Werner Berg was born on April 11, 1904 in Elberfeld, Wuppertal, Germany. After his secondary school leaving certificate, mining apprenticeship and industrial work he began his studies in governmental science in 1923, and graduated with a doctorate in Vienna in 1927. Afterwards he followed his longtime desire to attend the Academy of Art in Vienna and Munich. In 1931, he made his crucial decision to move to the Rutarhof, a remote mountain farmstead in Carinthia. With his family he worked the farm in addition to his artistic work. In 1934, with the encouragement of Emil Noldes, he showed his first exhibition in Vienna and Germany. In 1935 his paintings were declared “degenerate” by the Nazis and were confiscated. After 1945 numerous exhibitions and honors served to make the works of Werner Berg famous both in Austria and abroad. And so he was named professor in 1956, and in the years 1966, 1969 and 1971 he was given honorary citizenship in the towns of Sovenj Gradec, Bleiburg and Gallizien. In 1981 he was awarded the highest medal of honor of the Republic of Austria, the Medal for Science and the Arts. On September 7, 1981, he died at his home, the Rutarhof.
In the permanent collection of the Catholic Adult Education Center “Sodalitas” has 14 of Werner Berg’s wood cuts.
His wood cuts were done timewise separately from his paintings. Their pure black-white was considered by Berg to be an intensification of colorness. The individual printings are exclusively “paper-knife hand copies” that in their re-workings are so distinguishable from each other that each print is actually on original. The themes are mostly taken from rural life, but it was for the artist the formable goal: by using the minimum relationship of tension the forms became compact and precise. (from a description by Dr. Harald Scheucher)
