NEW YORK — John Berger, the British art critic, Marxist intellectual and prodigious author whose pioneering 1972 book and the BBC series it spawned, “Ways of Seeing,” ushered in a political perspective to art criticism, died Monday. He was 90.

Simon McBurney, the British actor and a friend of Berger’s, told The Associated Press that Berger died at his home in the Paris suburb of Antony. Berger had been ill for about a year, McBurney said.

Berger was the author of art criticism, novels, poetry, screenplays and many less classifiable books. He consistently, provocatively challenged traditional interpretations of art and society and the connections between the two.