Oddly enough, what I find most appealing about this slim paperback is its awkward layout. Set in Univers 75 black, the heavy text jars you out of your comfort zone, frays your nerves, and wears down your resistance with short forcible sentences, until you surrender, bleary-eyed and furrowed brow, to the logic of its Marxist and feminist analysis.

To illustrate the various arguments made by the author, muddy black-and-white reproductions of Western masterpieces consort with tacky advertising images from the early 1970s, a dreadful period in terms of aesthetics. None of those visuals are captioned, though some are identified in the margins. Yet, somehow, for reasons I will try to explain below, Ways of Seeing is a marvelous book.

Influenced by Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it attempts to expose a conspiracy that has kept the work of artists, and the ideologies their images promote, out of the political discourse. Adapted from a four-part BBC television series, it is a direct transcription of Berger’s script, and it reads as such, as a series of declarative sentences and short emphatic statements. A British painter as well as a novelist, a poet, and art critic, Berger speaks confidently about topics that are familiar to him. His point of view is always based on experience—on what it feels like to paint, observe, touch, watch, look, see, and be seen.

For him, a masterpiece by Frans Hals is a record of what it must have felt like for the destitute old Dutch painter to portray dour rich folks who looked down on him as a pauper. He argues that the painting is not, as some art critics would have us believe, “a wonderful depiction of the human condition”—a statement he dismissed as yet another sanctimonious art appreciation platitude.

On the chapter of women’s place in the visual culture, he is even more adamant. “A woman must continually watch herself,” he writes. “She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Traditional art museums are filled with paintings, sculptures, and drawings documenting the way men look at women: as possessors, collectors, masters, lechers, voyeurs, and judges. Apparently docile and compliant, the gorgeous creatures portrayed in the buff are the reflection of this masculine sense of entitlement.

Though he admires the skills of artists who can move us with masterful representations of beautiful things, Berger insists that the main reason rich merchants collected—and still collect—priceless art pieces is “to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy . . . how it will reward the touch, the hand of the owner.”

Ten years before he elaborated the script of the Ways of Seeing series, Berger had voluntarily exiled himself to an isolated rural community in France where he was able to observe and write about farmers and migrant workers. This could explain why the design of the book is so raw and gritty. Berger tracks ideas the way peasants push their plow. He leaves no clump of dirt unturned, and only stops when our field of vision is completely covered with deep parallel furrows.