John Berger
John Berger was a British-French novelist, art critic, painter, poet, screenwriter, and essayist who worked across an unusually wide range of creative and critical forms throughout his life.
Born on 5 November 1926 in the London Borough of Hackney, Berger was educated at St Edward's School before going on to study at the Central School of Art and Design and Chelsea College of Art and Design. He held citizenship in both the United Kingdom and France, and he died on 2 January 2017 in Antony, France.
Berger worked in English across all his disciplines, producing novels, criticism, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting over the course of his career. His output as an art critic and art historian ran alongside his fiction writing, and he also contributed regularly as an opinion journalist. He received the Booker Prize, one of the most prominent awards in English-language fiction, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, another major British literary honour. He also received the Scott Moncrieff Prize, awarded for translation-related work, and the Groeneveld Award.
The range of forms Berger moved between — novel, essay, art criticism, poetry, painting — remained a defining feature of his working life. His criticism engaged with art history, and his fiction sat alongside his practice as a painter and artist. Together, these pursuits in art, criticism, and narrative writing in English mark the consistent territory across which he operated.
Quotes by John Berger
John Berger's insights on:
Publicity is the life of this culture in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive and at the same time publicity is its dream.
The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature
The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be.
Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
Cow dung and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grain, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass.
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of clouds.
The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.
There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.