John Berger at 100: art, resistance and a lasting influence

By Elena Vasquez

John Berger was born on 5 November 1926; art historian John-Paul Stonard marks the centenary with an assessment of the writer and artist. Berger turns 100 this year. Next year marks the tenth anniversary of his death, Stonard notes. He places Berger among only two writers on art who also wrote a Booker Prize-winning novel; Anita Brookner was the other.

Stonard calls Berger one of the 20th century’s most persuasive and challenging voices in art and literature. The commemoration comprises a smattering of centenary events, a fact Stonard presents alongside its more revealing shortage.

What made Berger’s 1972 Booker speech matter?

Stonard draws on John Berger: From Life, Tom Overton’s biography published in August this year and described by Stonard as “thoroughly engaging.” It recounts Berger’s 1972 Booker Prize speech, delivered after he won for his novel G.

At the ceremony, Berger announced to a stunned and affronted audience that he would donate half the prize money to the British chapter of the Black Panthers. The gesture protested labour exploitation in British Guiana that had helped create the Booker McConnell fortune.

Stonard compares that action with the reputation-laundering he says remains widespread in cultural sponsorship. He treats Berger’s moral courage as one clear part of his legacy. The speech joined literary prestige to a direct challenge over labour and wealth.

What can a small centenary exhibition show?

Stonard says the only anniversary exhibition in Britain devoted to Berger is a small display of his drawings at Mandell’s Gallery in Norwich, running until 21 November. Artists John Christie and Martin Battye co-curated it.

He reads Berger’s drawings as the work of a writer gathering images and experiences, but also of an artist who understands drawing as the best way to look. The small show makes looking itself part of Berger’s artistic legacy.

Why does Ways of Seeing still matter?

Stonard identifies the 1972 book Ways of Seeing as Berger’s popular legacy. It remains a bestseller. Penguin calls it “one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language.”

He concedes that Berger was hardly the first to show how viewers construct images and reflect their prejudices through them. For Stonard, Berger’s achievement was publishing the first book to communicate that idea so effectively, combining relentless polemic with, in Richard Hollis’s case, brilliant design.

The book grew from a successful television series and included numerous pin-up images. Together, they supported Berger’s argument that Old Master painting, through patterns of privilege and possession, relates directly to contemporary advertising.

Yet Stonard says the arguments feel dated and even slack, quite unlike Berger’s later art writing. The book’s influence is secure, although the confidence of parts of its criticism is not.

Can Berger’s older criticism withstand a new generation?

Stonard identifies attacks on Seymour Slive’s interpretation of Frans Hals and Kenneth Clark’s The Nude as attacks shaped by Berger’s personal dislike of art historians. He also quotes his complaint about the “disingenuousness that bedevils the subject of art history.”

Berger targets Lawrence Gowing’s “nitty argument” that the figures in Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted around 1750, were not merely enjoying nature but thinking philosophically about it. Stonard asks what Gen Z art students will make of the polemic.

Berger’s reach now exceeds the strength of several early arguments.

How does Berger connect art, memory and mortality?

Stonard finds Berger’s questions about how society values art and how art exists within everyday life wholly relevant. Tom Overton describes the central idea in all Berger’s writing as “how we live with the dead, how the past surrounds us and keeps us company.”

Stonard says Berger spent his life tilting against a world “ordered with the logic of profit, always looking forward, never back,” one therefore inclined to neglect the past and forget the dead.

Stonard reads this concern in The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, a short story from Pig Earth about peasant life in France at the turn of the 20th century. In Portraits: John Berger on Artists: on Fayum portraits seen from a century of exile and emigration, Berger makes leaps of imagination between art from different periods.

Berger’s description of drawing Antonello da Messina’s astonishing 1475 Christ Crucified in the National Gallery recalls hearing pianist Myra Hess play in the same gallery in 1942, before he was thrown out for swearing at a security guard.

His account of Jean-François Millet calls him “a moralist in the only way a great artist can be, by the power of his identification with his subjects,” with that identification rooted in peasants working the land.

Stonard concludes that Berger’s rare ability was linking art to the most important questions of our time and redeeming it from the market and specialists alike. His artistic legacy links close looking to living ethically with the past.

With Mandell’s exhibition running until 21 November and the tenth death anniversary next year, the centenary will test whether Berger’s questions can still shape how audiences value art beyond the market and specialists alike.