Self-Portrait of an Artist: The Hazards of a Life of the Mind

If the case of John Berger's debut novel, A Painter of Our Time, still enrages sixty-three years after its release in 1958, a writer's wrath especially might be attended by the smallest, wistful pang. An idea-driven meditation on the role of art and the artist in the modern world, the novel alternates between excerpts of a diary kept by a sixty-something Hungarian painter named Janos and the annotations to those writings made by his young British friend, John, who discovers the diary in the wake of Janos's sudden disappearance. Then in his early thirties, Berger drew heavily on his experience as a would-be painter, art critic, and friend to numerous of the exiled Eastern European artists who landed in England pre– and post–World War II. A Painter of Our Time returns inexorably to the knotted intersection of politics and creative expression. A former warrior for socialism, in his journal Janos works to parse the vision that guides him now, examining it against the imperatives of communist revolution, of a belief system hostile to the basic tenets of artistic pursuit: subjectivity, solitude, the painter's duty not to politics or party but to his own capabilities, "his inconclusive one-man struggle."

The reviews, Berger wrote in his 1988 afterword, were "catastrophic." Many of them cast the author as a totalitarian sympathizer, seizing on the narrator's support for a Hungarian communist leader. Cowed by the intensity of the critical response, after one month in print Berger's publisher withdrew the book. Cold War politicking prevailed over a minor but well-turned work of art. It was a lesson not in humility, Berger writes, but in "the pride that a modern writer needs to have here in the face of the media—whether they lick or bite."

Read today, the novel is startling mainly for the quality of its insights, the willingness of an author so young to hold his ideals up to such inventive and unflinching scrutiny. The ferocity of the response to this effort suggests, among other things, a set of intellectual and ideological stakes more covetable, perhaps, from a distance. Debate persists around political acts of censorship and cancellation, yet the average writer now contends with an even more outrageous prospect: that of his or her own irrelevance. It is this sense that seeds with nostalgia the notion of a work of art so incendiary that the establishment sought to bury it; and that now finds growing throngs of aspiring artists wandering the Escher-like maze of false doors and floating stairs where the establishment used to be.

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In some ways Berger's rude baptism aligned him with his protagonist, the painter whose long-awaited, well-received London-gallery showing sends him into a reverse exile—to resume the real-world fight, it is suggested, on the Iron Curtain's far side. If "the modern artist fights to contribute to human happiness, truth or justice," as Janos writes in his diary, we are meant to understand the painter's bind as both particular to him and representative of a larger threat. "Capitalist society is incapable of rewarding the artist," he writes, "incapable of granting true success." Berger leaves the terms of that success somewhat opaque, emphasizing the artist's wish to be useful, recognized; to connect and to prophesy; to make a man realize "that up to now he has forgotten something." These are ill-fated ambitions in an age of spectacle; yet everywhere artist types abound, redouble, proliferate. Janos, who makes a pittance teaching, grouses over the "dilettanti, who now take up art solely because they have what in the eighteenth century they would have been content...