Artist Else Berg was born on February 19, 1877, to Jacob and Hedweg [Creutzberger] Berg in Ratibor, in what is now Poland. The city was economically attractive, with important industry and mining, and was well connected via the Oder River and a growing railway network. Ratibor had a culturally mixed population speaking German, Polish, or a regional dialect, with several synagogues and a Jewish community that offered newcomers—like the non-religious Jews Jacob and Hedweg Berg—social contacts. Jacob established his own cigar factory and prospered, and the couple had three sons and four daughters, of whom Else was one of the youngest.

Berg grew up in relative comfort. She attended school, did not have to work, and was allowed to take drawing lessons at her parents’ expense. Sometime between 1895 and 1900, she left her hometown to study art in Berlin, with her parents’ permission, when one of her brothers moved there. Nothing is known about her training. The official academy only admitted women after World War I, and a Meisteratelier (a master studio for advanced students) was out of reach for a relative beginner. Nor does she appear on the student lists of Berlin’s women’s drawing and painting school, which include such names as Gabriele Münter, Käthe Kollwitz, and Thérèse Schwarze.

Berg probably studied with private teachers paid by her father, for she learned to draw, paint, etch, make lithographs, and produce woodcuts with great skill, as shown by the small body of work that survives from her early career. These include a few paintings of people in parks and by riversides, skilled but traditional etchings of landscapes, and a small series of striking, intense portraits and nudes that display precise anatomical knowledge. (Later in her career, she would be criticized for “not being able to draw hands,” but this was a conscious stylistic choice.)

In 1908 in Berlin, Berg met Samuel Schwarz, a distant relative who had also defied family norms to choose an artistic career. Schwarz, the tenth of eleven children of Leser and Julie Schwarz, was born in 1879 in Zutphen, the Netherlands. The Schwarz children received little schooling; there was no money for it. Most left home around the age of fifteen to work elsewhere in the Netherlands or in Germany. Samuel stayed in Zutphen and, from a young age, helped in his parents’ small haberdashery shop—against his will, for he wanted to “do something” with art.

Schwarz, known as Mom or Mommie, seized his chance to leave Zutphen when his brother Julius, older by thirteen years, visited. Julius had secured a decent position in the New York textile trade and could help his younger brother find work. In 1897, the brothers sailed to the United States. There, Sam worked but also attended a “drawing and painting” course, learning basic techniques applicable to the emerging field of advertising. Likely failing to gain a foothold in the art world, Schwarz returned to Europe to obtain a teaching certificate at the Antwerp Academy’s evening school. He dropped out, received no further formal training, and returned to New York. Around 1908, he came back to Europe for good—and met Else Berg.

“Mommie and Els” were very different people with a loving bond and a strong sense of independence. They were often mentioned in the same breath because they spent most of their lives together and are difficult to separate in any telling. Both were painters formed in the tradition of nineteenth-century art education, yet both were more drawn to the modernist explosions in early twentieth-century art. They were two tireless workers who loved experimentation and continually sought to develop another personal style, two travellers who crisscrossed half of Europe with their painting materials, two artists who contributed to the modernization of Dutch art, two familiar figures in the Amsterdam art scene who hosted wild parties for their friends. And they were two of the more than 100,000 Dutch Jews who did not survive the Second World War.

Young and curious, fond of travel, and adaptable to new environments, Berg and Schwarz set off, more or less on a whim, for Paris to witness the changes underway in the French art world. They were likely overwhelmed by the sheer variety of artistic impressions, gatherings, experiments, and exhibitions. The language barrier and the awareness that they could not yet match the great masters made them feel somewhat lost until Schwarz, with his social ease, connected with Dutch artists. These contacts likely led them to decide to move to the Netherlands, where they met Piet Mondrian.

Around 1910, Berg and Schwarz settled in Amsterdam permanently. The relatively small art world suited them better, while Mondrian preferred Paris. The modernization of art was only just taking hold in the Netherlands, giving Berg and Schwarz an initial advantage. They exhibited regularly and were considered among the very modern artists; Schwarz’s work, in particular, was praised as “an exposition of exuberant painterly talent.” Only a few paintings survive from this period, but they are among his best.

Samuel was easy-going, liked by everyone, helpful to younger colleagues, capable of seriousness, but above all fond of silly jokes. He had no steady income but made reasonable money through graphic design commissions—posters, brochures, theater programs, and advertisements—drawing on his American experience. Berg avoided commercial work and was artistically more reflective, producing confident drawings and stylized landscapes quite different from her Berlin work—more balanced and original.

Berg was bold and enterprising, somewhat spoiled by liberal parents who provided her the means to do as she pleased. She received regular financial support from the cigar factory until the Great Depression struck. She was “different,” wearing loose, colourful clothes and living for art. Some people were a little intimidated by her, especially when she raised her voice. She quickly mastered Dutch, though she spoke with a heavy German accent. Those who knew her well or had known her since childhood recalled a warm woman who treated them as equals, brought unusual gifts, and always paid attention to them. She often painted children, who enjoyed posing for her despite having to sit still, even if some faces look a little tired or glassy-eyed.

Berg and Schwarz, both strongly independent, had very different characters. On April  21, 1920, they married, both over 40 years old and without having lived together beforehand or after. The formal reason was Berg’s naturalization, but numerous notes and their many joint travels attest to a loving bond.

Taking long journeys and discovering new surroundings was an important part of both their lives. Each time a new destination was absorbed, their work changed in style and palette. Berg occasionally travelled alone, usually to visit family. In 1911, she returned for an extended stay in Ratibor when her father died, and she worked regularly in the studio in Königsberg that her eldest sister Anna and brother-in-law Selm Winter had arranged in their home for her and Mommie. Berg also travelled with a small group of female friends, including the successful Jewish photographer Hanna Elkan, who, like her, had moved from Berlin to Amsterdam, and the designer Tine Baanders, her ever-warmhearted close friend who was entirely open about her lesbianism. It is not unthinkable that there was a flirtation between her and Berg, but friendship—also with Mommie—came first.

Mommie too went on solo trips from time to time, mainly to France and northern Italy, but the great majority of journeys were taken together. These were working trips, of course, since painting had to be done; boxes of paints, bundles of brushes, canvases, and other materials travelled with them to France, Italy, Belgium, Königsberg, Mallorca, and what was then Yugoslavia. They travelled by train or boat, and when they ventured into the mountains, they sometimes carried their paint boxes on the back of a donkey. 

Regularly changing style is the common thread in Berg’s work, a result of her nature and her approach to art. She produced a number of magnificent, highly original paintings and powerful drawings, but also many “experiments.” Because she was always trying new things, there was no steady development in one particular direction, though her work is still recognizably her own.

In 1912, Berg and Schwarz traveled to Italy for the first time. Berg’s work became more colorful. She experimented briefly with art nouveau but evidently found it too decorative, soon turning to the search for essence in form, restricting her palette and producing abstracted landscapes. She pursued abstraction further in 1914, in the early spring on Mallorca, where she built her compositions from little blocks, angles, and planes inspired by Cubism.

After Mallorca, Berg went to Schoorl near Bergen, small villages on the North Holland coast. There her style changed again and she discarded more and more conventions. Black-and-white drawings and woodcuts without ornament emerged when she became briefly fascinated by religious ideas, especially those concerning fertility and pregnancy. This was followed by an esoteric phase—with mysterious, stylized images of farmhouses and groves in the area in warm colors and portraits and self-portraits focused entirely on the person depicted. Sometimes these were surrounded by aura-like, shaded bands and flanked by colorful shapes, strange animals, or animal heads.

In the work Berg created later during trips to Italy and France, the esoteric element disappeared but the bold use of color remained. In Italy in particular, her colors became even more glowing and warm. Details vanished and strong lines defined the composition. Gradually, she also abandoned strict perspective. She would “slam” her subject onto the canvas without much spatial distance, so that foreground and background sometimes almost merged. She no longer strove for precise depiction of faces, hands, or fingers. “Beauty” interested her less and less; what mattered was atmosphere, expression, and essence.

Berg depicted grimy alleys in the mining district near Liège, Belgium, with poor houses, slag heaps, and prematurely aged people; her fairgrounds are vivid portrayals of cheerful yet grim popular entertainment; and the Croatian fisherwomen she painted in the early 1930s are worn out by hard labor. Berg’s almost raw exposure of the core only gave way in her final years (in Limburg and Amsterdam) to lighter and more softly colored work, which some critics described as “naïve.”

Berg and Schwarz were well aware of the grave danger they faced as Jews when the war broke out. Family members in Germany had already written to them in the late 1920s about the rise of the National Socialists. Several relatives fled to England and the United States and, after the Nazi takeover in 1933, urged Else and Mommie to join them. They did not. They felt relatively safe in the Netherlands, but when the war began, escape was no longer possible. They did not wear the yellow star but were registered as Jewish and, for safety’s sake, stayed indoors as much as possible.

In 1942, after the start of large-scale round-ups in Amsterdam, Berg and Schwarz went into hiding for a time in Baambrugge, a village south of the city. Presumably, they could not endure this situation, for they eventually returned to their studio homes on Sarphatipark and resumed work, relying on still lifes made from their own household items or depictions of the outside world seen from their window.

One of Schwarz’s last paintings is a sombre, carefully considered view of a snow-covered Sarphatipark, with almost black trees, fine twigs, and many details; the sky is dark despite the snow, and there is not a soul in sight. The painting makes the sense of threat palpable. Berg painted the same view, showing the synergy in their work but above all the differences in style. She may have felt the same atmosphere, yet she depicted a friendly park in soft pink winter light, lively walkers, a child on a sled, and a “naïve” rendering of a wood-burning car.

Just before winter set in, Else Berg and Mommie Schwarz were arrested and taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the assembly point for people rounded up by the Nazis and their collaborators for deportation. Shortly afterwards, on November 16, 1942, they were deported via Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz, not far from Else’s birthplace. There they were murdered three days later.

Shortly before all their possessions were gepulst (confiscated and removed), a friend broke the seals on their homes and managed to take some paintings and personal items. All other personal belongings that might have told something of Mommie’s and Els’ lives were seized by the German occupiers, together with the sketches, drawings, and paintings they had not managed to entrust to friends in time. As if they had never existed, their emptied homes were taken over by new residents. Seventy years later, the rediscovery of their work became the starting point for investigating their artistic legacy and their personal history.