John Berger and Katya Berger
Novelist, poet, essayist, art critic, scriptwriter (for Alain Tanner), painter... Through this non-exhaustive list, it is an entire life dedicated to life and literature that appears, but one that cannot sum up John Berger, an unclassifiable artist.
Born in London in 1926, holding a fine arts degree, he decided, 40 years ago, to live in Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie. He could be imagined being intentionally withdrawn and secretive, whereas he has constantly travelled and taken the pulse of the world as well as man. His support for the Black Panthers – to whom he offered half the money he received in 1972 for his prestigious Booker Prize –, his meetings with Subcomandante Marco and the Palestinian militants fit in with his loyalty to the principles of solidarity and fraternity with those “without power”, the oppressed, the resistance fighters, all those who fight the new world order imposed by what he calls “economic fascism”.
It is as a writer, a poet, that he takes responsibility for this engagement. It is through the intermediary of the fiction his imagination produces, that he tackles subjects that are of vital importance to him, persuaded that words are weapons and books “political acts” to notably talk about our urgent need for love and art. Love and art, that fertilize his life like all of his writings. Whether he evokes a painting by Picasso, exile, the decline of the peasants' world or he recounts how love can survive behind prison walls, the quality of his prose, the simplicity with which he gives flesh to his ideas while not in the least renouncing the depth of his thinking, permits him to create a very direct link with his reader, as close as possible to his humanity.
Over 40 works show a scholar who knows how to share the subtlety of his view that is both critical and generous, among which are G, King, From Here There and From A to X, published by Éditions de l'Olivier, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, the trilogy In Their Work, composed of La Cocadrille, Play Me Something and Flame and Lilacs, published by Champ Vallon and See Him See, a founding essay published by Alain Moreau and The Seventh Man, a book created with the photographer Jean Mohr about the immigrant workers in Europe, published by François Maspero.
Simon McBurney adapted one of the short stories in La Cocadrille for the theatre under the title The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol. Ever since, he has worked very closely with John Berger.
Part of the latter's work was translated from English into French by his daughter Katya Berger, who is also a journalist, with whom he shares his love of art and words. Together, they published a work on the Geneva photographer Jean Mohr, Jean Mohr, Behind the Mirror, an essay on painting. Titian, the Nymph and the Shepherd and a conversation on Mantegna's painting Lying Down to Sleep, which serves as the basis of a reading-performance that they are presenting at the Festival d'Avignon.
JFP, April 2012