John Berger

He lived in France for over fifty years.

John Berger studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Central School of Art and Design and St Edward's School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is creative and professional writing, art criticism and art history. Employment is recorded with St Mary's University, Twickenham. Work by John Berger is recorded in the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre and Harvard Film Archive. Distinctions recorded are James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Groeneveld Award, Booker Prize and Scott Moncrieff Prize.

• Name — John Berger • Birth Name — John Peter Berger • Born — 5 November 1926 • Birthplace — London, England • Died — 2 January 2017 • Place of death — Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, France • Occupation — * Novelist • critic • painter • poet • Language — English • Education — St Edward's School, Oxford Chelsea School of Art Central School of Art and Design • Genre — Writer • Children — 3 • Awards — James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Booker Prize (1972) Golden PEN Award (2009)

Berger was born on 5 November 1926 in Stoke Newington, London, the first of two children of Miriam and Stanley Berger. His grandfather was from Trieste, now Italy, and his father, Stanley, raised as a non-religious Jew who adopted Catholicism, had been an infantry officer on the Western Front during the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross and an OBE. Berger was educated at St Edward's School, Oxford. He served in the British Army during the Second World War from 1944 to 1946. He enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design in London.

Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited works at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. His art has been shown at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester Galleries in London. Berger taught drawing at St Mary's teacher training college. He later became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman. His Marxist literary criticism and strongly stated opinions on modern art combined to make him a controversial figure early in his career. As a statement of political commitment, he titled an early collection of essays Permanent Red. Berger was never a formal member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB): rather he was a close associate of it and its front, the Artists' International Association (AIA), until the latter disappeared in 1953. He was active in the Geneva Club, a discussion group that overlapped with British communist circles in the 1950s.

In 1999, Berger voiced twin brothers Archie and Albert Crisp in the video game Grand Theft Auto: London 1969. He was a member of the Support Committee of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. • Illustration — John Berger funeral, Quincy, 7 January 2017. Pic.: Amarjit Chandan

Berger married first to artist and illustrator Patricia (Pat) Marriott in 1949. They divorced. His second wife was the Hon. Rosemary Sibell Guest, ex-wife of Gilbert Boyd, 6th Baron Kilmarnock. In the mid-1950s, he married the Russian translator Anya Bostock, with whom he had two children, Katya Berger and Jacob Berger. The couple divorced in the mid-1970s. Berger then married Beverly Bancroft, with whom he had one child, Yves. Beverly Bancroft died in 2013. Berger died at his home in Antony, France, on 2 January 2017 at the age of 90.

• A Painter of Our Time (1958) • Marcel Frishman (with George Besson) (1958) • The Foot of Clive (1962) • Corker's Freedom (1964) • G. (1972) • Into Their Labours trilogy (1991): Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1987), Lilac and Flag (1990) • To the Wedding (1995) • King: A Street Story (1999) • Here is Where We Meet (2005) • From A to X (2008)

• A Question of Geography (with Nella Bielski) (1987) • Les Trois Chaleurs (1985) • Boris (1983) • Goya's Last Portrait (with Nella Bielski) (1989)

• Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (with Alain Tanner) (1976) • La Salamandre (The Salamander) (with Alain Tanner) (1971) • Le Milieu du monde (The Middle of the World) (with Alain Tanner) (1974) • Play Me Something (with Timothy Neat) (1989) • Une ville à Chandigarh (A City at Chandigarh) (1966)

• Pages of the Wound (1994) • Collected Poems (2014)

• The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles (1972) • About Looking (1980) • A Fortunate Man (with Jean Mohr) (1967) • Keeping a Rendezvous (1992) • Photocopies (1996) • Selected Essays (Geoff Dyer, ed.) (2001) • Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007; 2nd edition 2016) • Why Look at Animals? (2009) • Confabulations (Essays) (2016) • Meanwhile (2008) • Swimming Pool (with Leon Kossoff) (Introduction by Deborah Levy. Postscript by Yves Berger. Berger's Texts selected by Teresa Pintó. Book design by John Christie) (2020)

• A Seventh Man (with Jean Mohr) (1975) • Another Way of Telling (with Jean Mohr) (1982) • And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984) • The White Bird (U.S. title: The Sense of Sight) (1985) • Isabelle: A Story in Shots (with Nella Bielski) (1998) • At the Edge of the World (with Jean Mohr) (1999) • I Send You This Cadmium Red: A Correspondence between John Berger and John Christie (with John Christie) (2001) • My Beautiful (with Marc Trivier) (2004) • The Red Tenda of Bologna (2007) • War with No End (with Naomi Klein, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, Joe Sacco and Haifa Zangana) (2007) • From I to J (with Isabel Coixet) (2009) • Railtracks (with Anne Michaels) (2011) • Cataract (with Selçuk Demirel) (2012) • Flying Skirts: An Elegy (with Yves Berger) (2014) • Cuatro horizontes (Four Horizons) (with Sister Lucia Kuppens, Sister Telchilde Hinkley and John Christie) (2015) • Lapwing & Fox (Conversations between John Berger and John Christie) (2016) • John by Jean: Fifty Years of Friendship (Jean Mohr, ed.) (2016) • A Sparrow's Journey: John Berger Reads Andrey Platonov (CD: 44:34 & 81-page book with Robert Chandler and Gareth Evans), London: House Sparrow Press in association with the London Review Bookshop (2016) • Smoke (with Selçuk Demirel) (2017) • What Time Is It? (with Selçuk Demirel) (Maria Nadotti, ed.) (2019) • Over To You. Letters Between a Father & Son. Tate Publishing (2024)

• Harkness, Allan (1983), Berger: A Seventh Man?, review of A Seventh Man and Another Way of Telling, in Hearn, Sheila G.(ed.), Cencrastus No. 12, Spring 1983, pp. 46 & 47,

John Berger is recorded as having received James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Groeneveld Award and Booker Prize. Recorded at birth as John Peter Berger.

In July 2009, Berger donated his archive to the British Library including literary manuscripts, drafts, research notes and unpublished material, correspondence, press cuttings and professional papers. The archive contains some early and marginal examples of Berger’s graphic work, but is chiefly literary in nature, and its organisation is largely that of Berger’s wife Beverly. The physical archive is described as "369 files, 9 boxes and 1 book".

• Permanent Red (1960) (Published in the United States in altered form in 1962 as Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing) • The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) • Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R. (1969) • The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (1969) • Ways of Seeing (with Mike Dibb, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox and Richard Hollis) (1972) • The Sense of Sight (1985) • Albrecht Dürer: Watercolours and Drawings (1994) • Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) (1996) • The Shape of a Pocket (2001) • Berger on Drawing (2005) • Lying Down to Sleep (with Katya Berger) (2010) • Bento's Sketchbook (2011) • Understanding a Photograph (Geoff Dyer, ed.) (2013) • Daumier: The Heroism of Modern Life (2013) • Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Tom Overton, ed.) (2015) • Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Tom Overton, ed.) (2016) • Seeing Through Drawing