British critic and author John Berger dies aged 90
The Booker-prize winning author was ill for about a year and died at his home in a Paris suburb.
The author of criticism, novels, poetry, screenplays and many less classifiable books, Berger had considerable influence as a late 20th-century thinker.
John Berger, the British art critic and Booker-prize winning author, passed away in Paris on Monday. He was 90.
Berger had been ill for about one year and breathed his last at his home in Antony, a suburb in Paris, said his friend Simon McBurney who is a British actor.
Listener, grinder of lenses, poet, painter, seer. My Guide. Philosopher. Friend. John Berger left us this morning. Now you are everywhere.
— Simon McBurney (@SimonMcBurney) January 2, 2017
His pioneering 1972 book and the BBC series it spawned, "Ways of Seeing," redefined the way a generation saw art.
The author of criticism, novels, poetry, screenplays and many less classifiable books, Berger had considerable influence as a late 20th-century thinker.
He consistently, provocatively challenged traditional interpretations of art and society and the connections between the two.
Born to a middle-class London family on Nov. 5, 1926, Berger never attended university. He was drafted into the British Army in 1944 and was dispatched to Northern Ireland.
After the army, he joined the Chelsea School of Art. He began as a painter, later taught drawing and eventually began writing criticism for the New Statesman. But his studies later expanded significantly into other realms.
Copyright © 2024 TRT World.