Influential British art critic and prize-winning author John Berger, a self-declared revolutionary who controversially backed the far-left Black Panthers, has died aged 90, his son told AFP Tuesday. Berger was best known for his art criticism essay "Ways Of Seeing", written to accompany a BBC television series, which is credited with changing the way people viewed art.
He also won the 1972 Booker Prize for Fiction for his experimental novel "G.", set in pre-World War I Europe. Berger died on Monday in the Paris suburb of Antony, his son Jacob said. "He died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family," he said. He had lived in France since the 1970s.
Berger was born in London in 1926. After serving in the British army, he enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art, becoming a painter. He then taught drawing from 1948 to 1955, becoming a noted art critic from 1952 onwards, according to his French publishers, Les Editions de l'Olivier. He wrote about artists including Pablo Picasso, Titian, Paul Cezanne and Gustave Courbet.
"Ways of Seeing", a highly influential criticism of Western cultural aesthetics, originally aired in 1972 as a four-part BBC television series and was subsequently published as a book. "Art and the wider world seemed to make more sense after watching Berger on the BBC, with his piercing blue eyes, steady delivery and groovy seventies shirt, eloquently explain perspective or the idealisation of the nude," wrote Mark Brown, arts correspondent for Britain's Guardian newspaper.
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