Werner Berg Museum

Werner Berg, Nordmeerhafen
1943, Öl auf Leinwand, 75 × 95 cm, Nachlass Werner Berg
Werner Berg, Arctic Ocean Harbor
1943, oil on canvas, 75 × 95 cm, Werner Berg Galerie der Stadt Bleiburg
tive in Verbindung mit der betonten Gegenständlichkeit vermittelte
Berg wie nie zuvor den Eindruck von Monumentalität
und einem gesteigerten Ausdruck, der mit magisch und
mystisch umschrieben werden kann. Tatsächlich prägte
Wieland Schmied, bis heute einer der wichtigsten Berg-
Kenner, für Bergs reife Bilder den Ausdruck «Magischer Realismus»
16 , was allerdings zu mancher Verwirrung führte, da
dieser Ausdruck üblicherweise synonym für den Stil der
Neuen Sachlichkeit verwendet wird. 17
Werner Bergs Antwort auf die Rückkehr zur Normalität
der Verhältnisse nach 1945 war somit eine Betonung
der gegenständlichen Malweise. Damit brachte er sich aber
zwangsläufig in Konflikt mit der allgemein herrschenden
Kunstausrichtung in Österreich und Westeuropa. Hier
hielt nach 1945, massiv vor allem aber ab den frühen
1950er Jahren, die ungegenständliche Kunst ihren Siegeszug.
Dabei entwickelte sich in Österreich die Abstrakte
unter anderem auch über den Weg des gestisch-pastosen,
koloristischen Spätexpressionismus. Maler wie Herbert
Boeckl oder Max Weiler gelangten über eine betont gestische
Farbfleckenmalerei zur Gegenstandslosigkeit. Ab den
frühen 1950er Jahren erreichten schließlich auch Informel
yet he never wanted to press on into abstraction. For him
abstraction remained a «fad».
Despite various stylistic trends, the direct experience of
nature was «indispensable» to Berg. For him there was no second
mental world beyond existence that had to be depicted;
the human being is continually surrounded by real things. In the
course of preparations for the exhibition at the Belvedere in the
autumn of 1956, Berg wrote to the director of the Österreichische
Galerie, Karl Garzarolli-Thurnlackh: «there is no art beyond
human commitment, and everything that we are subjected to
meets us in the reality of time and space, which can never be discussed
away despite the most sublime knowledge. Art is the
witness thereof: the meeting with reality must admittedly be
new, strong and unsullied, and thus we live here and praise the
hard toils of the day, also, and precisely, at the times when they
often stifle us. (…)» 20
It was color in particular that Berg could only win from a
direct experience of nature. He had to experience color sensuously.
It was primarily still lifes and floral paintings that Berg realized
from direct experience, but his portraits were also executed
directly before his subject. 21 In painting his larger landscapes
in his studio, he generally relied on pencil sketches that had
been created on location, but there were also times when he
preferred to paint his landscapes from life. Today Berg’s son Veit
can still remember vividly waking up in the middle of the night
to find his father outside in front of the house, where he would
work for several clear nights in a row during a full moon in
order to capture the colorism of the moonlight and put it to
canvas. 22 This is how the 1972 painting «Rutarhof/February
Night» was created.
With his unequivocally figurative art, Berg could not avoid
getting mixed up in the conflict between the «Abstracts» and the
«Realists», which in the early fifties had nearly taken on the
dimensions of a cultural war. In Austria, Vienna was the center of
modernist developments, and every Austrian artist felt a strong
drive to win recognition in Vienna. Immediately after the war,
Werner Berg also made an effort to find opportunities to exhibit
in Vienna. In 1947 he participated in the first exhibition of the
Art Club, of which he became a member, and in an exhibition at
the Vienna Künstlerhaus. Berg’s first one-man show in Vienna fol-
25