Else Berg
1877–1942 · Kingdom of the Netherlands · Expressionism
The story
Else Berg spent most of her life as an Amsterdam painter, though she was born in 1877 in Ratibor, a Silesian town then in Germany, to a Jewish cigar manufacturer. She trained in Antwerp and Berlin, and it was in Berlin, in 1905, that she met the Dutch painter Mommie Schwarz. The two became a couple and a fixture of the Bergen School, a circle of Dutch artists working in a dark, angular Expressionism.
Her canvases are the opposite of grim: bright still lifes, portraits, market scenes and views from her travels through Spain, Italy and North Africa, painted in strong flat colour. In their studio near the Sarphatipark, the couple were well-known figures of the city's art world between the wars.
On 12 November 1942 German police came for them. The couple were sent through the Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz and murdered there on arrival, on 19 November. Else Berg was 65, and almost everything that survives her is the bright, colourful work of the years before.
