John Berger in His Own Bruised Time
The late novelist and art critic asked Tom Overton to wait to write his biography until after his death. The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so.
These days, we tend to take his ideas for granted: that art — making it or contemplating it — creates knowledge. That by foregrounding the processes by which we see, we can discover the mechanisms and deceptions through which we make meaning. And, of course, that it’s important to know who is footing the bill. John Berger, who died in 2017, was famous not for challenging the Western canon but for making its revelations feel so evidently connected to everything else about life. His essays often read like personal letters, offering to us the gift of our own passions and imaginations.
Berger was an electric presence in the 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing, in which he appears to be standing in a museum, a kind of anarchist-angel with his unruly curls and groovy white shirt, slicing a detail out of a Botticelli with a box-cutter. This is revealed to be an illusion: The “museum” is in fact a television studio set, and the Botticelli is a reproduction. Berger was making a point about how technology changed the way we interact with images, but the subtext is clear: that he was there to cut through exclusionary and pedantic framings that, even a half-century later, persist in giving art a cordoned-off quality.
A new biography, Tom Overton’s John Berger: From Life (2026), is less interested in applying the critic and Booker Prize-winning novelist’s ideas to our cultural moment, in which human creativity is vampirically extracted and homogenized by artificial intelligence, than it is in fixing him within his own bruised 20th century, shaped by modernization and imperialism. Overton and Berger met in 2009, when he donated his archive to the British Library; Overton edited two collections of Berger’s writing on art (Portraits: John Berger on Artists and Landscapes: John Berger on Art) and co-edited a collection of his essays on miners, The Underground Sea. Berger, whom Overton refers to as “John” throughout, granted the author permission to write his biography after his death.
The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so. In laying his thematic groundwork, Overton tells two stories. One is about Berger’s father, who, in the aftermath of World War I, remained in France to supervise the identification and transfer of fallen soldiers’ remains, “trying to give order and meaning to death.” The other draws from Berger’s memories as a teenager during the Blitz. Each month, he and his girlfriend would walk through bombed-out London to the National Gallery, where a single masterpiece at a time was shown — a lesson in survival “by our wits and with the Old Masters,” as Berger put it.
