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 ichael Bergt was a protégé of the world famous magic-realist Paul Cadmus. Magic Realism is an American style of art with Surrealist overtones. Its subject matter tends to be anchored in everyday reality but with overtones of fantasy or wonder. Typically magic realism is based on the classical techniques of the Renaissance.
Bergt is a mid-career artist who, like Cadmus, is renowned for his meticulously rendered figure paintings, which are created with the oft forgotten medium of egg-tempera and his delicately rendered figurative works on paper.
Bergt was born in 1956 in a small Nebraska farming community. At an early age his family moved to Denver, Colorado. After two years of training in an expressionist dominated college, Bergt left in search of the classical techniques he was interested in. In 1978, Bergt met the San Francisco art dealer John Pence who introduced him to fellow classicists and gave him his first major one-man show two years later.
Bergt began a correspondence with Paul Cadmus in 1988. With the support of his mentor, Bergt exhibited with Cadmus at the Midtown Gallery in New York City. That exhibition began a ten-year period of New York City exhibitions for Bergt. In 1995, Bergt was accepted into the Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Their sculpture garden enabled him to consistently show large-scale sculptures along with his paintings and drawings.
Michael Bergt is currently the President of the Society of Tempera Painters. He was elected a sculptor member of the National Sculpture Society in 2005. Bergt’s museum exhibitions include the Evansville Museum of Art and Science, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art and a mid-career exhibition at the Arnot Museum in Elmira, New York.
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Michael Bergt
The Observer
2005
Egg Tempera on Wood Panel
17 x 14 inches
Turner Carroll Gallery
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Art Interview: Can you tell us something about your paintings?
Michael Bergt: I just finished a show called the Shunga Series. It was inspired by working with a half-Asian and half-Caucasian model, who I've worked with for a long time. My work focuses on combining 2 dimensional pattern surface treatments and 3 dimensional realistic rendering. I began to realize that my work was influenced by both Eastern and Western ideas. I create a lot of figure paintings and drawings that have to do with duality and eroticism. All of these different elements combined became the core of my series.
I begin by doing life-drawing sessions with the model. I render, fairly realistically, the subject and then place her within a context, which incorporates patterning and influences from erotic Japanese Shunga prints.
Art Interview: In your last show did you also exhibit sculptures?
Michael Bergt: I have been intermittently working on sculptures. They are not directly related to the Shunga series … I am however currently working on a piece that incorporates some of the ideas of my Shunga series.
Art Interview: I understand that you were influenced by Paul Cadmus and eventually became friends with him.
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Michael Bergt
Spirit and Flesh
2006
Bronze (Edition of 25)
28 x 21 x 6.5 inches
Turner Carroll Gallery
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Michael Bergt: Yes. When I was 28 I left for Spain to live there. One of the books I brought with me was an exhibition catalog of a retrospective of Cadmus' works that took place at Miami University in Ohio. While reading through this book I discovered that Cadmus was my age when he left the US to go to Majorca, Spain with his friend Jared French. It was on Majorca that he became very influenced by the Italian masters and interested in tempera painting.
While my wife and I were in Spain an art instructor that I knew came to visit and he suggested that I write Cadmus a fan letter. I said I have no idea what his address is and I doubt he would to hear from just anyone. But he said: You would be surprised.
So I wrote Cadmus a letter in care of his gallery…Apparently he was intrigued with my story and wrote back to me asking if I would send him photos of my work so he could see what I was doing. That was how our correspondence began. Afterward I met him and some years later he became very instrumental in helping my career. He was showing at Midtown Galleries and he introduced me to them. Shortly thereafter I began to show my work at Midtown.
Art Interview: How developed were you as an artist before meeting Paul?
Michael Bergt: Well, before I went to Spain I'd been working as a professional artist in San Francisco. I had already had about 3 or 4 shows in some of the galleries there. One of the reasons I moved to Spain was because I had lost the lease to my studio in San Francisco. So decided to use the opportunity to experience a different culture and broaden myself.
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Paul Cadmus
(1904-1999)
Male Nude TS5
1954
Pencil & Casein on Paper
14 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches
DC Moore Gallery
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Michael Bergt
Seamus on Block
2002
Color Pencil and Gouache on Paper
18 x 14 inches
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Art Interview: What was Paul Cadmus like?
Michael Bergt: I found him to be one of the most literate men I have ever come across. He was incredibly well read and very articulate. The letters he wrote to me were beautifully constructed. He always treated me like his peer, which dumbfounded me initially. He never took the position of someone who was more professional. He was a very gentle soul and always very supportive of me.
One of the things that always fascinated me with him was that he dealt with a very difficult subject for most people to accept. The nude male figure was rather taboo at the time. In addition to going against the norm, his technique with egg tempera and his impeccable drawing skills really impressed me. The greatest body of his work was really life drawing. That is something very few artists do, at least to the degree of finish that he did. I felt like he created a validation for the practice of finished drawings and in some ways I felt he reintroduced it. Michelangelo always did very finished drawings and they were a major part of his work. But in contemporary art you rarely think of an artist's work in terms of their drawings. With Paul, you can't see his body of work without including his drawings. His work was the affirmation I needed that figure drawing was a valid pursuit and having finished figure drawings could be a valid part of your work. That was the biggest thing that inspired me about him.
Art Interview: Didn't you show drawings before you met Paul Cadmus?
Michael Bergt: You know, occasionally I included some studies for paintings or whatever. The first or second show that I had in San Francisco I had shown some drawings. But almost all of my paintings, both watercolors and egg tempera, are done in a linear, almost drawing-like, fashion. So for me there's very little separation between drawing and painting.
Art Interview: How did you learn to work with egg tempera? It's a very unusual technique today.
Michael Bergt: It's one of the things that I'd always been intrigued by because I have always loved the early Renaissance painters. I'm fascinated with the period of transition between egg tempera painting and oil painting. There was the Gothic period when the art was still heavily overlaid with spiritualism and had a mythical rendering of faith, which also included the figure and the stark realism of the Renaissance. I liked that magical quality that remained alongside of the representation.
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Michael Bergt
Constellation
2005
Egg Tempera on Wood Panel
11 x 14 inches
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Egg tempera is a great medium that allows you to incorporate those two elements because the nature of tempera is that it is so sharp and crisp and the rendering becomes very defined. Therefore, even when you depict something that is very stylized or pattern-oriented, it has a very defined quality to it. It has a very resolved nature. It's not suggested as in impressionist paintings. It's not vague. It's very crisply rendered. Egg tempera is a medium that I have always admired just because of the kind of works that were rendered in it. I read about it and I was curious about it for a very long time. But I hadn't really painted with it until I received a commission from a priest to paint a processional cross. I knew that the icon tradition that he was interested in was painted in tempera, so I started researching the medium and then began experimenting with it. I had mixed results in the beginning and I wasn't sure I was doing it correctly. I was probably about 20, 21 years old at that time. So I took a workshop by Robert Vickery, he was still teaching workshops and he had written a book a year or two earlier about the techniques of tempera painting. That workshop conveyed the basic practices of tempera painting, how you blended, what the proportions were, what kind of surfaces you work on and that sort of thing and from there on I worked on my own.
Art Interview: Did you have initial schooling as an artist?
Michael Bergt: I had about two years in college but I never finished my BA. I had difficulties because it was the mid-70s and the universities that I went to were not technique-oriented. They certainly didn't teach classical training by any means. My interest at that time was very much in classical painting and drawing techniques. When I expressed that interest with my professors they told me “you don't need to know that…” or “technique doesn't matter... it's not important” or “that's not what the art world is about” or “that's not where art is going”. I knew at that point that they were unable to teach me what I was truly interested in knowing. But I was very fortunate to met John Pence early on, the gallery owner and director in San Francisco. He began showing my work and introduced me to other artists who were working very traditionally. They helped me get started in this career so I didn't really have to go through the usual university training and get a Master's Degree.
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Michael Bergt
The Angel
2000
Egg Tempera on Wood Panel
24 x 14 inches
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Art Interview: What were the art teachers at the university actually teaching?
Michael Bergt: Well, even though they were painting somewhat representational, the idea of trying to do under-painting, glazing and working on true chalk gesso was something they had no experience with so they told me I didn't need it and that it wasn't important.
Art Interview: I find that curious because just a decade later I was trained in the classical drawing, sculpture and painting techniques of the old masters. I did 7 years of life drawing and anatomical studies.
Michael Bergt: That certainly wasn't the case in the 70s. Classical training was sort of seen as the death knell for your career because most of the people who were professors at the time had been trained in abstract expressionism during the 50s and 60s. The focus was on the conceptual and formalistic concerns of art rather than on technique.
Art Interview: Do you always work from life?
Michael Bergt: My practice tends to begin with a 3-hour life drawing session. Then I use that drawing, which is fairly finished, to either create a composition for a tempera painting or it may just sit around for a while and I might do another version. But my paintings almost always begin with a life drawing session rather than from my imagination, at least at this point of my career. Early on, before I had the money or space to hire models, I had to invent the compositions but I have always incorporated the figure.
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Will Wilson
Roy
2004
Oil on Linen
19 x 16 inches
John Pence Gallery
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Art Interview: Aside from Paul Cadmus, did you have any other role models?
Michael Bergt: There are several other artists I've known over the course of my career that I keep in touch with and that I respect a lot. Will Wilson, who also shows in the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco, has influenced me a lot. He is a painter I have often worked together with in the studio. He came to visit us in Spain and we worked together. Unlike myself he is an oil painter, but he is also involved with revising the traditional techniques in his work. But, of course, we always put our own sort of twist to it. His figure compositions have a metaphorical quality to them. We would discuss the whole process of painting and what the ideas were behind the paintings or just how to resolve a painting beautifully and the influence of art history on our work. He was a strong influence. There were others, over time; people that you migrate to, run into and who cross your path in your profession. Gino Miles is a sculptor who had a bronze casting business; he traded me his services so that I could enlarge my first sculpture, Carol Mothner, a painter, and I worked together in my studio on Sundays for nearly ten years. There are people that influence you when you begin friendships with them and those who you admire and ask how they came to their technique or their tradition. It all begins to modify what you do and influence what you do.
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Michael Bergt
The Plunge
2001
Egg Tempera on Wood Panel
24 x 18 inches
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Art Interview: Why did you decide to become a professional painter?
Michael Bergt: It was something that I knew I was going to do when I was 5 years old. I guess later I was too naïve to know that you are not supposed to make a living as an artist, so I just proceeded. There were periods where I may have wondered how valid a profession this would be, but I was always fortunate. Some say I have had a charmed life. Every time I've reached a critical point in my life or career, when I was forced to ask myself how I was going to make a living doing this, I either met someone or encountered something that allowed me to continue doing what I do. It's as if I were simply following a path but a path that opens up before me as I go.
Art Interview: How old were you when you had your first solo show?
Michael Bergt: The first major show was at the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco in 1980. I was about 24 at the time.
Art Interview: How did you get into the John Pence Gallery?
This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Michael Bergt on November 7, 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
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