Susan Sontag once wrote that “in contemporary English letters he seems to me peerless.” Stephen Spender, on the other hand, called him “a foghorn in a fog” (a condemnation that Mr. Berger wryly spun into a compliment, asking what could be more useful in a fog). The critic Hilton Kramer complained that his brand of Marxism was not about real political problems but about provoking “social guilt among the comfortable, cultivated consumers of high culture.”

John Peter Berger was born in London on Nov. 5, 1926, and raised in only moderate comfort, with little high culture, in what he described as a working-class home.

His father, Stanley, a minor public official, and his mother, Miriam, managed to send him to private school, but he hated it and spent most of his time writing poetry and reading an anarchist weekly newspaper. He ran away from school at 16 and began studying art, continuing at Chelsea School of Art, now Chelsea College of Arts, after a stint in the Army.

Mr. Berger (pronounced BER-jer) wanted to be a painter but found that he was much better at writing. For a decade he was an art critic for The New Statesman, where he made a name for himself by antagonizing nearly everyone in the art world in prose that was beautifully spare and precise but heavily moralizing and also frequently humorless.

He was a champion of realism during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, and he took on giants like Jackson Pollock, whom he criticized as a talented failure for being unable to “see or think beyond the decadence of the culture to which he belongs.”

But his love for favorite artists — among them Rembrandt, Velázquez, van Gogh and Frida Kahlo — was expressed with a fervor and depth of intelligence matched by few critics of his generation.