John Berger (London, 1926-Antony, France, 2017) is one of those intellectuals of the 20th century who today seem impossible. Combative and erudite, a staunch Marxist with a highly refined artistic taste, politically militant and intellectually sophisticated, select and popular, Berger achieved, like a contemporary colleague of his who was also an art critic, Robert Hughes, a feat currently inconceivable: to surround himself with an aura of fame without selling out his rigor, squandering his prestige, or allowing his ideas to be adulterated or his priorities to be altered. Both Berger and Hughes achieved fame thanks to two cultural milestones of television, Ways of Seeing (1972) and The Shock of the New (1980), respectively, which brought the visual arts to the general public in a didactic but, at the same time, serious and expert way. What matters, in any case, is that, beyond the television glory, neither Berger nor Hughes ever stopped doing above all what for them were the main tasks: looking, thinking, writing. It is partly for this reason that everything they wrote still seems to us at least interesting.