Biography

John Peter Berger was born in London in 1926, art critic, painter and writer. Among his best known works are G., winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1972 and the trial of an introduction to art criticism, Ways of seeing.

John Berger is the son of a Jew who converted to Christianity and to whom the service as an officer in the infantry in the British Army during “World War I” took him the desire to become a priest, but not the faith. From his father, saids Berger's own, inherited talent for painting and a certain soldier moral which has always tried to imitate. "Contrary to what happens to me with many actual politicians, whom I find impossible to respect, I respect the soldiers, because they are aware of the consequences of what they do," he told EPS. In the same interview he added, "If my mother is so close to me is because during my childhood, and as an adult, always left me be very free."

At age 16 he ran away from St. Edward's School in Oxford decided to study art "and see naked women." He earned a scholarship to study at the Central School of Art "in London, although few years later he would join in the British army, where he served from 1944-1946. After the war, takes up his studies at the 'Chelsea School of Art "with another scholarship, this time awarded by the army itself. Between 1948 and 1955 taught drawing at the same school where Henry Moore tagught sculpture classes. During that period he makes links with the British Communist Party and will soon begin publishing articles in the Tribune, where he wrote under the strict supervision of George Orwell. In 1951 began a period of collaboration with the magazine New státem, collaboration that would last up to ten years and which is revealed as a Marxist art critic and defender of realism. In 1960, is published Permanent Red, volume that will pick up a selection of articles published in New Stateman.

When he was thirty he decided to stop painting to dadicate completely to writing, not because he strives for his talent as a painter, but because the urgency of the political situation in which he lived (the Cold War) appeared to call him to put to write. In 1958 he published his first novel, A painter of our time. It recounts the life of a Hungarian painter in exile in London. The clear political commitment to the novel and the realism with which he narrated, always in first in-person, made a lot of people to think that it was an intimate diary and not a fiction one. The book was on sale for a month, after which the publisher, Seck & Worburg, withdrew the novel from bookstores. Later he had known that such a withdrawal was carried out under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an association of anticommunist lawyers.

But Berger continued writing, novels, essays, articles in newspapers, poetry, film scripts, along with Alain Tanner, and even plays, and in the meantime decided to emigrate voluntarily to a village in the French Alps. Has been published many times that what caused that self-exile was the vocation of being a "European writer," although later Berger has confessed he failed to feel at home at the London of thus time, a city in which it did not appear to fit.

In 1972 the BBC broadcast a television series that was accompanied by the publication of the text modes of seeing, which marked a whole generation of art critics, has become a textbook in British schools and taking borrowed many ideas from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction technology, the article by Walter Benjamin, 1936. And that same year, Berger, unexpectedly won the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel G., raising special stir his decision to donate half the amount of the prize to the British Black Panther Party

Throughout the eighties will publish the unique staggered From their fatigues trilogy, in which he worked for fifteen years and which addresses the change we are experiencing with the transition from rural to urban life. In Puerca earth has announced an investigation into a lifestyle that takes less than a century to disappear, peasant life. Once in Europe recounts the love that creates a life well and, finally, in Lilac and Flag go to the next generation to an existence in the great cosmopolitan city. But the research extends into the formal reading and we witness the search for a voice with which to relate this exceptional event of humankind.
In the selection of topics on which he writes, John Berger has continued until today demonstrating its commitment to writing as a means of political struggle. So you can see, for example, the size of a bag, which includes a correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos, in Towards the wedding, which focuses on AIDS, or King, a story of the life of the homeless, Apart from their active collaboration as a columnist for the press in many countries. Although over the years has taken some distance from old political positions, for example in respect of its support for the Soviet regime, recently finished an article published in The conference, entitled "Where to find our place," saying: "Yes, among many other things, I'm still a Marxist."

Información obtenida de: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger