a little over nine years, in December 2007, the british writer John Berger came to the chiapas jungle to learn about the zapatista movement. That was his first visit to Mexico, the result of a correspondence which he maintained with the subcomandante Marcos, and that helps to make a sketch of the life and work of the art critic: put the pen, writing, in the service of reality, a reality that is fired at 90 years of age.
The news of his death, at his residence in France, gave it to the publishing house Alfaguara, which in its page in Facebook announced the fact: "it is With great sadness we say goodbye today to John Berger, author of G and Sow earth, among many other memorable title. For us it has been an honor to have the opportunity to edit their works in Spanish. Up always master."
Berger was born on the 5th of November 1926 in Highams Park, London, and studied art at the Central School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art, the british capital, a time in which it began to interact with the communist party of britain, to the extent that for more than a decade is defined as a critical art a marxist.
His passion for the painting lasted for almost up to 30 years of age, when he made the difficult decision to leave the arts to devote himself entirely to writing, not because I doubted his talent as a painter, as he came to confess in different interviews, but because I felt that your word, the deed, became more and more missing in that time, the peak of the cold war.
In 1952 he began to collaborate with the weekly left-wing New Statesman, and very soon became one of the most famous marxist critics coloured by humanism.
Commitment creating
Berger began his literary career not as an essay, but with a novel, A Painter of Our Time, which he wrote in 1956, published in 1958 and which was very controversial, even, in an interview with the newspaper The Guardian, he explained that the book had been the result of its coexistence with a group of political refugees from fascism, each of which had its story to tell about Budapest, Berlin and Vienna.
Considered one of the writers most influential of his generation, in the same year that he published ways of looking, Berger returned to fiction with G, picaresque novel of an experimental character, with which he won the Booker prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
In 1972 he published his book of essays the most famous, ways of looking, which would then be turned into a tv series for the BBC.
The multi-faceted artist also collaborated as screenwriter with the director of swiss film by Alain Tanner on several films, including La Salamandre and Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000.
With the photographer Jean Mohr published the book Another Way of Telling, about the documentary technique and theory of photography. Other of his books were Art and RevolutionThe moment of cubism and other essays, Success and failure of Picasso, On the look, Copy, in The form of a pocket and The Trilogy: Of his labours, about the experience of the peasants of european emigrants to the city, which started to be published during the decade of the eighties and which also addressed the social change caused by the transit from rural to urban.
"Maybe my dislike for the political power, whatever its form, shows that I am a bad marxist. Intuitively I am always on the side of those whose lives are dominated by that power", used to comment on John Berger.
Just in may of 2015, Alfaguara published in Spanish in Rondo for Beverly, a work that began to be written a month after the death of his wife —Beverly Bancroft, in July 2013, when John Berger listening to a rondo of Beethoven that somehow bring him back.
The volume, which is illustrated with drawings of John Berger and his son, Yves, was transformed into a tribute that was committed to show the memory of the love and the possibilities of the memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment