Jason Berger, The Beach at Veullettes, oil on canvas, 42 x 52", 1974.

On a November day, inside a sixth-floor apartment, painter Jason Berger sits with his back to a picture window overlooking Brookline. The eighty-four-year-old artist, who’s known as a witty bon vivant and a second-generation Boston expressionist, wears a jacket over a wool sweater with a black scarf wrapped around his neck. He doesn’t say much, but puffs on a long-stemmed pipe with smoke wafting around his head, so he looks a bit steamed.

Berger hates the cold and is ready to flee Boston as newscasters talk of snow flurries. In a few days, he’ll be headed to Portugal where he will sit in the sun and do what he does best, paint en plein air. 

Another November, the artist might be in southern Europe already. But Berger has stayed for the opening of his one-artist exhibition Jason Berger: Directed Vision at the Danforth Museum. It’s a retrospective featuring thirty-five works (including a very rare sculpture) that span the artist’s career, from his School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston days under the tutelage of Karl Zerbe, to his involvement in a short-lived movement that he co-founded, known as “direct vision.” The Berger show is up through March 1, 2009.

This exhibit is part of an ongoing series exploring Boston expressionism, a movement that has long fascinated Danforth Museum Director Katherine French. The term refers to a painting style of the 1940s and 1950s, led by a trio of prominent Boston painters: Karl Zerbe, Jack Levine, and Hyman Bloom. Their approach to painting gained national recognition, inspired a second- and even a third-generation of like-minded painters, and changed the course of art history.

Jason Berger, Self portrait with Pipe, oil on canvas, 21 x 17 ¼", 1949.

Certainly no time could be better to re-examine this work and introduce it to a younger, unaware audience. What appeals to French, among many things about this era, is that many of these artists are still alive and have a good body of work for such a show. It’s a great opportunity for her to sit down with them and explore first-hand their motivations, inspirations, and memories of this period.

French began this series back in 2005 with Political Discourse: Jack Levine. Levine, who became known for his social realism work, was ninety when the show opened. Two years later, French mounted A Spiritual Embrace: Hyman Bloom. The artist was ninety-four. Early in 2008, French staged Arthur Polonsky: A Thief of Light. Being a second-generation Boston expressionist, Polonsky’s a little younger—eighty-three.

Now it is Berger’s turn. He is eighty-four and not in the best of health, having had a stroke in 2002. Seen in the 1993 documentary, At the Edge of the World, directed by Howard Posner, Berger appears clever, lively, and loquacious. Today, however, his language is limited to short and clipped sentences. How this re-organization of his brain has affected his art is rather stunning. Berger continues with his Matisse-like landscapes, but the brushstrokes are more hurried, as if he approaches the canvas with a sudden burst of energy.

Giving a good definition of expressionism, Nick Capasso, senior curator of the DeCordova Museum, said in an interview for WGBH: “It’s a painting about emotion, about psychology, about passion, and about humanism. It’s not an optical art like impressionism. It’s not a very intellectual art like geometric abstraction. It’s about the human passions.”

Jason Berger, painting en plein air. France, 2002. Courtesy of the artist, the Danforth Museum of Art and judi rotenberg gallery.

The importance of this idea is stressed from the first painting in the Berger show. It’s Bloom’s painting (c. 1942–45), Skeleton in Red Dress—a nightmarish image of a dark skeleton floating above a dark ground, the bones visible through a thin, blood-red dress. The painting is from Bloom’s corpse series: ghostly images, dead bodies, and lumps of flesh. This is Bloom’s emotional response to the Holocaust.
“Bloom and Levine loved paint and loved pushing paint across the surface to express feeling,” says French. “Bloom was particularly known for his explosive use of color. Together they not only influenced other painters, but also helped lay the basis for abstract expressionism.” 

In fact, Bloom and Levine’s paintings were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in a seminal 1942 show, Americans. According to French, “The exhibition helped New York artists get past muddy, symbolic works on canvas or the brittle surface that grew out of WPA-style painting. Willem de Kooning later remarked that he and Jackson Pollack considered Hyman Bloom to be ‘the first abstract expressionist in America.’”

From French’s point of view, she sees the Boston expressionists as the missing link between realism and abstract expressionism. This crossover is evident in Berger’s work, as he began in very formally executed, jewel-toned portraits and self-portraits; he started to transform with a 1949 painting, Bird. It is a pecked-over, decomposing carcass hanging from a hook, likely an oblique reference to the Holocaust.

Jason Berger, Quincy Market, oil on canvas, 43 x 48", 1984.

At the same time, Berger created two graphic butcher shop scenes. Quincy Market could be a set design for Sweeney Todd, given the amount of blood that not only drips from the hanging carcasses, but is splattered over the rafters, walls, and tables. Though heavily detailed, the painting shows a looseness in Berger’s application of the paint and an intensity of emotion behind it.

No doubt, some of this emotion came from Berger’s war experience. He was drafted into World War II two years after he entered the Museum School. He saw plenty of death in France, though he never actually fought. Off the coast of France, Berger’s outfit was involved in a horrific train accident that killed one hundred and fifty people. Berger escaped unharmed.

Berger’s Self Portrait with Fur Shirt (a somber, brown painting, patterned after Albrecht Dürer’s Self Portrait in a Fur Coat), speaks volumes about the fear and apprehension the artist felt about being plucked out of the art school and sent off to war.

After his three-year military stint, Berger returned to art school. Painting classes were conducted by Karl Zerbe, a German expressionist, who immersed his students in modern European art. He brought in such artists as Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Ben Shahn, and Max Weber.

Jason Berger, Out My Window, oil on canvas, 58 ¾ x 35 ½", 1986.

This shaped Berger’s thinking. In fact, in his apartment today, on one of his rattan end tables, the artist displays a photo of Beckmann in 1948, when he visited Zerbe’s classroom. It’s easy to pick out Berger—the boyish, round-faced student wearing a tweed jacket and bow tie. Berger is positioned exactly where you would expect him to be, at the artist’s elbow, looking over the master’s shoulder.

It shows in Berger’s landscapes of the mid-1950s—the trees, buildings, and mountains are outlined in heavy black. Berger took a giant step into abstraction as well; in his 1956 work, Abstract Landscape, he tossed away almost all references to landscape.

 “This second generation of painters are all interesting in their own way and are remarkable for their tendency towards painterly expressionism, while still holding onto the idea of representational painting,” says French. “Contemporary to the abstract expressionists, these painters always worked from memory and observation. They used the tools of abstraction, but never realized pure abstraction.” While many artists were following the abstract expressionism trend and making a good living from it, Berger and his colleagues remained grounded in real life.

In this regard, Berger was influenced by a fellow Museum School student, Marilyn Powers, whom he married in 1947. In Portrait of Marilyn (1949), Berger captures Powers dressed in a close-fitting, cropped green jacket, leaning forward, hands on her hips, as if she might be inserting her opinion into the conversation, as she was known to do. She disdained abstraction and believed art should occur organically and spontaneously, that it should be directly observed. By the mid-1970s, Berger and Powers, with five other artists, created a movement centered around this belief, which they called “direct vision.” In terms of distinguishing this art from others, Powers told a Boston Globe reporter, “The academy is making products for the establishment. We are trying to touch people’s hearts.”

Jason Berger, Deduct, collage on paper, 6½ x 6½", 1960. Courtesy of Michael and Norma Katz.

Berger’s landscapes from this period, such as The Beach at Veullettes, are airy, joyful, and full of color. The vibrancy and careful editing might remind one of Matisse, whom Berger acknowledges as his most powerful influence. Berger met him in France at a show of his cut-outs.

“When you’re looking at Berger, you’re looking into the eyes of an artist who looked into the eyes of Matisse,” says Ernesto Mayans of Ernesto Mayans Galleries in Santa Fe, NM. He has been showing Berger’s work for twenty years and is writing a book about him. Mayans plans to release the book next year.

Berger’s paintings since his stroke are even more energetic, direct, and edited than work from his “direct vision” days. Mayans says that art buyers in their mid-thirties and forties respond immediately to them.

“This is the way they grew up,” says Mayans about these clients who backpack, hike, canoe, and interact directly with nature. “The immediacy in which he presents nature to you, without thinking, is striking. It’s very unusual for an artist to get to this stage of life and have this kind of freshness.”

Berger’s show at the Danforth closes on March 1, but French is already working on four simultaneous shows for the fall. The artists are all related to the Boston expressionism movement: Henry Schwartz, Gerry Bergstein, Morgan Buckley, and David Aronson. That show will run from November 2009 to March 2010.

Debbie Hagan has been writing about art for twenty-five years, and her features have appeared in Boston Globe Magazine, Robb Report, American Style, Artist’s Magazine, Folk Art Illustrated, and many others. She is the book review editor for Brevity literary magazine and author of the narrative nonfiction book, Against the Tide (Doukathsan Press, 2008).

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