslim world and was seeking to project strength; the ayatollah issued the fatwa only after a part of the book, which includes a character who appears to caricature Khomeini, was read aloud to him.) Berger should have condemned, without hedging, the inhumanity of the autocratic regime that was calling for a fellow writer’s death. “I do not expect many to listen to arguments like mine,” he concluded in his essay, with the maudlin tone that colors too much of his writing. “The colonial prejudices are still too ingrained.”
Berger’s writing, at its strongest, has a quality of thinking in process that can be immensely engaging. His essays “are all the time testing his life, probing and assessing it,” Geoff Dyer wrote in his introduction to Berger’s Selected Essays. But being exposed to too much of the clanking machinery of thought, especially for a reader not convinced by its premises, can become wearying. Overton rightly points out that Berger did not have a talent for storytelling: “He had no ear for rhythm, or gift for narrative.” Instead, he was at his best a “conduit for the lives of others,” and his unique skill was to “use paintings, drawings, photographs to drill holes in time, to make channels to the future as much as to the past.”
I think Berger appeals especially to people who revel in the romance of failure—failed ideals and conceptions of the world. He loved Stendhal, the great Romantic-era writer who survived Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow. He wanted to think of himself as “a kind of marxist Stendhal.” But Tony Godwin, Berger’s book editor, sensed the danger in his author’s Romantic inclinations. He tried to remind him that his job was to supply “the vision, the insight and the reminder of humanity.” “You’re not a political commentator,” he warned Berger. “You’re an artist, and it is your duty to guard yourself from fragmenting your time, especially in journalism.” This was surely Godwin’s polite way of saying: Don’t make a fool of yourself—or of me.
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