Werner Berg

(1904-1981)

Germany / Austria – Expressionism – Werner Berg

Vita:

Even as a child, Werner Berg was convinced that he wanted to become a painter. Due to the poor economic conditions after the First World War, he decided at the age of 19 to study commercial and political science in Cologne. After only a year he moved to Vienna and continued his studies there, where he successfully completed it together with his fellow student Amalie Kuster, whom he later married. After graduating, he finally began to pursue his childhood dream and studied with Karl Sterrer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. During this further training he decided to leave Vienna in 1929 and continued his studies at the Munich Academy. In the course of this time he was given a master’s atelier and enjoyed friendly support from Emil Nolde. Werner Berg broke off his desired studies and decided together with his wife, Amalie, to move to the Carinthian Unterland, where they bought the Rutarhof together. In his new domicile he worked as a farmer and painter. This union of two different professions underlined his motto that art and life form a unit. In his pictures you could exactly understand this conviction, as they were often shaped by rural motifs and impressions of everyday life.

Work:

Werner Berg managed to become known early in Germany after only a few exhibitions. His style didn’t just get positive reviews. In 1935 one of his staff was even blocked by the police, and one of his works was shown at the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. In the later 30s, his style of representation became more vivid and descriptive. His intensely colored pictures, influenced by Expressionism, represent the landscape and life of his adopted home in Carinthia in a unique way. The 2015 special exhibition „Paths through the country – Werner Berg and folk art“, which takes place in the Werner Berg Museum in Bleiburg, follows Werner Berg’s routes through Carinthia and uses striking individual examples to convey how many suggestions from high and popular culture have flowed into his work. He brought the principle of two-dimensional representation to a special breakthrough not only in paintings but also in his numerous woodcuts. In 1947 Werner Berg became a member of the Art Club and sent his woodcuts to its first exhibition in the Neue Galerie in Vienna. „As far as I look at modern graphics in Austria, I don’t find anything that can be compared with your woodcuts. They are a human work that touches me deeply, in its effect on me similar to the best European short prose. For me they are today the great exception of artists: your relationships to things that have not yet been described and are ignored by day, have bright life, in the light of heaven and in the shadow of the earth, – your relationships to the dark and dark side of life, on which everything actually only begins to speak where every stone has a mouth and every leaf has a movable eye, are more obvious. I think you hear „things“ more often than people talk. Hence your wonderful power, which paints your pictures and around them I envy you completely ”, that’s how Michael Guttenbrunner described the artist’s talent.