John Berger, a Critical Quarterly special issue

Some free material for curious readers

For those interested in migration, transcendence, food, drawing, animals, time, Picasso, medicine, reporting, book design, politics, feminism. . .

I have edited a journal issue about the work and legacy of John Berger, free to read (link and cast list below).

It was originally intended to mark a pair of anniversaries – fifty years of G., which won the Booker Prize, and the book and TV series Ways of Seeing – but Berger kept on spoiling this plan. His achievement led in too many directions. I then hit on the period from 1965 until 1975, from The Success and Failure of Picasso to the first product of the migrant research he funded from his Booker winnings, A Seventh Man, and encompassing not just his best-known novel and art-historical intervention but A Fortunate Man and Art and Revolution, his study of the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, and essays such as ‘The Moment of Cubism’, ‘The Worst is Not Yet’ (later ‘Francis Bacon and Walt Disney’), and ‘Turner and the Barber’s Shop’. This seemed to constitute, if not a mini-oeuvre, then a manageable epoch. I even felt a little guilty for stretching the timeframe to consider Berger's short article on the eaters and eaten, a rich site for study, but which didn’t appear in the Guardian until Saturday 3 January 1976. But once I started commissioning articles, I discovered that to consider his writing on an individual artist or theme always involved casting far and wide. And so my neatly curated issue ended up as a miscellany. I experienced a moment of vindication late in the process when I saw that Berger himself, in an essay that appeared thirty years after my initial cut-off point, was happy to present what he had been doing in ad hoc terms:

What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told. I picture myself not so much a consequential, professional writer, as a stop-gap man.

It seems a neat summary of Berger’s voracity and versatility, attributes which the issue aspires to reflect and celebrate.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678705/2023/65/1

Marina Warner

Joshua Craze

Ben Lerner

Jonathan Nunn

Henry Hitchings

Sophie Elmhirst

George Prochnik

Anna Hartford

Rebecca Liu

Lamorna Ash

Matthew Holman

Rye Dag Holmboe

Henry Mance

Maria Horvei