John Berger: Art and Property Now
Exhibition
September – November 2012
Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing, Strand Campus
‘Art and Property Now is a lightning tour through a unique career.’
The Independent ****
‘Archive exhibitions are rarely thrilling, but something of Berger’s magnetism and sincerity comes across here.’
The Spectator
'stunning'
OpenDemocracy
'Fascinating tour around art & the left from 1940 to the present'
Keith Flett
Art and Property Now brought together unseen highlights from John Berger’s personal archive, with artworks connected to his life as a storyteller, artist and critic. The exhibition spanned his entire career from his 1940s drawings to the 2009 collaboration with Artangel and Alan Kane, Life Class: Today’s Nude.
2012 marked the 40th anniversary of two of Berger's key works: Ways of Seeing (1972), the collaborative series of films and book which changed the way we understand art and its private and public ownership, an essay from which the exhibition borrows its title, and Berger's novel G., for which he won the Booker Prize, sharing half the proceeds with the Black Panthers.
Presented by King’s College London and the British Library, and curated by Tom Overton, cataloguer of the John Berger archive, the exhibition wasdrawn together through close communication with many of Berger's key collaborators.
A free public programme of events ran in support of this exhibition.
The exhibition closed with Redrawing the Maps, a week-long, open programme of conversations and workshops in which the public were invited to revisit the paths which Berger’s work has opened up and follow them in new directions.
Including pieces from Artangel, Artevents, the Arts Council, The British Library, John Christie, Prunella Clough, Complicite, Delia Derbyshire, Mike Dibb, Eva Figes, Peter de Francia, B. S. Johnson, Alan Kane, Leon Kossoff, Fernand Léger, Simon McBurney, Jean Mohr, Peter Peri and Tom Waits
Presented by King's College London and the British Library. It was supported by the university's Culture team.