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 BergKenner, 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 fol25