John Berger, pioneering art critic and author, dies at 90

A British art critic, Marxist intellectual and prodigious author whose pioneering 1972 book and the BBC series it spawned, “Ways of Seeing,” ushered in a political perspective to art criticism has died. John Berger was 90.

Simon McBurney, a British actor and a friend of Berger’s, told the Associated Press that Berger died Monday at his home in the Paris suburb of Antony. McBurney said Berger had been ill for about a year.

Berger was the author of art criticism, novels, poetry, screenplays and many less classifiable books. He consistently challenged traditional interpretations of art and society and connections between the two. When he won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel “G,” he pledged to give half his reward to the Black Panthers.

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