BOOK REVIEW: John Berger and Me

“For two years we were all stuck at home. At first, I wrote without access to my library. The COVID blues meant no travel, but a flood of memories. This book came from that freedom.” Nikos Papastergiadis on writing John Berger and Me

Cover image, 'John Berger and Me' by Nikos Papastergiadis, Giramondo Publishing Company, 2024.

The measure of how much I enjoyed this book is that as I was reading it I was also compiling my list of Top Ten Books of the 21st Century for ABC Radio National’s poll of its audience. I placed John Berger and Me, 2024, by Nikos Papastergiadis in second place behind Wittgenstein’s Poker, 2001, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, just ahead of Peter Schjeldahl’s The Art of Dying, 2024, and Lori Waxman’s wonderful text on the history of psychogeography, Keep Walking Intently, 2017. 

The book begins, “John Berger will be 100 in 2026,’’ so it is a timely milestone for a publication. However, Papastergiadis soon qualifies this by saying, “John Berger was born in London and died at the age of ninety in the suburbs of Paris.” 

Yet for Papastergiadis (and I’d argue the grateful reader) Berger clearly lives on. Throughout this book of some 200 pages, Papastergiadis frequently addresses Berger in a direct conversational style as if they were still sitting in the farmhouse kitchen in the peasant village of the Haute-Savoie, Quincy, where Nikos spent many summer months with John throughout the 1990s. I switch here to occasionally using both men’s first names as it reflects the informal style of this wonderful book.  

The publishing world still argues about the difference between biography, autobiography, and memoir. John Berger and Me takes the discussion to a whole new level of complexity, like two strands of DNA in a dance between migrants and aesthetes. 

A memoir is often described as a discrete period of a person’s life, and we get this here with Nikos’s focus on the decade of the 1990s and the glorious summers they spent together. Not that Nikos is one for lying in the sun. To his mind “A holiday is when work is going well, a sunset is more satisfying when your body feels the worth of the day’s strain.” And yet, this is also a biography spanning Berger’s entire life as viewed through the lens of Papastergiadis—John writing the essays and BBC TV series Ways of Seeing, 1972, that changed the life of art students around the world. I well remember its ubiquity in the early 1970s at art school in Dundee. And this coincided with Berger winning the very first Man Booker Prize for his novel, G. in 1972, and the controversy when he donated half of the prize money to the London-based Black Panther movement. He was conflicted as he felt the sponsors of the Booker were involved in developing countries and environmental exploitation.  

But these twin strands of biography and memoir also tell a global migrant story. On page 180, Nikos gives a brief overview of scholars who have written incisively about the migrant experience through history: “Dante pointed out that when you leave home, everything seems to be odd, even the bread tastes different. . . . Nietzsche hated stay-at-home types. . . .  Calvino had a good nose for the smells of foreign streets. . . . Simmel noted that the stranger’s mentality was forever oscillating. . . .  John however chose to leave his native England . . .  no one has ever called him a migrant or a refugee. Was he an exile?” 

Berger home in Quincy, France, c. 1995. Photographed by Yves Berger

Nikos by contrast is the son of migrant peasants from Greece. He grew up in the Melbourne suburbs as part of a broader Greek community. At several points he strays back to childhood memories of Beating at school as his own ambivalence to many aspects of the Greek migrant experience on Melbourne. Writing of a community dance he attended with his father he says, “At these events, the music and food were usually rather ordinary. But everyone dressed like celebrities.”

If you are unfamiliar with Nikos’s writing, I can highly recommend his earlier volume Art and Friendship, 2020, in which he says, “Friendship between an artist and an art critic is seen as a threat to the objective evaluation of art.” And then he demolishes this viewpoint in a variety of logical and emotional ways including: “Friendship is a rugged kind of companionship that is akin to the spirit that Braque described in his partnership with Picasso while they were both working in the early phase of Cubism.”

The first chapter of this important book is called, The colour of the cosmos: John Berger on art and the mystery of creativity, and begins: “In a review of an exhibition of Paul Cézanne’s paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg, John ends with this fabulous quotation from the painter: ‘Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’”

Life was to get even more exciting. It was a university friend in Melbourne, Michael Healy, who gave Nikos a copy of Ways of Seeing, with its enigmatic Magritte painting on the cover. “The moment I started reading it my mind blew up. At last, I thought, a real comrade in art and politics.” A few years later when completing his doctorate in Cambridge, Nikos had another epiphany when a visiting professor, Teodor Shanin (who was staying in Newton’s room), suggested they give John a ring. “Fuck! He had Newton’s room, the cognac, and the direct line to God,” was Nikos’s response. It was the start of a decade of travelling to Berger’s remote peasant village, and his uncompromising mind.”

Book:
John Berger and Me
By Nikos Papastergiadis
Giramondo Publishing, 2024
ISBN: 9781923106123
RRP: $32.95

This article first appeared in Artist Profile Issue 73 under the title “Eating Badly but Dressing Like a Celebrity”

Dr Peter Hill is an artist, writer and curator.

Images courtesy of Nikos Papastergiadis and Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney

John Berger and Me is the winner of the Michael Crouch Award 2025