Art critic and author, Berger, dies aged 90

John Berger, the Booker-prize-winning novelist and visionary writer who helped transform the way a generation looked at and perceived art, has died aged 90.Berger had a profound effect on how visual art was appreciated with his book Ways of Seeing and the 1972 BBC television series based on it.In reaction to the news of his death, artist David Shrigley called Berger “the best ever writer on art”, and author Jeanette Winterson praised him as “an energy source in a depleted world”.Berger lived for many years in a remote farmhouse in the French Alps, to where the British Library’s Jamie Andrews had to travel when the institution acquired Berger’s literary archive in 2009.More recently he lived in Antony, a suburb of Paris. It was from there he gave one of his final interviews with the Observer’s Kate Kellaway, giving his view, among other things, on the bigger picture around the Brexit vote. “It seems to me that we have to return, to recapitulate what globalisation meant, because it meant that capitalism, the world financial organisations, became speculative and ceased to be first and foremost productive, and politicians lost nearly all their power to take political decisions – I mean politicians in the traditional sense. Nations ceased to be what they were before.”Berger was a lifelong Marxist, a vehement critic of capitalism.  His picaresque novel G won the Booker prize in 1972. Subsequent winners of the prize are routinely asked what they are going to do with the generous prize money and no-one has been able to better what Berger did. Disdainful of Booker McConnell’s historical association with indentured labour in the Caribbean, he said he would donate half the cash to the British Black Panthers, who were “the black movement with the socialist and revolutionary perspective that I find myself most in agreement with in this country”.