In 1961, the year he completed his studies at the Royal College of Art, Berg moved into a flat at
Gloucester Gate, a residential
terrace designed by the celebrated architect
John Nash overlooking Regent's Park. The park and its changing seasons would be his primary subject for the next 27 years, a period in which he reimagined the long British tradition of
landscape painting. According to the critic Charles Darwent, "Berg, a psychiatrist's son, appraises nature with a cool doctor's eye, noting its symptoms, observing its changes. . . . What at first glance looks like a whimsical work, a paean to petals, is actually something very much steelier." The critic and poet Andrew Lambirth noted a similar tension. "His paintings are full-blooded emotional statements, in which the emotion is at least as tightly-controlled as the paint," Lambirth wrote, adding that Berg liked to quote
Vita Sackville-West on the subject of her garden at
Sissinghurst: "Profusion, even extravagance and exuberance, within the confines of utmost linear severity." Unconventional as it is, Berg's work has been described as "among the finest British landscape painting of all time." It was shown frequently in London galleries—first at the venerable
Arthur Tooth & Sons, then at the
Waddington Galleries in
Mayfair, and eventually at the Piccadilly Gallery. In 1986 Berg was given a retrospective at the
Serpentine Galleries in London that subsequently traveled to
Liverpool and
Newcastle. Two years later he left London with his partner and assistant, Mike Osmund, for the seaside city of
Brighton. There he became known as an eccentric old man, his spine bent double by arthritis, but he continued to paint, focusing now on such landscapes as the
Sussex coast and the gardens of
Stourhead in Wiltshire. He was elected to the
Royal Academy of Arts in 1992 and named an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1994. == References ==