John Berger Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early life and formation
John Peter Berger was born in London on 5 November 1926. Growing up in the shadow of war shaped his sensibility early; he came of age as Europe was convulsed by conflict and reconstruction. After service in the British Army during the final years of the Second World War, he returned to civilian life determined to draw and paint. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London, acquiring a disciplined craft while forming the convictions about art, politics, and everyday life that would govern his work. Even as a student, he mixed studio practice with voracious reading, locating his creative purpose in the relationship between images and the social realities in which they were made.

Painter and critic
Berger began as a practicing painter, exhibiting modestly and supporting himself by teaching and writing. The postwar art world in Britain was fractious, with fierce arguments about modernism, realism, and the function of art. Berger entered these debates as a critic for the New Statesman and other journals, and his essays made him a prominent, sometimes polarizing, voice. He defended committed, figurative painting that spoke to working lives and argued against tendencies he saw as detached from social experience. His positions brought him into public contention with other critics of the time, including David Sylvester, yet they also attracted a generation of readers to the serious consideration of art as part of civic life. Collections such as Permanent Red (1960) and the sustained study The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) confirmed his reputation for clarity, empathy, and argumentative courage.

Ways of Seeing
In 1972 Berger worked with the filmmaker Mike Dibb and colleagues at the BBC to create the series Ways of Seeing. The programs, and the book that followed, translated complex ideas about images, power, and representation into a lucid, accessible form. The project, designed with collaborators including Richard Hollis and drawing consciously on the insights of Walter Benjamin, asked viewers to consider how tradition, advertising, and museums shape what we think we see. Ways of Seeing became a touchstone in art education, opening conversations across classrooms, studios, and living rooms about who images are for and how they circulate.

Novelist and laureate
The same year, Berger won the Booker Prize for his novel G., a formally daring narrative set against the turbulence of early twentieth-century Europe. His acceptance speech was as widely discussed as the book: he criticized the prize sponsor for its colonial legacy and gave half of the award to the Black Panther movement in Britain. The other half helped support research and travel for a new collaboration with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. Berger and Mohr had already produced A Fortunate Man (1967), a study of a country doctor and the communities he served; they would go on to create Another Way of Telling (1982), a meditation on photography and storytelling, and A Seventh Man (1975), a landmark book about migrant workers in Europe. These works bound together Berger's writing with Mohr's photography, exemplifying his belief that images and words can interrogate reality most powerfully in concert.

Life in rural France and sustained collaborations
In the mid-1970s Berger settled in a small village in the French Alps. Living among peasant farmers and artisans, he chose to observe and participate rather than merely report, and that long residence became the foundation of the trilogy Into Their Labours: Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1987), and Lilac and Flag (1990). The books mix testimony, fiction, and history to record a rural world under pressure from modernity, written with the patience of a neighbor and the curiosity of a reporter. Throughout these years he continued to draw and paint, treating sketching as a way of thinking. Collaboration remained central: with Jean Mohr across decades; with the artist and filmmaker John Christie on the epistolary project I Send You This Cadmium Red; and with editors and interlocutors such as Geoff Dyer, who studied his work in Ways of Telling, and Tom Overton, who later assembled volumes of his essays and art writings.

Later work, public presence, and influence
Berger's later books extended his range without abandoning his preoccupations. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984) combined love poems, reflections on time, and a theory of memory; To the Wedding (1995) entwined intimate grief with the mapping of Europe; Here Is Where We Meet (2005) played with geography and ghosts; Hold Everything Dear (2007) gathered political essays; From A to X (2008) traced an epistolary love across a landscape of struggle; Bento's Sketchbook (2011) returned to drawing as a conversation with Spinoza. He wrote frequently about photography, championing the ethical imagination of image-makers and asking readers to look slowly and with care.

Even as he preferred the quiet of village life, Berger remained a public presence. He appeared in conversations and films that introduced his voice to new audiences. Shortly before his death, Tilda Swinton and Colin MacCabe, with other collaborators, made The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), a set of films attentive to his habits of looking and listening. Friends, students, and readers often remarked on his courtesy and his readiness to mentor younger artists and writers. Those close to him, including his long-time partner Beverly Bancroft, formed the intimate circle that made the practical work of an unusually collaborative career possible.

Legacy
By the time of his death in 2017, Berger had become a rare figure: a writer and artist whose ideas mattered across disciplines and generations. Painters, photographers, teachers, novelists, and activists drew on his methods of description and his insistence that aesthetics and ethics are inseparable. He left behind shelves of books, notebooks of drawings, and a body of filmed and printed conversations that continue to invite readers to see the ordinary with exacting tenderness. The people around him, from Mike Dibb and Jean Mohr to Tilda Swinton, Geoff Dyer, John Christie, and Tom Overton, helped shape and carry forward that invitation. Through their work with him, and through the readers and viewers they reach, John Peter Berger's questions about art, justice, and attention remain alive.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Live in the Moment - Deep.

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