A Writer of Our Time

The Life and Work of John Berger

Joshua Sperling

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786637420
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786637406
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers; as a TV presenter he changed the way we looked at art in Ways of Seeing; as a storyteller and political activist he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants and the oppressed around the world. In 1953 he wrote: "Far from dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics." He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January, 2017.

In A Writer of Our Time, Joshua Sperling places Berger's life and works within the historical narrative of postwar Britain and beyond. The book also explores, through the work, the larger questions that vexed a generation: the purpose of art, the nature of creative freedom, the meaning of commitment. Drawing on extensive interviews, close readings and a wealth of archival sources only recently made available, the book brings the many different faces of John Berger together and shows him as one of the most vital, and brilliant, thinkers and storytellers of our time.

1

The Battle for Realism

—You certainly raised hell as a young art critic.

—Well it wasn’t difficult to raise hell in that polite world.

Interview with John Berger, 1989

In early 1952, the same year a twenty-five-year-old John Berger joined the ranks of the New Statesman, the London-based Institute for Contemporary Arts announced a competition. Artists from around the world were encouraged to submit proposals for a public monument to be built in commemoration of the Unknown Political Prisoner. The prize amounted to £11,500, and a site had been set aside in West Berlin. The selection committee featured several prominent artists and critics, including Henry Moore and Herbert Read.¹

The theme of the well-publicized contest was chosen to ‘pay tribute to those individuals who, in many countries and in diverse political situations, had dared to offer their liberty and their lives for the cause of human freedom’.² By this point the Cold War was in full swing. Stalin still ruled in Moscow; the Korean War had entered its second year; and the United Kingdom was only months away from testing its first nuclear bomb off the western coast of Australia. In such a climate the neutrality professed by the ICA was a hard sell. The committee spoke of the universal significance of its subject, but no Soviet or Eastern European entries were received, and two architects of the prize were prominent and influential Americans. Both were later discovered to have covert connections to the CIA.³

A year later, when Reg Butler’s model was chosen and displayed at the Tate Gallery, the politics that underwrote the prize burst into the aesthetic realm. Butler’s maquette featured three miniscule, Giacometti-like human figures dwarfed by a large tower resembling an antenna. For many on the left the insectile sculpture (not to mention the high-minded fanfare that accompanied it) smacked of pretension and hypocrisy. For some it was a show of out-and-out disrespect. On a Sunday afternoon in March, a young Hungarian refugee, Laszlo Szilvassy, walked through the museum doors, grabbed the model, twisted it in his arms, and threw it to the floor. ‘Those unknown political prisoners have been and still are human beings’, Szilvassy said in a prepared statement he handed to the museum guards at the time of his arrest. ‘To reduce them—the memory of the dead and the suffering of the living—into scrap metal is just as much a crime as it was to reduce them to ashes or scrap. It is an absolute lack of humanism.’⁴

A young Berger seized the moment. He had been railing against the postwar avant-garde for the better part of a year (‘pointless’, ‘confused’, ‘produced by guesswork’),⁵ but now he was furnished with a symbol. His article for the New Statesman, becoming a touchstone in the controversy, characterized the ICA contest as ‘a total failure’ which proved that ‘the “official” modern art of the West is now bankrupt’.⁶ ‘Imagine’, he said, ‘on one hand the most cogent, truly contemporary and relevant human symbol of our time—the Unknown Political Prisoner; on the other a plinth in the Tate Gallery on which were arranged three screws, some bus tickets, a few matches and a crumpled paper bag. Within that contrast can be seen the enormity of the failure of the admired, so-called progressive art of our time.’⁷

That many subsequent visitors took the trash that had come to replace Butler’s maquette as seriously as if it were the actual winning sculpture only proved, in Berger’s view, the farce of the entire competition. While a readymade of scraps might fit in at the Tate, its inadequacy in a serious political context was ‘absolute’.

As important as Berger’s indictment of the contest’s handling was his rejection of its premises. The pretence that the monument and its selection would be ideologically neutral was not only false in practice, but impossible in principle. Aesthetics could never wholly free itself from politics, and to presume otherwise was itself an ideological ploy. ‘All works of art’, Berger wrote, ‘within their immediate context, are bound directly or indirectly to be weapons: only after a considerable passage of time, when the context has changed, can they be viewed objectively as objets d’art … Valid art, in fact, because it derives from passionate, fairly simple convictions about life, is bound, in one sense, to be intolerant.’⁸

Berger’s rhetoric—as well as a comparison he made between a ‘trade-unionist imprisoned in Spain’ and a ‘counterrevolutionary in Siberia’—enraged a liberal public. First an artwork had been defiled; now their values were being vandalized. The ICA went on the offensive. Herbert Read, having publicly attested to the neutrality of the committee, portrayed Berger as a Soviet apparatchik. The abstract painter Patrick Heron, Berger’s rival at the New Statesman, caricatured him as a small-minded propagandist. The controversy spilled over into the letter pages of the press. For the first time in his life, Berger found himself at the front lines of a culture war. ‘I think that Socialist realities mean more to Mr Berger than universal ones’, wrote one reader. Another accused him of distorting his criticism to ‘conform to a preconceived art theory based on a political formula of art as propaganda’. The apostate communist Philip Toynbee took it one step further, as if sounding the alarm. ‘This is the embryo of Newspeak’, Toynbee wrote, ‘with which we have been so long familiar.’⁹

But how long is so long? Only a few years earlier none of this would have seemed familiar. Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been published in 1949, but it was not until its many publicized adaptations in the 1950s that Orwell’s tropes and neologisms took on widespread currency.¹⁰ Before Cold War paranoia kicked in, a global cultural discourse mounted and the Truman Doctrine was brought to bear on art, labels such as ‘Social Realism’ were not yet so fraught or triggering. People had other things on their minds: 80 million dead; maps and borders redrawn; entire neighbourhoods reduced to ruins; old generals tied to the stake and executed.

If anything, de facto socialism was what got Britain through the war. And having now got through it, what had buoyed their victory translated almost directly into a new spirit of populism. In the summer of 1945, only weeks after VE Day, the Labour Party won a landslide victory over Churchill’s Tories—the first time the Conservatives had lost a general election since 1906. Many on the left saw in Attlee’s victory the partial realization of socialist ideals: the founding of the National Health Service; the nationalization of large sectors of the economy; the expansion of social security, education, and affordable housing. (Of course, in Labour’s increasing factionalism, and ultimate defeat in 1951, the same leftists saw in the painful arrest of that process before it was complete the betrayal of those ideals.)

For Berger, too, the years coming out of the war represented an enlargement of possibility. If he later rose to prominence as a critic amid the fractiousness of the cultural Cold War, he first came of age as an artist during a period of postwar unity; the years separating these phases of his career were deceptively brief. London had been scarred, but the shoots of herbs were growing in the rubble. The late 1940s were strangely halcyon years—a time Berger later remembered as a calm between storms, when he was comparatively uninvolved in politics. Having just turned twenty, he was painting what he felt like painting and spending afternoon after afternoon at the cinema.

In 1946, Berger enrolled at the newly reopened Chelsea School of Art (then Chelsea Polytechnic), where he stayed for three years. Many of his classmates had seen combat; some had been POWs; others, like him, had served on the home front. He belonged to a committed yet lively cohort which, freshly released from military discipline, embraced a new kind of independence. After the armistice they could now make up for lost time. But at Chelsea they also encountered a new kind of rigour. Life-drawing and life-painting—what was called composition—were mandatory. Students would be presented with a subject and then asked to render it on paper, while teachers came around to evaluate their progress. Berger was a talented draughtsman. And though not as severe as their crosstown rivals at the RCA or Slade, Chelsea’s professors still hewed to the age-old principles of figuration far more than to cutting-edge experiment. The faculty in painting included Ceri Richards, an energetic Welshman, Harold Williamson, a war artist and poster designer, and Robert Medley, an affectionate mentor to Berger whose nearby house became a gathering place for students and artists. Even those tutors who had once fitfully followed the avant-garde emphasized a strong grounding in technique. Medley, for example, had once exhibited with the surrealists, but was known to instil in his students a love for the classical: his heroes were Poussin and Watteau. One of Berger’s friends and classmates, Harry Weinberger, later recalled that a film of Matisse sketching his grandson was shown to students as an example of how not to draw.¹¹

Chelsea’s campus was, and still is, a short walk from the Tate Gallery, guardian and symbol of British art; and though Berger was in fact intrigued and impressed by many of the reproductions he saw from France—Picasso especially—the school still moved very much within the orbit of the home-grown. This tendency was even stronger when, after the war, patriotic sentiment held sway. Reconstruction meant the recovery of local currents: Lowry, Sickert, Spencer. Particularly influential for many young painters, including the young Berger, was the Euston Road School, a short-lived prewar academy that had favoured tradition, naturalism and the ‘poetry in the everyday’.

Berger’s own paintings grew out of this general tradition, but were not as wistful or private: he preferred popular, more robust themes. In 1950, when the South Bank was being prepared for the Festival of Britain—itself a celebration of national culture and resilience—a twenty-three-year-old Berger went day after day to draw the builders. (One of his canvasses, Scaffolding, depicting the Royal Festival Hall in the early stages of its construction, was later acquired by the Arts Council.)¹² From these and similar studies—of fishermen in Brittany, foundry workers in Croydon—Berger worked towards finished paintings. He also drew ballet dancers at Sadler’s Wells and, during a formative trip to Italy (and evidently under the influence of Chagall and Soutine), painted street performers and jugglers. Like most young artists, Berger was trying on a number of hats. But across a range of moods and subjects he returned again and again to a common premise: the connection of a group of people sharing in a mutual activity.

Though Berger later credited a charged geopolitical atmosphere for his abandonment of painting—with journalism, it stood to reason, more could be done, and could be done more quickly, than with art—this was a simplification: the imposition of an older, retrospective awareness onto a younger, more tentative self. The arts of storytelling he later came to adopt apply also to memory, and move forwards and backwards in time. At twenty-five, he was still very much finding his way.

After finishing his studies, Berger took a part-time job teaching life-drawing. In 1948 he married the illustrator Pat Marriot, a classmate. The couple lived together in a small two-bedroom flat in Hampstead, but the marriage soon ended in divorce. Though he continued to paint and exhibit, the response to his work was minimal. ‘Every painting was an enormous struggle’, he later remembered. ‘I had no facility and at that time I tended to think that this total lack of facility meant that I really wasn’t a painter.’¹³ But through his speaking and writing, Berger attracted fast attention. Alongside his work as a tutor he took a second job as a lecturer with the Workers’ Educational Association. In order to prepare for his classes, he began, for the first time in his life, a serious exploration of art history. In the midst of this, he was also becoming re-politicized, shedding his early anarchism for something recognizably partisan and communist. His position became, as he later described, ‘more Leninist, more orthodoxly Bolshevik, if you wish, and less anarchist’.¹⁴

Berger’s first book and exhibition reviews appeared in the Tribune, a democratic socialist paper (for which Orwell had once served as literary editor). In 1950 he was invited by a friend who was a producer to talk about paintings in the National Gallery for the BBC World Service. On the basis of these radio scripts, which he sent to the offices of the New Statesman, Berger came to the attention of Kingsley Martin, the magazine’s famously well-connected and tempestuous editor. In 1951, Berger started publishing short reviews for the journal, and by 1952 he had been taken on as one of its principal art critics. At first there was a boyishness to his early articles—an enthusiasm in search of a purpose. But once he found it, he was off.

The name of his cause was realism; opposing it was modernism. In one corner, art that was accessible, popular, rousing; in the other, art that was difficult, esoteric, often misanthropic.¹⁵ At the start of the century modernism had been on the up and up. ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, was Virginia Woolf’s famous remark. But after the bloodshed of World War I, it seemed to change again. Much of modern art appeared to go off the rails: Dada, De Stijl, Surrealism. The flurry of interwar avant-gardes had produced, in the minds of many postwar critics, something of a muddle. Old dichotomies were newly felt. Should painting depict the physical world or the physical trace of its own making? Should art move within or against institutions? What constitutes a proper subject for the artist: dreams, shapes, nature, society?

After World War II, such questions left eddies of mixed emotion in their wake. The whole dilemma of the modern—What was it? How to remake and reimagine it?—seemed to be up for grabs. People were looking around for answers. And though Paris was still thought to be the bellwether of taste (only later was it registered that New York had usurped that distinction), what was emerging from the French capital struck many in England, not just Berger, as uninspired.

Consider a 1951 review of the École de Paris by Anthony Blunt. ‘What, one is always hearing asked, are the young French painters doing?’ Blunt mused as he took the measure of the work that had crossed the channel to Burlington House. What he saw let him down: ‘The dominant tenden...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Dialectic and the Pear Tree
• 1. The Battle for Realism
• 2. The Crisis of Commitment
• 3. Art and Revolution
• 4. Divided Loyalties
• 5. A Toast to Modernism
• 6. The Work of Friendship
• 7. Beyond Ideology
• 8. The Shape of a Valley
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index