recommended by
Galleri Tapper-Popermajer

JASON BERGER

Selection of new and older works 

On a visit to Jason Bergers studio in Lisbon last week, we selected some 30 oil paintings and 15 drawings that we now offer to select clients. These include some older works, but most of them were made during the years 2001-2005. Jason is now 82 years of age and still very active exhibiting in different parts of the world. In particular in the US, his reputation is steadily growing and a regular size painting by Jason Berger is now priced at $ 12.000 US. As an esteemed customer at our gallery, we can offer you a very good bargain for some of the works below. Please, request a quote by responding to this e-mail.

N.B. by clicking on the images below you can view higher resolution images.
Also note that most images are photographs of unstreched canvases, and that the "margin" will disappear upon streching the works.

At the end of this e-mail, you will find more information about Jason Berger.

Please, enjoy the works of Jason,

              / Hans Tapper and Ilona Popermajer

 

 

Oil paintings

 

St Valery en Caux 1965, 99x128cm

 

St Valery en Caux 2005, 97x130cm

 

Roof Tops Tavira 2005, 81x86cm

 

Factories 2001, approx 86x70cm

 

Boats Boyardville 2001, approx 97x80cm

 

Cafe St Lucia 2001, 99x80cm

 

Cafe Tavira 2003, 80x99cm

 

Palmtrees and Birdhouse 2004, approx 97x77cm

 

Landscape with House 2001, approx 74x89cm

 

Fishing boats Tavira 2003, approx 93x80cm

 

Boat St. Lucia 2002, 77x97cm

 

Abandoned boat, Tavira 2002, 99x80cm

 

Backyard, Tavira 2001, 80x95cm

 

The Room, Carvoeiro 1990, 87x 100cm

 

Duck Pond, Tavira 2003, 91x111cm

 

Veules 2001, 90x100cm

 

Carvoeiro, 153x63.5cm

 

Province Town 1992, 77x97cm

 

Dieppe 2002, 55x101cm

 

Reeds Tavira 2003, 61x85cm

 

Portimao 2001, 60x76cm

 

Tavira 2003, 45x64cm

 

Almond Blossoms in Tavira, 61x76cm

 

Boston Public Garden, 47x60cm

 

Boat Yard Portimao, 80x99cm

 

Bridge House 1978, 80x99cm

 

Canal Zaende, 88x99cm

 

Vista Tavira 2005, 81x100cm

 

Salon De The - Veules 2001, 80x99cm

 

Estombar, 61x76cm

 

Rue Dr Girard, Veules les Roses 2003, 90x122cm

 

 

Drawings

 

01 Drawing 44x35cm

 

02 Drawing 44x35cm

 

03 Drawing 41x30cm

 

04 Drawing 42x30cm

 

05 Drawing 43x35cm

 

06 Drawing 42x30cm

 

07 Drawing 43x35cm

 

08 Drawing 43x35cm

 

09 Drawing 43x35cm

 

10 Drawing 43x35cm

 

11 Drawing 45x37cm

 

12 Drawing/collage 49x35cm

 

13 Drawing 43x35cm

 

14 Drawing 43x35cm

 

 

Parts of the following text was based on excerpts from the book:
The paintings of Jason Berger, Lois Katz, ed., New York, 1997.

---

Jason Berger was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on January 22, 1924. He has been sketching and painting the scenes around him en plein air since he was thirteen years old.

After graduating from the Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1949, and winning a two-year fellowship to work and travel in Europe, he went there. It was a significant time to go to Europe since Bonnard, Matisse, Dufy, Picasso, and Braque were all still living there and showing their work.

"Once in Paris I had to study with someone and I really didn't want to study with any of the painters who where available at the time, for instance, Fernand Legér, although I did go to his criticism presented in a Saturday morning workshop. But I was required to study to get the benefits of the G. I. Bill, so I decided to study with Ossip Zadkine, the cubist sculptor."

"While we were in Paris, we went to exhibitions of works by painters working in France. In nineteen fifty-two, we even had the good fortune to meet Henri Matisse."

"Georges Braque lived about ten kilometers from our flat in Normandy so we had visited him, seeing and talking to him about his work at the time. Cubism was entirely new to me, in art school I had been immersed in Expressionism. I found Cubism very interesting and its influence, or lingering traces of it, still turns up in my work here and there."

In 1952, Jason Berger returned to the States to pursue his professional life as a painter.

For almost seventy years, Jason has been painting the familiar scenes around his home, until 1994 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Presently, he paints in Portugal, where he lived with his second wife, Estela, until her death in June, 1997.

Traveling to often observed sites abroad, he has painted them, either in Mexico, during the 1960s and early 1970s, or in the places in Europe; in Normandy, on the northern coast of France; in Spain; and in Lisbon or the Algarve, Portugal, where he has spent part of almost every summer since 1970. From time to time there have been new sites: In the spring of 1987 he visited Holland and painted along the canals in Amsterdam. En route he stopped in Ireland, set up his easel and painted scenes of the Irish countryside around County Cork.

The landscapes, cityscapes and interior scenes of Jason Berger record a site realistically, by the association of elements through contiguity, the dominant structure of realism. In his paintings, we see both the illusion of reality and the components parts of that reality. But it is those component parts which are of most concern to him – space and form, light and color, and surface manipulation as it serves the creation of a convincing illusionistic space. He exaggerates, may transform the subject, but he doesn't invent the whole picture. He finds it already there, but it is a question of his selection.

Berger's focus on what, for him, it means to be a painter, and his method of painting, made him one of the lonely voices in a sea of twentieth century artists trying to be loud enough or to be heard or to stand out. Rather than succumb to external pressures, however, he trusted himself and stuck to an inner imperative associated with painting en plein air, or outdoor painting, and the belief that a view depicted on canvas is the artist's direct response to an actual scene. His paintings are his reflection – attempt to clearly present, in paint, something directly observed. He present something as viewed, not merely views of something.

Actually, the style of Berger's plein air paintings, in its insistence on depicting form and light as paint, is close to Impressionism. Yet the language of Berger's art vividly transmits a sense of concreteness not associated with Impressionism. His paintings record the concrete experience of the way he see what he see.

The interplay between what Berger sees and how he wishes to portray it is edging towards making outer reality subjective. Like the abstract expressionists, his art is concerned with painting, not the truth of what he sees before him. For him, the physicality of the paint and the personality of the brushstrokes is equally important visually. Berger's paintings also incorporate aesthetic qualities associated with abstract expressionism, and his art demonstrates a deep involvement and concern with the traditional craft of painting: color, rendering of form, modulation of tone and hue.

Plein air paintings is only the most visible part of Berger's oeuvre, the other part of his work he describes as his "studio" or "flat" paintings. These are reworked paintings when he uses the memory of his plein air paintings as stimuli, or entirely new compositions. An abstraction from nature in the sense of abstracting the essence of a scene already painted in direct view of it, extracting the essence of its imagery's form and color.

"Except for music, I was never interested in anything else but painting."

 

 

JASON BERGER

Born: 1924, Malden, Massachusetts
Education with Ossip Zadkine, Paris, France

Permanent Collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Permanent Collection Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
Permanent Collection Rockefeller Medical Center, New York, New York
 
Selected exhibitions:

Institute of Modern Art, Boston, Ma.
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Il.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Ma.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

Education:

1942-43 The Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ma.
1943-44 University of Alabama
1946-49 The Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ma.
1950-52 Atelier of Ossip Zadkine, Paris, France

Teaching:

1955 Mt. Holyoke College
1956-69 The Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ma.
1957-59 Wellesley College, Wellesley, Ma.
1969-70 State University of New York at Buffalo (Visiting Associate Professor)
1971-72 Metropolitan College, Boston University, Boston, Ma.
1973-88 Art Institute of Boston, Boston, Ma.
1983 Started Summer School in Normandy, France

Collections in which works are included:

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
Brandeis University, Waltham, Ma.
Smith College, Northampton, Ma.
Rockefeller Medical Center, New York, New York
Chase National Bank, New York, New York
Boston Sheraton Hotel, Ma.

One Person Exhibitions (selection):

1950 Institute of Modern Art, Boston, Ma.
1952 Swetzoff Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1954 Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Ma.
1955 Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Ma.
1956 Swetzoff Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1956-58 Peridot Gallery, New York, New York
1960 Gallery 10, Boston, Ma.
1960 Nova Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1961 Pace Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1962 Joan Peterson Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1967 Nashua Art Center, Nashua, New Hampshire
1971 Helen Bumpus Gallery, Duxbury, Ma.
1972 Joan Peterson Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1977 Annual Festival of Arts & Sports, Ferrugado, Algarve, Portugal
1979 MacIvor Reddie Gallery, Boston, Ma. "Jason Berger, 37 Years of Printmaking"
1981 Galeria Jornal de Noticias, Oporto, Portugal, an exhibition of 35 paintings in conjunction with "American Culture Week", under the aegis of the American Consulate, Lisbon, Portugal
1982 Field Branch Library, Cambridge, Ma., "Paintings of Portugal"
1986 Simmons College, Boston, Ma.
1991 Mayans Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico
1995 Mercury Gallery, Newberry Street, Boston, Ma.

Group Exhibitions (selection):

1943 Boris Mirski Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1943 Institute of Modern Art, Boston, Ma.
1947 Downtown Gallery, New York, New York
1947 Boris Mirski Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1947 Berkshire Museum, Springfield, Ma.
1949-57 Swetzoff Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1950 Gallery Le Grip, Rouen, France
1952 Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Il.
1952 Salon de la Jeune Sculpture, Musée Rodin, Paris
1952 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Ma.
1953 Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Ma. (traveling exhibition)
1953 Brandeis University, Waltham, Ma.
1953 Tufts University, Medford, Ma.
1953 Boston Independent Artists, Boston, Ma.
1954 Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Il.
1954 Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Ma.
1954 Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1954 Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (traveling exhibition)
1954 Carnegie Institute International, Pittsburgh, Pa.
1954 Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Ma. (traveling exhibition)
1956 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Ma.
1956 Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York ("Recent Drawings")
1960 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Ma.
1961 Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Ma. (travelling exhibition)
1961 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Ma.
1962 Smith College, Northampton, Ma.
1962 Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia, Pa.
1962 Institute of Contemporary Art (Dana Collection), Boston, Ma.
1967 Joan Peterson Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1969 Providence Arts Festival, Providence, R.I.
1969 Museo De Artes Populares, Patzcuaro, Mexico
1972 The Direct Vision Exhibition, Boston City Hall Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1973 The Direct Vision Exhibition, MacIvor Reddie Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1973 The Direct Vision Exhibition, Boston City Hall Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1973 Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Ma.
1974 The Direct Vision: 100 Paintings, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, Ma.
1974 The Direct Vision Exhibition, Point Gallery, Kittery, Me.
1974 The Direct Vision Exhibition, New Hampton School, Hampton, N.H.
1975 The Direct Vision: Exhibition and Symposium, St. Paul´s School, Concord, N.H.
1975 Paysages Francaises, Bibliotheque Francaise, Boston, Ma.
1975 The Direct Vision: 14 Days in May, Boston City Hall Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1975 The Direct Vision Paints Boston, State House, Doric Hall, Boston, Ma.
1976 The Direct Vision, MacIvor Reddie Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1976 The Direct Vision, Hilles Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Ma.
1976 The Direct Vision, The Academy of the Arts, Easton, Maryland
1976 The Direct Vision, Walters Gallery, Regis College, Weston, Ma.
1977 The Direct Vision, Boston City Hall, Boston, Ma.
1977 355 Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1978 The Direct Vision, Phoenix Gallery, Concord, N.H.
1983 Visconti Gallery, Boston, Ma.
1985 Boston Arts Festival, Boston, Ma.
1985 Southern Massachusetts University, South Dartmouth, Ma.
1986 Expressionism in Boston: 1945-1985, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Ma.
1987 Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Ma.

Awards:

1949 The Boston Museum School Paige Traveling Scholarship for Study Abroad
1955 Grand Prize for Painting, Boston Arts Festival
1957 The Boston Museum School Clarissa Bartlett Traveling Scholarship
1961 First Prize for Painting, Boston Arts Festival
1970 State University of New York at Buffalo Faculty Research Fellowship

 

Galleri Tapper-Popermajer / Frans Suell
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