“When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.”

English art critic, novelist, painter and poet

John Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He lived from 1926 to 2017, and spent more than fifty years in France. He is best known for his writing on art and for fiction that won wide attention, especially his Booker Prize winning novel G. Berger’s essay collection Ways of Seeing, written alongside the BBC series of the same name, became a landmark in art criticism and is still widely read. His work moves between visual culture, fiction and poetry, often returning to questions of how art is seen and understood.