Jason Berger

Jason Berger (January 22, 1924 – October 17, 2010) was a Boston landscape painter, connected to Boston Expressionism [1]. He painted from nature, en plein air, and used favorite motifs in abstract paintings, referred to as "studio paintings". He, also, enjoyed woodcuts which were predominantly printed in black and white. Known for his humor, love of jazz, and his upbeat approach to painting, “his work expresses the joy of life and love of place”.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Berger was the son of first-generation Jews from Lithuania and Latvia, on his mother’s side, and from Russia and Lithuania on his father’s side. Speaking only Yiddish till the age of three, he grew up in the Boston suburbs and attended Roxbury Memorial High School. Encouraged by his mother and uncle, J.P.Savel, illustrator for the Boston Post, Berger’s interest and passion in painting were evident very early. As a teen in the mid-nineteen thirties, he painted en plein air regularly emulating the influences he saw in Boston. His love of the old masters, the immediate approach of the watercolors of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, and the current trends of Modernism, Cubism and Abstraction were the influences that would stay with him throughout his life.

At a young age, he frequented the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and haunted the Boston Public Library, reading all he could on painting and painting techniques. His focus on painting was recognized during high school by acceptance to the “Vocational Art Classes” at the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston where he studied drawing and composition in the afternoons. With this preparation, he received a full scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston in 1941. Karl Zerbe, the principle painting teacher at the school, thought Berger and his classmates, Reed Kay, Jack Kramer, David Aronson, and George Sheridan were among best students.

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