Werner Berg

Werner Berg, 1934

Werner Berg (born April 11, 1904 in Elberfeld , † September 7, 1981 in St. Veit im Jauntal , Carinthia ) was a German - Austrian painter . In 1931 he settled on a remote farm in Carinthia. On his Rutarhof in the border area with Slovenia , Werner Berg looked for an existence “close to things”. Werner Berg succeeded in condensing the everyday reality of his surroundings into haunting symbols. Despite all the formal requirements, Werner Berg's pictures are also documents: They bear witness to a class of people on the border between the German and Slavic-speaking areas and they hold on to a way of life that is only slowly and gradually breaking away from old agricultural ties.

Life

Childhood, adolescence and studies

Hans Werner Berg was the youngest of four children. His father, Josef Berg, was a technician by profession. The determining power of the wealthy parental home was the mother, Mathilde Clara Berg, née an der Heiden. She had already founded a successful toy store on her own initiative in the 1890s, shortly after their marriage. Soon the family's residential and commercial building in Elberfeld at Schwanenstrasse 52-54, in the immediate vicinity of the Von der Heydt Museum , could be converted into a handsome house with two commercial and residential floors. Werner Berg attended the Realgymnasium in Elberfeld. In his free time he enjoyed spending time on the farms in the rural surroundings of Elberfeld. The First World War shook orderly family life. Werner Berg's brother Alfred was killed in one of the Marne battles, as was the sister's fiancé. His brother Walter was also wounded and was missing for months. Broken by these losses, his father died in 1917. Werner Berg had to deny his original dream of becoming a painter for the time being. After graduating from high school, he began a commercial apprenticeship in an industrial company in 1922. Because of his foreign language skills, he should take over the management of a foreign branch in South America. In 1923, however, Werner Berg began studying commercial science and went to Vienna in 1924, where he enrolled in economics and social studies with Othmar Spann . After receiving his doctorate with honors in 1927, he was offered an assistant position at the university. But he was now able to realize the wish he had cherished since childhood to become a painter. As early as 1924, Werner Berg met his fellow student and companion Amalie "Mauki" Kuster at the university. Mauki, who received her doctorate in the same year as Werner Berg, wholeheartedly supported the companion's ideas. Together, the young couple decided to later settle down as farmers in the countryside. In autumn 1927 Werner Berg became a student of Karl Sterrer at the Vienna Academy . But he was soon repelled by the stubborn severity of Karl Sterrer. In 1929 he switched to Karl Caspar's master class at the Munich Academy. Many trips shaped Werner Berg's student days. In October 1928 Werner Berg's first daughter Ursula was born in Salzburg.

Years of starting at the Rutarhof

The Rutarhof in 2015

Wayside shrine designed by Werner Berg at the entrance to the Rutarhof

Werner Berg went to Carinthia for the first time in the summer of 1929 . In 1930 he married Mauki Kuster in Munich, but the young family stayed in Carinthia for most of the year. A farm was sought and acquired to buy. The Rutarhof was a small farm with 22 hectares, located on barren conglomerate and gravel terraces high above the valley. The house, which is covered with wooden shingles, was without electricity and running water until the 1960s, and the agricultural production conditions hardly differed from those of the previous centuries. But Werner Berg was looking for a life full of direct intuition that should have meaning in itself. He wanted to live the life of a farmer despite all the time constraints on his painting. The income from agriculture should also make him independent of all the constraints of the art business. In March 1931 Werner Berg moved into the Rutarhof with his family and his friend Kurt Sachsse. He built a studio with a large north-facing window over an old sheepfold. The second daughter Klara was born. When Werner Berg settled at the Rutarhof, he also radically broke everything he had learned at the academies. Under the influence of Emil Nolde, with whom he entered into correspondence, he looked for a flat, deliberately primitive painting style. The starting point of his pictures were now small-format sketches, on the way on the many occasions where the farmers met, in which the essential picture idea had already been formulated.

In January 1932 Werner Berg went to Berlin at Emil Nolde's invitation . Emil and Ada Nolde welcomed him hospitably and introduced him to the painter Werner Scholz . At Pentecost 1933 Ursel and Werner Scholz visited the Rutarhof. In 1933 Werner Berg also visited Emil Nolde in Berlin. Werner Berg met him with appreciation and at the same time was careful not to influence the young artist too much. In January 1934 - through Emil Nolde's mediation - the renowned Von der Heyde gallery on Schöneberger Ufer in Berlin showed a solo exhibition by Werner Berg, which was subsequently taken over by several German art houses. In a state of strong nerve tension, Werner Berg broke off his relationship with his “fatherly friend” Emil Nolde. It is still unclear what prompted him to do so. The friendship with Ursel and Werner Scholz also broke up. Werner Berg's son Veit was born on the Rutarhof. In the fall of 1934 Werner Berg contacted Herbert Boeckl by letter .

The meager income from the farm had put the family in dire financial straits. The original idea of ​​financing the Rutarhof project through the sale of paintings became impossible due to the increasingly limited sales opportunities in Germany. A police ban of Werner Berg's solo exhibition at the Cologne Art Association as “not in line with the healthy public feeling” should be the first indication of the later assessment as a degenerate artist. In the same year 1935, Werner Berg received the coveted Nuremberg Albrecht Dürer Prize. Herbert Boeckl tried to get Werner Berg to participate in the Brussels World Exhibition. Herbert Boeckl spent the summer of 1935 in the immediate vicinity of the Rutarhof in Lower Carniola. Boeckl's daughter Eleonore was born there, and Werner Berg's daughter Hildegard was also born on the Rutarhof. At the beginning of autumn, however, before Boeckl went to Vienna as an academy professor, the two artists fell apart. Again it remains unclear what led to the break of the friendship that both of them had emphatically affirmed earlier. Werner Berg now saw himself increasingly isolated, the last chance to perform on a larger scale with his art was destroyed in 1936. Werner Berg was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts , which meant the prohibition of the practice of painting and exhibition in Germany. In 1936, Werner Berg joined the NSDAP's foreign organization in order to enable him to return to the Reichskunstkammer and to be protected against continued hostility .

At the beginning of 1936 his friend Kurt Sachsse had left the Rutarhof after increasing tensions. He spent several months in Germany without hesitation before shooting himself in Freiburg im Breisgau on the day Heinrich von Kleist died. Heavy shadows had now settled on the enthusiastically started project on the Rutarhof. Mauki Berg was at times unable to cope with all the troubles of doing business and raising four children. She, who had also graduated, was caught up like a maid in the perils of everyday rural life. Werner Berg was also unsettled artistically. He had already abandoned the program of emphasized primitivism in 1935 during Herbert Boeckl's stay, and from 1936 onwards he turned to an increasingly natural representation. The subject of his pictures was now more and more the family, the farm and its immediate surroundings. Instead of the original fascination with a primitive, exotic archaicism, Werner Berg was now looking for a more sober, factual representation of country life. In 1937 Werner Berg traveled to the World Exhibition in Paris. In 1939 the traveling exhibition Degenerate Art was shown in Vienna annexed by the German Reich. Werner Berg was represented defamatory with the picture Nocturnal Barn .

War time in Scandinavia

After the outbreak of war, Werner Berg completed training as a Red Cross medic in Klagenfurt in order to be able to avoid arms service in the event of a possible conscription. Annette, the youngest of the five children, was born on May 3, 1940. In March 1941 Werner Berg was called up to serve as an army medic, but at the end of April 1941 he was posted to Norway as a war painter. The lieutenant colonel on the General Staff, Walter Schmidt, who was impressed by Werner Berg's pictures, was responsible for this. Schmidt belonged to the XXXVI. Mountain Corps, which was set up in Norway in 1941, and commanded its General Staff from 1943 to 1945. Due to his influential position, he was Werner Berg's permanent protector in the following war years. At his instigation, Werner Berg was granted a surprising amount of freedom under the circumstances. So he could limit himself to the task of landscape documentation and avoid any propaganda painting. After his arrival at the front, Werner Berg realized what a tremendous guilt the German units were bearing upon themselves. He drew the fallen and wounded and made sensitive portraits of Russian prisoners of war, such as a Mongolian doctor.

The young art journalist Trude Polley has been campaigning for Werner Berg in Carinthia since 1941. Participation in the large presentation of the Carinthian artists in Salzburg was also planned. Ultimately, Werner Berg's focus on the Slovene-speaking “Windischen” was displeased by Helmut Bradaczek, the head of the Carinthian State Gallery responsible for the exhibition concept. Werner Berg, on the other hand, was not prepared to make any concessions in the choice of motifs. In 1943, when Werner Berg's patrons Erwin Bauer and Wilhelm Rüdiger wanted to show his pictures from the Rutarhof in an exhibition of young German art in the Goethe Museum in Weimar, this was prevented by an objection from a morality committee specially requested from Berlin. However, under the protection of the Wehrmacht, Werner Berg was able to open an exhibition of his “Pictures from the Arctic Ocean Front and from North Karrelia” in the Klagenfurt Art Association in 1943 .

A bomb attack on Elberfeld destroyed Werner Berg's parents' house and his sister Clara died in the process. His mother happened to be at the Rutarhof and from then on stayed in Carinthia. At the beginning of 1944 the Welz gallery in Vienna showed Werner Berg's landscapes from Norway and Finland. The press briefings highlighted the lack of military motives and the factually serious focus on a cold, vast, untouched landscape, whose deep peace was seen in contrast to the atrocities of war. In April 1945, Werner Berg, still affected by Edvard Munch's death , visited his sister Inger in Ekely . Werner Berg ended the war as a corporal. He was sent to an internment camp in Hamar and was only able to return to the Rutarhof in late autumn 1945. He had to leave the works created during the war with a befriended Norwegian officer, Ivar Wormdal, who later sent them back to him and supported Werner Berg with paint deliveries in the years of privation after the war, when painting materials were hardly available in Austria.

Return, Conflict and Breakdown

After his return to the Rutarhof, Werner Berg received great support in his efforts to obtain Austrian citizenship from the cultural advisor Johannes Lindner and his colleague, the poet Michael Guttenbrunner . In 1946 Werner Berg joined the Carinthian Art Association. Letters connected him with Anton Kolig , whom he visited in Nötsch in 1947. In January 1947, Werner Berg and his family received Austrian citizenship. Due to his former membership in the Nazi party, he had to undergo de-registration under the Prohibition Act, which, however, attested that he had an “impeccable and decidedly anti-fascist political attitude”. The fact that he was the only one of the Carinthian painters to be represented in the exhibition Degenerate Art , as well as his artistic dedication to the Slovene ethnic group, which was not changed even during the Nazi regime, were particularly emphasized. Werner Berg joined the Art Club in Vienna.

In February 1948 Werner Berg ended his friendship with the young poet Michael Guttenbrunner, to whom he had previously been very fond, and expelled him from the court. Together with Heimo Kuchling , he attended the Venice Biennale. Werner Berg's mother died in 1949 on the Rutarhof. In January 1949 Werner Berg exhibited in the Welz gallery (Würthle) in Vienna. Viktor Matejka , City Councilor for Culture in Vienna, supported Werner Berg with picture purchases and also showed them to Oskar Kokoschka , who expressed his approval of the pictures. Young painters like Maria Lassnig , Arnulf Rainer , Herbert Breiter and the graphic artist Paul Flora came to the Rutarhof. In 1950 Werner Berg was represented at the Venice Biennale. In Vienna, its reception was increasingly hampered by the open hostility of Herbert Boeckl.

At a conference of contemporary authors and composers in St. Veit, Werner Berg met the poet Christine Lavant and was very impressed by her poems and their appearance. A fateful love soon united the two artists. Werner Berg invited Christine Lavant to the Rutarhof. He openly explained to his wife Mauki the artistic and intellectual necessity of turning to the poet. In 1951 the portraits of Christine Lavant were created at the Rutarhof.

Berg's daughter Ursula married Heimo Kuchling . As with the later marriages of the children, the separation from court was associated with great tensions and conflicts.

On Werner Berg's fiftieth birthday, the Klagenfurt Künstlerhaus showed a work exhibition. Many Carinthians became aware of him on this occasion, including future collectors who would later make him independent through their purchases. An exhibition was also planned in Vienna, but due to open objections by Herbert Boeckl, who had a great influence in art circles, it did not materialize. Werner Berg's relationship with Christine Lavant failed. In January 1955 Werner Berg tried to put an end to his life by taking a heavy overdose of sleeping pills. He could be saved under dramatic circumstances. In the intensive care unit, he contracted pneumonia and then developed hepatitis , which tied him to the hospital for months. He was able to survive this crisis and processed it in the series of hospital pictures. Official and private purchases soon eased the great economic difficulties on the farm. The collectors of his pictures, who were among his most loyal friends, gave him the certainty that the country had welcomed him in the years that followed.

Werner Berg, 1964

Exhibitions and constant work

View into the garden of the Werner Berg Museum with Hemma stele by Berg

After the crisis of last year, Werner Berg felt internally liberated and soon found new strength for his art, to which he now devoted all his time and energy more than ever before. In November 1956 the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere showed Werner Berg in a solo exhibition. In 1957, Werner Berg's exhibitions at the Austrian Cultural Institute in Paris and the Modern Gallery in Laibach followed. 1958 was Werner Berg's most intense creative year to date, over 60 oil paintings were created. In earlier years, Werner Berg often did not get to paint for weeks due to his self-chosen work as a farmer, but now his son Veit and his youngest daughter Annette took some of the strain off his farm. The preparation of an exhibition shown in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1961 interrupted a largely unhindered period of constant creativity. After that Werner Berg renounced the exhibition business for years, which was also not exactly well-disposed towards his art. He consistently rejected all projects brought to him.

Mauki Berg's health deteriorated noticeably, and in November 1964 she suffered a heart attack. The Rutarhof, whose official owner was Mauki Berg, was handed over to his son Veit. The marriage of his son Veit and daughter Annette also meant a decisive change for Werner Berg. Werner Berg was prominently represented in the UNESCO exhibition Peace, Humanity and Friendship among Nations in Slovenj Gradec and was made an honorary citizen together with Henry Moore and Ossip Zadkine .

At the suggestion of the Bleiburg Lebzelters Gottfried Stöckl, the municipality of Bleiburg adapted a free-standing house on the main square for a permanent Werner Berg presentation in 1968 with funding from the State of Carinthia. Rejecting anything museum, the artist chose the name Werner-Berg-Galerie for this facility and put together a representative selection from his life's work. In 1969 the city of Bleiburg made Werner Berg an honorary citizen. However, due to the impairment of his time and creative reserves, he wanted to give up the Bleiburg project again. His wife's serious illness cast a shadow over Werner Berg's artistic production in the late sixties. The strong colors were withdrawn and replaced by subdued, broken colors. The original diversity and visual power of pre-industrial peasant life was also increasingly rare, and the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture also changed Werner Berg's immediate environment. There were conflicts and tensions with the son's young family on the farm. Werner Berg could not accept any stranger in the innermost area of ​​the court, which was at the same time his world.

Darkening of the last years of life

When Mauki Berg died on April 9, 1970, “what was once our Rutarhof life” had definitely changed for Werner Berg. For a year he felt incapable of artistic work. In 1971 the Modern Gallery of the City of Slovenj Gradec showed Werner Berg's most extensive retrospective to date. He was made an honorary citizen of his home parish, Gallizien . Inspired by his daughter Ursula, Werner Berg began to paint again in the summer. The Werner-Berg-Galerie of the city of Bleiburg was reopened in 1972 after a generous redesign of the house with a new hanging as a permanent facility. In 1973 Werner Berg received the Carinthian Culture Prize. Kristian Sotriffer published a catalog raisonné of the woodcuts. A comprehensive catalog for the permanent collection of the Werner-Berg-Galerie was published , introduced by Trude Polley. These were the last books whose production Werner Berg agreed to. In the years that followed, he repeatedly rejected requests for publications or exhibitions in order to be able to concentrate fully on his work. The last years of his life were characterized by great artistic productivity.

Werner Berg's life situation on the Rutarhof grew increasingly gloomy. Constantly preoccupied with the literature and intellectual life of his time, he again devoted himself in great detail to the work of Jean Améry and the subject of the Holocaust . Conflicts with the young family on the Rutarhof burdened him. In the last years of his life he lived alone in a small “pull-out house” next to his studio. In 1979, the director Wolfgang Lesowsky shot a comprehensive documentary about Werner Berg under the title The Ungeheure never understands the Sichre . In the years 1980 to 1981, another tremendous creative effort resulted in over 100 new woodcuts. In the summer of 1981 Werner Berg received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art . He sent "last greetings" to his closest friends. On September 7th, Werner Berg was found dead in his studio on the Rutarhof. According to his request, he was buried anonymously in the cemetery of the nameless in Salzburg. In his will, he bequeathed the pictures in the Werner Berg Gallery in Bleiburg to the public as a foundation.

To the work

Werner Berg was fascinated to find archaic life contexts in Lower Carinthia as a daily reality. For him, the concept of reality itself had a mythical dimension that went far beyond a logical understanding. He recognized early on that the mystery of existence could not be penetrated rationally. The experienced reality should now help him to grasp it in the picture. “What could be more mysterious than clarity?” Paul Valéry's sentence became his motto - it encompasses the entire spectrum of his art. In his pictures he found the myth as a pictorial interpretation of the world that is closed to linguistic explanation. All living conditions took on the character of a thing for him and became an "object" that he evoked with great urgency. Motifs from rural themes characterize Werner Berg's distinctive work. Since he permanently exposed himself to a demanding and sometimes threatening environment of original living conditions, he was able to gain a mythical dimension from even the simplest occurrences in his small, rural world. For Werner Berg, who was permanently exposed "in the foothills of the natural kingdom" through his everyday farming life, things literally took on an uncanny significance. Whether in the interrelationship of his figures and their inseparable being woven into the landscape, in the posture and gaze of his protagonists, in the glow of his flower pictures or the oscillation of his night landscapes - time and again, even the simplest motifs seem to reveal their secret depth in his image transformation. His images are by no means “literary” - rather, his image signals condensed into the greatest simplicity convey dimensions that can hardly be grasped linguistically. The Bleiburg gallery manager Gottfried Stöckl aptly described how Werner Berg's pictures eluded interpretation: “On the one hand, they appear to be of a clarity that makes any word superfluous. On the other hand, they are again full of mysteries that the word cannot penetrate. "

landscape

There is hardly any other landscape that has received such profound documentation and interpretation as the Carinthian Unterland by Werner Berg, and there is hardly any other painter who has concentrated so exclusively on one landscape as Werner Berg on the Carinthian Unterland.

In the south-east of Carinthia, only a few kilometers from the border with Slovenia , lies the picturesque, old town of Bleiburg at the foot of the Petzen . On the journey, the charm of a landscape of harsh beauty enchants. In the crouched farming villages with the Karawanken chain in the background, the people on the move, the fields and farms, one is confronted directly with motifs by the painter and wood cutter Werner Berg. Werner Berg's museum, who died in 1981, has become a magnet for art lovers from all over Europe. Werner Berg's pictures, whose artistic starting point was German Expressionism , provide deep insights into the soul of the Lower Carinthian landscape and the people who live there.

literature

• Heimo Kuchling: Werner Berg, woodcuts. Vienna 1964.
• Spelca Čopič: Werner Berg. Exhibition catalog. Slovenj Gradec 1971.
• Trude Polley: Werner Berg Gallery of the city of Bleiburg. Klagenfurt 1973.
• Kristian Sotriffer : Werner Berg, Die Holzschnitte. With a complete catalog of works 1929–1972. Vienna 1973.
• Heimo Kuchling: Werner Berg, late woodcuts. Kirchdorf 1982.
• Peter Baum : Werner Berg, The Sketches. Klagenfurt 1991.
• Harald Scheicher (ed.): Werner Berg, paintings. With a complete catalog of works of the paintings. Klagenfurt 1994.
• Wieland Schmied : Werner Berg. Salzburg 1996.
• Werner Berg Gallery of the City of Bleiburg (Ed.): Werner Berg. Bleiburg 1997.
• Arnulf Rohsmann: Werner Berg, Ein Beginn 1927–1935. Völkermarkt 1998.
• Wieland Schmied: Foreign landscape, Werner Berg 1942–1945. Völkermarkt 1999.
• Barbara Biller: Werner Berg, woodcuts. I and II. Klagenfurt 2001.
• Franz Smola (Ed.): Werner Berg on the 100th birthday. Vienna 2004.
• Heimo Kuchling: Werner Berg. Völkermarkt 2005.
• Harald Scheicher (Ed.): Werner Berg, His Art, His Life. Klagenfurt 1984.
• Harald Scheicher (eds.): Emil Nolde and Werner Berg. Munich 2006.
• Harald Scheicher (eds.): Werner Scholz and Werner Berg. Bozen, Schwaz, Klagenfurt 2008.
• Harald Scheicher (Ed.): From the gallery to the museum, 40 years of Werner Berg in Bleiburg. Bleiburg 2008.
• Harald Scheicher: Paths through the country, Werner Berg and folk art. Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2015. ISBN 978-3-7774-2547-4 .
• Rainer Zimmermann : Expressive realism. Painting of the Lost Generation. Munich 1994, p. 351.

Web links

• Literature by and about Werner Berg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Werner Berg Museum Bleiburg / Pliberk
• Digital retrospective Werner Berg
• Entry on Werner Berg in the database of the state's memory of the history of Lower Austria ( Museum Niederösterreich )