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Eugene Berman American (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1899 - 1972, Rome, Italy) Eugene Berman [Yevgeny (Gustavovich)] Russian View objects by this artist.

(Born St. Petersburg, 4 Nov 1899; died Rome, 14 Dec 1972).

"It is impossible to classify me...in a well-defined category. Neo-Romantic, Neo-Classicist, Surrealist, all these appellations are at the same time true and false. Since art is made of a thousand possibilities and contradictions, one ought to abstain from the easy and general tendency to catalog."    -Eugene Berman

Fleeing the Russian Revolution, Eugene Berman moved to Paris in 1918, where he studied with Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Vallotton. By 1925 he had designed theater sets for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Along with Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Berard, and his own brother, Leonid Berman, he formed a group known as the Neo-Romantics. In this context Berman painted poetic subject matter in reaction to Cubism and Futurism.

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. In America he continued to design theater productions, including sets and costumes for the Metropolitan Opera, 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.
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.
Source: http://www.utah.edu/umfa/contemporary.html
              
Russian painter and stage designer. His family moved to Western Europe in 1908 and 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, and two years later he exhibited at the Galerie Druet, Paris. 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.

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; see 1941-2 exhibition catalogue, no. 14). During the 1930s Berman followed a more magical, Surrealist 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. After the 1930s 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.).
Source: Christian De Boeck/Fantastic Art Centre® http://fantasticart.tripod.com/berman.htm




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