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THE DOYENS of the 1950s art world, gallerists, critics, and artists alike, often flush with the CIA’s anticommunist cash, kept politics at bay by emphasizing the autonomy and neutrality of art. As an art critic for The New Statesman who refused to keep politics out of art, he found himself at the center of controversy after controversy.

Joshua Sperling’s A Writer of Our Time, the first biography of John Berger to appear since his death, begins in the midst of this exciting period. Still in his 20s, Berger was metamorphosing from student at the Chelsea School of Art into a prominent art critic. Sperling’s biography focuses on Berger’s work, keeping his personal life an embroidery at the edge of the narrative.

“The name of his cause http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0003/549/MI0003549188.jpg?partner=allrovi.com” alt=”best asian hookup app 2016″>,” writes Sperling, “was realism; opposing it was modernism.” Realism was the official aesthetic of the Communist Party in several countries, but though he was sympathetic to the Party, Berger championed realism for his own aesthetic reasons. When he was an art student, Sperling tells us, Berger was influenced by the Euston Road School, “a short-lived prewar academy that had favoured tradition, naturalism and the ‘poetry in the everyday’.” His own art followed that pattern, with a special focus on paintings of people engaged in ordinary work. Then, as an art critic, he promoted a set of young British realists who exhibited similar tendencies. They came to be called the Kitchen Sink painters.

First, A Painter of Our Time, in which an artist grapples with his relationship to leftist politics, and eventually the Booker-winning G

In Berger’s opinion, art communicated to a viewer what seeing had disclosed to an artist. Seeing was the ever-fruitful source of art, and severing art from that source was a dead end. Berger clung to this axiom for his entire life, and it led him in a surprising variety of directions.