(Wuppertal-Elberfeld 1904–1981 St. Veit im Jauntal/Carinthia)
Sommerabend im Dorf (Kirche St. Stefan in Globasnitz, Kärnten) / Summer evening in a village (Carinthia), 1958, monogrammed W. B., oil on canvas, 76 x 96 cm, framed

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Registered and illustrated in:
Harald Scheicher u. a., Werner Berg. Gemälde mit einem Werkver-zeichnis, Verlag Johannes Heyn, 1994, cat. rais. no. 541, ill. p. 282

Exhibited in:
TRIGON, Graz, 1963

Provenance:
directly acquired from the artist
Private Collection, Steiermark/Styria

Compare with:
“Dorf” (“Village”), 1956, woodcut, work no. 198 and “Dorf” (“Village”), 1958, pencil on paper, work no. 1061

The frame was selected by the artist himself.

We are grateful to Dr. Harald Scheicher for his kind assistance in cataloguing this work.

1958 was one of the most artistically productive years in the almost 50-year career of the painter Werner Berg; around 60 oil paintings were created in a veritable outburst of creative energy. A lot of exhibitions in the years before had helped him to overcome a serious life crisis and with success and growing recognition he found further strength for his chosen symbiosis of hard mountain farming and artistic creation.
A rather new theme also captured the artists mind in 1958: the portrait of villages or buildings without figures and the interesting motif of a path crossing the canvas. It seems as if these purely architectural pictures helped the artist to regather and deepen his artistic reflections.

Two years earlier, in 1956, Werner Berg had already completed a woodcut that captured – in the reverse, of course – the view in the small Carinthian village of Globasnitz with the church of St. Stefan, the church wall, tree and path in sharp black and white contrast. (Ill. 1) In 1958, a quick sketch of the same view followed in the now "correct" proportions and in the concentrated triad of house, church and tree. (Ill. 2) The present painting finally emerged from these pictorial ideas and clearly conveys Berg’s artistic essence in splendid clarity: expressiveness in colour, reduction in form close to abstraction, tension of space and surface. A new colour contrast appears in these late 1950s, a bright lemon yellow that gains intensity and luminosity in contrast with the dark green of the tree and the iridescent violet tones of the path and house. The painter's typical use of a chalk ground makes the paint surface appear rough and pastel-like, deliberately avoiding the smooth perfection of varnish.
The liberation of colour of German Expressionism, especially of Emil Nolde is echoed here, just as the sober view of the building shapes takes up the idea of geometric decompositions of form. And in this way, the "Summer Evening" acquires its very own, unromantic magic.