Signed Oil Painting, Montmartre Street Scene in Paris by Georges Berger (1908-1976), 1975, French Expressionist Cityscape on Canvas

A Narrow Street Climbing Toward the Sacre-Coeur

The street pulls the eye upward through the center of the canvas, flanked on both sides by the kind of Montmartre facades that lean slightly inward, their shuttered windows and peeling plaster catching a late afternoon light that Berger rendered in thick, warm yellows and dirty pinks. The composition is vertical even though the canvas is landscape format, because everything in it rises: the cobblestones, the rooflines, the dome of the Sacre-Coeur sitting white against a restless sky at the top of the scene. The paint handling is rough and fast. Berger worked with a loaded brush and probably a knife in places, scraping color across the building facades and laying the street surface down in broad, confident strokes of gray, ochre, and muted blue. There are figures suggested rather than drawn, small marks of color that read as pedestrians only because the eye expects them there. The palette stays controlled (no pure reds, no bright greens) which keeps the mood overcast and urban, the kind of Montmartre you see in winter or on a gray afternoon rather than the postcard version.

About the Artist

Georges Berger (1908-1976) was a French painter who worked primarily in Paris during the mid-twentieth century. He painted the streets and buildings of Montmartre, Belleville, and the older quartiers with an expressionist sensibility that owed something to the School of Paris and something to the long tradition of Parisian street painting that runs from the Impressionists through Utrillo and beyond. Berger's brushwork is more aggressive than Utrillo's and his palette darker, closer to the muted urban tones you find in postwar Parisian painting. He is not widely recorded in major auction databases, but his work appears in private collections and through galleries that specialize in mid-century French urban painting. The 1975 date on this canvas places it in the last year of his life, when his style had fully matured into the bold, direct manner visible here.