Simon Torracinta in Dissent:
“Every artist’s work changes when he dies,” the painter, critic, documentarian, and writer John Berger wrote of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti shortly after his death in 1966. “And finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive.” Nearly a decade after Berger’s death in 2017 at the age of 90, his own work has undergone a similar transformation.
In 1986 Geoff Dyer, for whom Berger was “the brightest figure in English intellectual life,” could still write that his “official standing as a writer is uncertain.” Today, Berger is practically ubiquitous. A fusillade of tributes are underway to mark his hundredth birthday on November 5. NYRB Classics have reissued several of his key works of fiction and criticism this year, with more to come, which supplement Verso’s extensive thirteen-volume Essential John Berger series, now with accompanying merch (“Art and Revolution” dad hats, anyone?) In New York this past summer, the magazine Film Comment organized screenings across the city of Berger’s film collaborations—with additional centenary events in London, Paris, Lausanne, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Tokyo. The documentarian Brett Story (The Prison in Twelve Landscapes; Union), meanwhile, is completing a full-length feature, The Production of the World, on Berger’s early work as critic amidst CIA influence on the arts in the Cold War.
Berger’s shadow, it seems, has only lengthened with his passing.
More here.
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