Contemporary Art

Born the 4 november 1899 in St. Petersburg , Russia. He died 14 december 1972 in Roma.
He fled with his family to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. His basic training was in Germany, Switzerland and France (apart from a brief residence in St Petersburg in 1914?18, when he received lessons in art from the painter Pavel Naumov and the architect Sergey Gruzenberg)...In 1919 he enrolled at the Acadmie Ranson in Paris, attending courses under Edouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis, with Pierre Bonnard and felix Vallotton. Two years later he exhibited at the Galerie Druet, Paris. By 1925 he had designed theater sets for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Along with Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Bérard, and his own brother, Leonid Berman, he formed a group known as the Neo-Romantics and Surrealism. In this context Berman painted poetic subject matter in reaction to Cubism and Futurism. He was fascinated by lonely figures amidst ruins and explored with De Chirico the problems of space and time for artists.When Berman arrived in New York in 1935, his work was already well known for its sense of nostalgic romance: mythic figures, imperial ruins, shadows, and the legacy of the Italian Renaissance were among his sources. From the late 1930s Berman worked increasingly in the USA, creating designs for ballet and other musical productions (for example for the Music Festival in Hartford, CT, in 1936). . In spite of his cosmopolitan background, Berman maintained close connections with Russian artists, critics and dancers, collaborating, for example, with Serge Lifar on the production of Icare in Monte Carlo in 1938.
In 1935, he became a theater, opera set designer in New York. He did numerous sets for the Metropolitan Opera as well as European opera companies with productions of Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, and Othello.
and to paint visionary images. Medusa, the once beautiful woman turned into a Gorgon by Athena, was a subject of particular fascination for the artist. Anyone who looked at Medusa would be turned to stone, and Berman suspends her image amid a rubble of stones, suggesting the remnants of unfortunate viewers. The dreamlike quality and bizarre juxtapositions found in Berman's work align him with Surrealism, yet his fanciful obsessions with the past disqualify such a summary categorization. As the artist said, one should avoid easy generalizations in the place of serious consideration. The painting of Eugene Berman is most particularly the creation of a romantic imagination. It describes a world that exists only in the mind of the artist, and finds its natural mood in a nostalgia for the past and a preference for what seems to be a dream state, where reality is heightened in a dramatic intensification of color and texture and an exaggeration of scale. It is, then, no surprise that Berman may also be considered among the most outstanding designers for the operatic stage.
Berman lived in France from 1918 to 1939, although he also spent long periods in Italy, manifesting a particular interest in Renaissance art and architecture, which he interpreted in his studio paintings, some of which were shown at his one-man show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932 (e.g. View of Venice (Sleepers, Statue and Campanile), 1932.
His style often reminiscent of the work of Salvador Dalí, a development reflected in his whimsical costume and stage designs for the ballet Devil's Holiday produced by the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1939 (original designs: New York, MOMA). He also expressed his rich fantasy in the fashion designs that he created for the magazine Vogue in the same period.

In 1949 Berman received a Guggenheim fellowship which provided the means for an extended visit to Mexico. On his return, he executed a series of paintings that display his response to the Pre-Columbian and Baroque monuments he saw there. A sculpture of Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child on the exterior of the Church of Santa Monica in Guadalajara is presumably the inspiration for Berman's painting. In San Cristobal y Los Niños Perdidos, however, the figure becomes, in effect, the figurehead for the shiplike mass of the church, thrusting ahead in a powerful movement of forms from right to left. Berman's signature motif, however, is the forlorn figure carrying a child in the street below. These two represent los niños perdidos, the lost children who exist in the midst of the world's ambitions. In the artist's view, human experience is only a part of a theatrical and surreal dream infused with a sense of tragedy.Then he continued to produce oil paintings exploring the same themes in a style approaching Pittura Metafisica (e.g. Rome, 1954; Minneapolis, MN, Walker A. Cent.).

In 1957, he retired to Rome, where he pursued his interest in people in relation to ancient buildings and landscapes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eugene Berman (exh. cat.; Boston, Inst. Mod. A.; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum; Chicago, A. Club; Portland, A. Mus.; 1941-2)
Eugene Berman (exh. cat., Buenos Aires, Inst. A. Mod., 1950)
Obituary, New York Times (15 Dec 1972)
Eugene Berman in Perspective (exh. cat., Austin, U. TX, A. Mus., 1975) [selections from the Robert L. Tobin Col.] ...

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