ArtistNorwegianb.1890–d.1961
Einar Berger
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Einar Berger was born in 1890 in Finnkroken on the island of Reinoya in Troms, northern Norway, into a family of fishermen. As a boy he went to sea with his father, participating in the Lofoten seasonal fishery for over a decade - a formative experience of extreme weather, hard labour and the peculiar light of the far north that would define his entire output as a painter. After years working as a shopkeeper in Svolvær, a mail clerk, a ship's clerk, and finally a fish merchant in Oslo, he went bankrupt around 1920 and turned to painting without any formal training.
Berger spent the early part of his career selling canvases on the streets of Oslo, billing himself on posters as "the Lofoten painter Einar Berger". The decisive turn came in 1932, when he visited an exhibition of German Expressionists in Oslo. The contact with the German school - bold brushwork, compressed colour, raw emotional energy - gave him the visual language for the imagery he already carried from his years at sea. In 1933 an Oslo art dealer gave him a solo exhibition; sales were rapid and invitations from abroad followed.
Berger went on to exhibit in Berlin, Paris, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, New York and Chicago. Works entered the collection of the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, one of the leading venues for modern foreign art in Europe at the time. Both King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav purchased works from his exhibitions, a mark of the official recognition that his unconventional background had long kept from him.
His subjects are almost exclusively the sea around Lofoten - fishing fleets in harbour, boats caught in open water, winter fish-landing stations, storm scenes. His handling is rough and direct, using thick impasto and strong contrasts of ochre, blue, brown and white to convey the physical conditions of the northern fisheries. He is considered one of the last painters in the Lofoten tradition established earlier by Gunnar Berg and Adelsteen Normann, though his expressionist approach sets him apart from his predecessors' more naturalistic manner.
Berger died in 1961. Works by him are held at Galleri Lofoten in Henningsvaer and in private Norwegian and Scandinavian collections. On Auctionet and Nordic auction platforms, his paintings appear almost exclusively at Norwegian houses - above all Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for the large majority of his 32 recorded auction appearances. Signed oil paintings of Lofoten harbour scenes have reached up to 17,000 NOK, with Lofoten coastal motifs consistently drawing the strongest interest from collectors.