Biographers do not present themselves as intermediaries. Still, there is the fantasy that the subject of a book will emerge from its pages like a stranded ghost, clapping one hand on the author’s shoulder and the other on the reader’s shoulder. It’s a fantasy that adds romance to the business of trespassing on the dead: flattering family, interrogating neighbors and lovers, sorting through mostly useless documents from the archive. But left unchecked, it can turn a biographer into an emotional illusionist. He touches a stain on his finger on a letter. He enters the bedroom and smells the air. She seems to see the man himself: his facial features are thin and lined, his white shirt is unbuttoned at the top of his chest, his mouth is open as if he is about to speak.
I am looking at the photo on the cover of the book “John Berger: From Life,” the second biography of British art critic and novelist Tom Overton, published by Verso Books since his death in 2017. The first, Joshua Sperling’s “A Writer for Our Time” (2018), was a lively study that considered Berger as a leftist popularizer of the Western tradition in art. By the age of twenty-five, Berger had gained fame as a critic and distinguished himself in contrast to the noble figures of his time. A friend recalled how, against the backdrop of private collectors, museums, the cold, cerebral designs of abstract art, people, land, and largely realistic images of the human body, he would pull up to gallery openings on his motorcycle, his cigarette dangling from his fingers and his “lips always ready to talk.” Berger argued that art should be for everyone, rich or poor, regardless of country or faith. A magnificent man whose low, cautious voice could be heard on radio and television – most notably in the BBC series “Ways of Seeing” – making a surprisingly impertinent gesture. In the first episode of “Ways of Seeing,” he was holding a knife and appeared to be carving out the head of Venus from Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars.” The series united the country through the simultaneous acts of looking at her and listening to her convey her judgments. He became known as “the assertive, tie-free Marxist who took the tweed establishment down a notch or two,” Overton writes.
This month marks the centenary of Berger’s birth, and numerous events are being held to celebrate his lasting impact. Overton’s biography followed on the heels of The Essential John Berger, a thirteen-time reprint of Verso’s various collections of novels and essays. To go through this journey is to understand that Berger’s reputation rests not on a single, unique novel, or even on his great and varied works, but on a kind of attitude that has been adopted since the publication of his first reviews in the 1950s. According to Berger, the artist not only perceives the world; The world was training the artist’s perception, teaching him what to look at, from which perspectives and in what proportions. The artist, too, could use his brush against the accepted values of the world and the tendency to see people from a holistic, fixed perspective. He could portray “old, tired prostitutes” (Toulouse-Lautrec), “sacred humble peasants” (Millet), or “the great sexual image of the nude” (Giorgione, Rembrandt, Watteau, Courbet), so that the viewer could look at these subjects from a peculiar angle, with compassion and clarity. Berger formulated a distinctive concept of Marxist criticism: the assessment of an artist’s greatness based on whether his creations “can encourage people to know and demand their social rights.”
Reading Berger, one discovers that his Marxist aesthetic is less a doctrine than a vague and sublime justification for why he likes his art. What makes Berger special, as he wrote about Picasso, is “not his individual works, but his presence, his personality,” his “new perspectives on the world.” Berger was an ideologue; Most charismatic people are like that. As they get older, they shrivel up and run the risk of becoming preachy or boring. Berger escaped this fate by his relentless search across mediums and forms for the purest expression of his way of seeing. His novels in particular were inspired by Cubism’s use of overlapping perspectives to achieve a collective sense of reality. In “A Painter of Our Time” (1958), an artist’s mysterious diary entries are explained by an art critic friend. “G.” (1972), which won the Booker Prize, is the story of a seducer, presented as a collage of memoirs, histories, essays, sheet music and suggestive doodles. The blind narrator of “To the Wedding” (1995) shattered the dreams of a dying father, a mother and her daughters. AIDS. In the movie “From A to X” (2008), a woman writes painful letters to her lover in prison. These novels feature very different characters in very different times and places. But their common subject is human perception in all its diversity and instability; It is what Berger heralds as “the workings of vision itself.”