Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by Fred Berger

Fred Berger is one of Chicago's most admired "artist's artists" - a figure respected by generations of professionals, but little known to the larger audience, despite a lengthy and distinguished exhibition history. The son of Romanian immigrants, Berger was born in Chicago. His father, a furniture dealer, moved the family to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when Berger was a small boy. After losing the business during the Great Depression, the family moved back to Chicago, where Berger showed early interest in pursuing a career in the arts. Urged to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, a commercial artist, Berger receied a scholarship to a commercial art school. He applied instead to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, though was forced to drop out after only six months when his brother was drafted into the service and could no longer support the family.

Berger was largely self-taught as an artist. As a high-school student (and classmate of Seymour Rosofsky) he had taken a course at SAIC offered by Kathleen Blackshear that introduced him to the Field Museum. Objects from the New Ireland Islands and the Northwest American Indians were particular influences. Despite and abiding interest in the figure and anatomy in particular, after seeing the work of Wassily Kandinsky in a book, Berger began to paint in a nonobjective style. He was also deeply impressed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whom he heard lecture.

After working for the US Department of the Treasury during the war, Berger was admitted on scholarship to the Institute of Design, where he studied design and received his BS in 1952. While still in school, Berger received a one-person show at the prestigious Bordelon Gallery in Chicago (1949) and participated in the Art Institute of Chicago's Chicago & Vicinity exhibitions starting in 1947 (and throughout the 1950s and early 1960s was a frequent prizewinner). Berger was also featured in the 1951 "American" Exhibition at the Art Institute and participated in Exhibition Momentum in 1950, 1952, and 1953. He showed in 1953 at both Baldwin Kingrey and the Well of the Sea Restaurant at the Hotel Sherman, Chicago.

He also showed his work through the short-lived artists' cooperative Exhibit A in 1958. Through participation in these exhibitions as well as shows at HPAC in the late 1950s and early 1960s, combined with his subject matter of the human figure in strife-filled, mythological settings, Berger became associated with the first generation of Imagists, the "Monster Roster." When Franz Schulze included him in his seminal 1972 book Fantastic Images, this categorization became well established, although Berger's classical draftsmanship and choice of media - watercolor and ink on paper - set him well apart from painters such as George Cohen and Leon Golub or sculptors like Cosmo Campoli who are generally associated with this moniker. From 1953 to 1970 Berger worked in a commercial art studio; he also did occasional illustrations, most notably for Playboy magazine. He taught extensively, most importantly evening classes at ID shortly after he received his degree there and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (1971 - 1978) and American Academy of Art (1979 - 1986).

Biography by Lynne Warren, from Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995