The british writer knew how to shine both in the critical as in the narrative by building their shelter between art, politics and literature
John Berger had served 90 years on the 5th of last November. Died yesterday in France, where he lived -latterly, on the outskirts of Paris – from the ’60s. There were No new reports of the causes, but in the last time the writer was physically overcome by the pains which reminded him of the passage of time on his back.
Novelist, critic, painter and poet, the british was the author of several fundamental books on new ways of looking at the art, think about the literature and to intervene in politics. Ways of seeing (1972), Look (1980), Pages of the wound (1994) and With hope between the teeth (2007) are some of those titles, lucky of fields of textual test, where coexisted the acuity, sensitivity and a curiosity that resembled the love for all the human creations. “I become aware that there is something that needs to be said -he said in an interview with John Cross published a little over a month in THE NATION-. It can be something big about the world or something about the appearance of a flower in a jar, for some reason or another. Sometimes I say to myself: “you May say another”. And sometimes the answer is: “Not if what you say will not be said.” And then I have to write.” This urgency is manifested in subtle ways in their texts, which were more than thirty, some of them in collaboration. They all seem to skim the imperfection deliberately, as if it were the attribute that best could designate the trade of living and of writing.
In 1942, Berger was admitted to the Central School of Fine Arts to become a painter, but soon he was summoned to fight in the Second World War. Once completed, he worked as a professor of drawing at Chelsea. I painted and made a living with commissions from publishers, and illustrations for magazines. Accepted a weekly column of art criticism in the New Statesman and the Tribune, edited by none other than George Orwell, whose ideological influence and literary is evident in all his work. So it was as he assumed an intense political activity for several years.
More notes to understand this topic
Library elementary: “If someone wants to know what I have said of every thing, go to the books”
A bunch of lights in a kaleidoscope
Although he never joined the Communist Party and denounced the ravages of stalinism, was called a marxist by the hunters of conscience british. It was. In 1960, he left England and began a career nomad by France, Switzerland and Italy. In 1972, Berger won the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel G. He donated half the prize to the Black Panthers, whose perspective socialist and libertarian openly supported. The rest used it to write A seventh man (1975),on migrant workers in his country, in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr.
While he lived in the French region of the Haute Savoie, he composed his trilogy of novels, his labours, part Sow earth (1979), once in Europe (1987) and Lilac and Flag (1990). The work, the tenderness and the meaning of the customs in the life of men always interested him, beyond the fashions of literature. “Literature has elevated herself to the rank of pure art. Or it is supposed to be. The truth is that the greater part of the literature, is already aimed at a public of elite or to the masses, has degenerated into pure fun”, he wrote in the epilogue to Sow earth. Your step-by Switzerland are the contributions made to the scripts of four films from director Alain Tanner.
In his first book, 1958, A painter of today -released in Argentina by Alfaguara-, Berger addresses the relationship between art and politics through the reflections of the protagonist, the artist Janos Lavin. Formed by journals of the character that a friend found after the disappearance of the artist, the novel serves to Berger to address the tensions between art and capitalism. “The more you destroy and corrupt bourgeois society the creative spirit of the people, the more rare will be the experience of creating imaginative, until the people end by believing that creativity is founded in a secret magic. The direct consequence of this is that you start looking for that secret on the private life of the artist; a search doomed to failure, because in fact “the secret” is of a simplicity colossal”, he wrote.
The label Interzona announced for this year, the publication of Combines, a collection of essays on the power of language, reflections on Albert Camus, globalization and notes autobiographical that relate to the feeling of orphanhood that Berger, despite the fact that their parents lived, had from childhood.
the reflections of The writer on the dimension of artistic creation in human activities are of a beauty and a mystery to be enormous. “Visibility is a way of growth”, he wrote in one of the essays in The sense of sight. “Twenty years ago, I started to read it and I never stopped to follow him -he said to THE NATION Florencia Abbate-. It was always for me a writer very intimate and adoring, one of those strange authors who actually do want to. Unique as few, his work does not conform to any one genre, so perhaps the form most suitable for him has been the essay, a form that is not allowed to define the whole.”
Angela Pradelli was a friend of Berger for years. Visited him in Quincy, the rural village of France where the writer lived until the death of his wife. Rondo for Beverly (2015), in collaboration with his son Yves, addressed the experience of that duel. “It is sad that it has died John Berger, that sadness that we sink into when you are a teacher -says the author. There are people that die and are dragged to a world. Berger was holding a universe of delicate, had discovered how the earth, and the words are united, and that was the matter of his books. Maybe today is the close of this world in which the peasants entered with his hands hardened by the tools with which to work the land. Today hurt the most their Pages of the wound.“
Recently, Berger was honored in his country with the publication of Landscapes: John Berger on Art and Portraits: John Berger on Artists, which brings together profiles of Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock. It was first performed, in addition, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, a series of four chapters, one directed by the actress Tilda Swinton, where he considers a mentor, artistic, and a beloved father figure. In the essay, “Twelve theses on the economy of the dead”, wrote: “What is the relationship of the dead with what has not yet happened, with the future? All of the future is the construction in which it works your imagination.” Since yesterday, the imagination that the work of Berger treasures works to that future.
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