John Berger

John Berger (1926-2017), an author, painter, screenwriter, leading art theorist, and intellectual, was born in London. After his military service (1944-46), he attended the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London. By the late 1940s, he began exhibiting as a painter in small London galleries such as Wildenstein and Redfern. Shortly thereafter, he started contributing critical articles to the magazine "New Statesman," adopting a radical, Marxist, and humanist approach to modernism. His novels, original in form and with historical and political insight, draw their themes from the world of art and critical thinking: "A Painter of Our Time" (1958), "The Foot of Clive" (1962), "Corker's Freedom" (1964), "G." (which won the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1972), "Into Their Labours" (trilogy: "Pig Earth", 1979, "Once in Europa", 1987, "Lilac and Flag", 1990), "To The Wedding" (1995), "King: A Street Story" (1999), "Here Is Where We Meet" (2005), "From A to X" (2008). Among his outstanding studies on painting and photography are "The Success and Failure of Picasso" (1965), "Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist in the USSR" (1969), "The Moment of Cubism" (1969), the internationally acclaimed "Ways of Seeing" (1972), which was a book adaptation of his successful BBC television series that significantly influenced visual arts and art history students in the following years, "About Looking" (1980, which includes the essay "Why Look at Animals?"), "Another Way of Telling" (with photographs by Jean Mohr, 1982). In the 1970s, he wrote the screenplays for Swiss director Alain Tanner's films "La Salamandre" (1971), "The Middle of the World" (1974), and "Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000" (1976). In the 1980s, he lived and worked in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his novel trilogy "Into Their Labours." With his book "From A to X," focusing on his wife's letters to an imprisoned terrorist, Berger was again shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008. He passed away at his home in the suburb of Antony, Paris, on January 2, 2017, at the age of 90.