John Berger

John Berger, an artist, Booker-prize-winning novelist "and visionary writer who helped transform the way a generation looked at and perceived art," died January 2, the Guardian reported. He was 90. Berger "had a profound effect on how visual art was appreciated with his book Ways of Seeing and the 1972 BBC television series on which it was based."

Actor and director Simon McBurney, who collaborated with Berger on several projects over the years, tweeted: "Listener, grinder of lenses, poet, painter, seer. My Guide. Philosopher. Friend. John Berger left us this morning. Now you are everywhere."

Although Ways of Seeing was Berger's "apotheosis as a popularizer," the Guardian noted that in the same year he also won "the Booker prize, the James Tait Black Memorial prize and the Guardian Fiction prize with his novel G, and also published, with his frequent collaborator the photographer Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man, a sensitive documentary account of a country doctor on his daily round in Gloucestershire. These three books began to sketch out the areas of Berger's lifetime enterprise."

Berger's many books include Landscapes: John Berger on Art; Portraits; About Looking; Bento's Sketchbook; Shape of the Pocket; Selected Essays; To the Wedding; and the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours.

The New York Times noted that Berger "returned again and again to the essay, the bedrock of his reputation, whose underlying theme was almost always the impossibility of disentangling the aesthetic from the moral: A 1992 piece described the annual task of mucking the pit beneath his outhouse, an odious job but one that offered many of the same lessons that great art had taught him."

In a tribute to Berger posted in the Verso Books blog, Andy Merrifield wrote: "John's whole life represents a species of eternity; his art lies beyond duration, beyond space. A lightness of touch, resembling the 'geometrical' deftness of Spinoza's Ethics, lies everywhere in his work: the culmination of all those years of restless activity, of writing and thinking, of drawing and riding, of meeting and discussing. The finally-achieved 'blessedness' and mortality of Spinoza's 'third level of knowledge,' knowledge that John spent 90 years searching for."

Penguin Books U.K. editorial director Tom Penn, who worked closely with Berger for many years, told the Bookseller: "With John Berger’s passing, we have lost one of the great storytellers of our times, one of the most vital voices in British, European and international culture of the last half century. His work--sharply attentive, pungent, sensuous, constantly questioning--seems to share a secret with us, the secret of the human condition itself. It’s difficult to find words to say how much we’ll miss his warmth, his openness and his friendship. His work will remain our companion, inspirational and full of hope."