Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by Fred Berman

Born in Milwaukee, Fred Berman was a successful chess player in his youth, and seriously considered pursuing the game as a career. He also dreamed of becoming an architect, which led him to work for an architectural firm before entering college. Eventually, he turned to fine art, receiving a degree in art education from Milwaukee State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) in 1948. The following year, he earned an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and began teaching at the Layton School of Art. In 1960 he joined the faculty of UWM, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. Berman has always been interested in land- and cityscapes. He has examined in particular the effects of time and nature on man-made structures, creating haunting, many-layered compositions of walls, facades, whole buildings, and skylines that border on but are never entirely subsumed into abstraction. He has worked in a variety of media: painting, collage, assemblage, photography, and printmaking. In all, he brings to bear a keen sense of design (drawing upon his long-time interest in architecture), an ability to make elegant compositions combining traditional media and found objects, and love of color and texture. His later work exhibits a greater concentration on pure painting and a new focus on color and light, from which subtle images emerge. Like his older friend Joseph Friebert, Berman was invited by Art Institute of Chicago curator Katharine Kuh to participate in "American Artists Paint the City," the exhibition she organized for the American pavilion of the 1956 Venice Biennale. In addition, Berman was included in several Chicago & Vicinity shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, two Biennials at the Corcoran Gallery (1955 and 1959), the Annual and "Young America" exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1959, 1960), and an exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art in London (1967). His work can be found in the Milwaukee Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, and Telfair Museum of Art, among others.