John Berger obituary - by Michael McNay
The art critic,
essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his
television series Ways of Seeing. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who
has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the
arts pages of the New Statesman. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC
as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since
Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which Kenneth Clark,
its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had travelled 80,000 miles
through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western
world. Berger travelled as far as the hut in Ealing, west London where his
programmes were filmed, and no farther. What he said in his characteristic tone
of sweet reasonableness was:
“In his book on the
nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The
nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be
naked is to be oneself; to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not
recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a
nude.”
In other words, art is
a commodity and a woman in art is an object. No approach to art could have been
more different from Clark’s gentlemanly urbanity. These demotic programmes
turned Berger into the hero of a generation studying the burgeoning new
university courses on European visual culture. The spin-off book was never out
of print. Clark, meanwhile, found himself derided as Lord Clark of
Civilisation.
Ways of Seeing was
Berger’s apotheosis as a populariser, but in this year too he won the Booker
prize, the James Tait Black Memorial prize and the Guardian Fiction prize with
his novel G, and also published, with his frequent collaborator the
photographer Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man, a sensitive documentary account of a
country doctor on his daily round in Gloucestershire. These three books began
to sketch out the areas of Berger’s lifetime enterprise.
They were preceded by
the publication of The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) and Art and
Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969); in
one, he made a hopeless mess of Picasso’s later career, though he was not alone
in this; in the other, he elevated a brave dissident artist beyond his talents…
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/02/john-berger-obituary