Eugene Gustavovitch Berman Biography
Yevgeny Gustavovič Berman was born in Petersburg on November 4, 1899.
In 1918 he studied at the Acadèmie Ranson in Paris under the guidance of Maurice Denis and Édouard Vouillard. Fleeing Bolshevik Russia and Nazism, Berman influenced art, fashion and design by collaborating with major fashion houses such as Balenciaga and Schiaparelli. Among his main works are “Nike” (1943) and “The Living and the Dead” (1949), while his elegance and originality are demonstrated by the theatrical sets created for the Russian Ballet of Monte Carlo and for the Metropolitan Opera from New York. His life and art reflect the complexity of the twentieth century, uniting past and present in a unique and evocative charm.
His first trip to Italy dates back to 1922 to Vicenza, Verona, Padua, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua and Rome. In 1923 he was in Tuscany. In 1924 in Sicily and in Naples, Rome and Tivoli. In 1925 he spent the summer in Ischia, where he met his compatriots Grigorij Šiltjan and Pavel Muratov, as well as Alberto Spaini and the German painter Hans Purrmann. The same year he created the series of paintings Memorie d'Italia, one of the fundamental stages of his journey towards Neo-Romanticism.
In Paris he held his first solo exhibitions in the Granoff (1927), Etoile (1928) and Bonjean (1929) galleries. He also participated with a landscape and a portrait of Giorgio De Chirico in the Contemporary French Art Exhibition organized in Moscow in 1928. In 1930 he participated in the XVII Biennial International Art Exhibition in Venice. From the second half of the 1930s he worked mainly for the theatre, often using studies and drawings made in Italy as ideas for his stage sets and costumes.
In 1957 he settled permanently in Rome and passed away here in 1972.
