21 Facts About John Berger

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet.

John Berger's grandfather was from Trieste, 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.

John Berger served in the British Army during the Second World War from 1944 to 1946.

John Berger enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design in London.

John Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited works at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s.

John Berger's art has been shown at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester Galleries in London.

John Berger later became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman.

John Berger was never a formal member of the Communist Party of Great Britain : rather he was a close associate of it and its front, the Artists' International Association, until the latter disappeared in 1953.

John Berger was active in the Geneva Club, a discussion group that appears to have overlapped with British communist circles in the 1950s.

In 1958, Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, which tells the story of the disappearance of Janos Lavin, a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and his diary's discovery by an art critic friend called John.

John Berger moved to Quincy in the Haute-Savoie, France, in 1962 due to his distaste for life in Britain.

John Berger donated half the Booker cash prize to the British Black Panthers, and retained half to support his work on the study on migrant workers that became A Seventh Man, asserting that both endeavors represented aspects of his political struggle.

In 1974, John Berger co-founded the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Ltd in London with Arnold Wesker, Lisa Appignanesi, Richard Appignanesi, Chris Searle, Glenn Thompson, Sian Williams, and others.

In later essays, John Berger wrote about photography, art, politics, and memory.

John Berger published in The Shape of a Pocket a correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos, and penned short stories that appeared in The Threepenny Review and The New Yorker.

In Bento's Sketchbook John Berger combines extracts from Baruch Spinoza, sketches, memoir, and observations in a book that contemplates the relationship of materialism to spirituality.

In 1999, John Berger voiced both twin brother characters Archie and Albert Crisp in the video game Grand Theft Auto: London 1969.

John Berger was a member of the Support Committee of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

John Berger married three times, first to artist and illustrator Patt Marriott in 1949; the marriage was childless and the couple divorced.

John Berger died at his home in Antony, France, on 2 January 2017 at the age of 90.

In July 2009 John Berger donated his archive of 369 files, nine boxes and one book to the British Library.