John Berger, author and critic, 1926-2017

The most frequent comment made of John Berger, who died in Paris on Monday at the age of 90, is that he saw clearly, with a passion to understand and to communicate his way of seeing to others.

Ways of Seeing, commissioned after his decade of reviewing art for the New Statesman, was a 1972 BBC series, and later a book, on how to look at and what to look for in art.

He insisted, then and throughout his long life, that art’s subjects should not be simply a matter for gazing but for inquiring into the hidden attitudes of the painter and the times: and the depiction, often unconsciously rendered, of power relationships. He found that especially true in the use of women subjects — generally, Berger believed, more as projections of men’s desires than existing in their own right.

Berger was born in north London in 1926 to a Hungarian émigré father and an English mother. Sent to St Edward’s School in Oxford at the age of six — he later described his 10 years there as “torture” — he left to do national service at the end of the second world war. Then came art school, where he discovered Marx and the Marxists, his constant tutors for the rest of his life.

Ways of Seeing, a radical’s reply to the patrician Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series broadcast in 1969, made him moderately famous: but rather than take advantage of that fame, he left the UK to live for the rest of his life in France.

Much of that was spent in a remote village in the Haute-Savoie. He told the journalist Kate Kellaway: “I worked pretty hard, doing exactly the same things as the peasants, working with them. This landscape was part of my energy, my body, my satisfaction and discomfort. I loved it not because it was a view — but because I participated in it.”

Participating was what he wished to do, in his appreciation of art as in his life, entering into the creative act of the past to give a sense of its meaning and importance in the present. His friend, the literary scholar John Barrell, said of his criticism that “at his very best, Berger can describe a painting, can evoke the aura emanating from the objects it represents, with such eloquence that it can inspire us, or me at least, with universal longings”.

He could at times be dogmatically anti-capitalist, saying capitalism “became speculative and ceased to be first and foremost productive, and politicians lost nearly all their power to take decisions”. But his work — criticism, essays, novels — sought to experience and convey a deeper understanding of how ordinary, often poor and heavily exploited, people, work and live. The 1980s trilogy of novels, Into Their Labours, evokes with great clarity the life of the peasantry he had come to understand in the Haute-Savoie.

In the introduction to the first book of the trilogy, Pig Earth, he writes that the relationship of the peasant to the dominant classes “was often heretical and subversive. ‘Don’t run away from anything,’ says the Russian peasant proverb. But don’t do anything.’ The peasant’s universal reputation for cunning is a recognition of this secretive and subversive tendency.”

His novel G, a romance set against the pre-first world war years in central Europe, won the Booker prize in 1972. In keeping, in his view, with the roots of the Booker sponsor in colonialism, he gave half the award to the Black Panther party, retaining the rest for his own work with migrant workers.

Ever prolific, he worked with photographers, especially the Swiss Jean Mohr, with whom he produced half a dozen books. He wrote scripts for, and occasionally appeared in, films — once, in Play Me Something, with his friend Tilda Swinton. His was a life of constant exploration, and its most vivid productions were his ways of seeing, his close and sympathetic attention.

John Lloyd