Clark, meanwhile, found himself derided as Lord Clark of Civilisation. The spin-off book was never out of print. These demotic programmes turned Berger into the hero of a generation studying the burgeoning new university courses on European visual culture.

No approach to art could have been more different from Clark’s gentlemanly urbanity. In other words, art is a commodity and a woman in art is an object. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.” I would put it differently: to be naked is to be oneself to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. “In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. What he said in his characteristic tone of sweet reasonableness was: Berger travelled as far as the hut in Ealing, west London where his programmes were filmed, and no farther. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which Kenneth Clark, its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had travelled 80,000 miles through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western world. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the arts pages of the New Statesman. The art critic, essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his television series Ways of Seeing.

John berger ways of seeing book