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Before he was a critic and novelist, John Berger began his career as a painter. Throughout the s, he exhibited works in galleries across London. Along with painting, he formed associations with the Communist Party of Great Britain early in his career: although he never formally joined the party, he was closely tied to the broader communist movement, and his Marxist values would underlie his artistic work for the rest of his career.

His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was released in , but it was immediately taken out of publication due to pressure from the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded liberal anti-communist organization.

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Berger soon became fed up with life in the U. A decade later, he filmed Ways of Seeing for the BBC, publishing a book of the same name as a companion to the miniseries. Most of the other books he published throughout this time were fiction, though he also wrote on sociology, including A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe. Throughout the later part of his career, Berger wrote primarily about the relationship between politics, art, photography, and memory.

He also wrote art criticism regularly for the New Statesman and New Yorker , infusing his art-historical analysis with a healthy dose of Marxist radicalism. Berger passed away in , to the immense sadness of the leftist art criticism community. In an obituary in Artforum, he was called "the least boring writer on art there has ever been. Even nearly fifty years after Ways of Seeing 's publication, many of the ideas Berger expressed in the text remain controversial, impressive for their relevance to the contemporary leftist discourse.

Entitled Civilization , the series sketched out a concise, simple approach to art history, positing that every work of art can be understood by an adequate Remember me. Forgot your password?