Cassandra

About the Art and the Artist.

The story of Cassandra appears in The Iliad. According to legend, Apollo, the god of the sun with power over other gods and humans,
fell in love with Cassandra, daughter of King Priam. To win her favor, Apollo conferred upon her the gift of foretelling the future on her promise to yield herself to him. Angered when Cassandra refused to fulfill her part of the bargain, Apollo could not withdraw his divine gift so he took from her the power of persuasion. Cassandra could foretell the future, but no one would listen to her. When she tried to warn the Trojans to“beware of
Greeks bearing gifts”, they would not heed her warning and were defeated when the Greeks sent a huge sculpture of a horse filled with Greek soldiers into the city of Troy. Berman’s painting shows Cassandra as she watches the flames of the destruction of Troy.
While the pose of Berman’s Cassandra is particularly appropriate to her story, a central female figure was a device he used often; several works during the period 1940–46 show a woman with her back to the
viewer, looking into the canvas or off toward the horizon. Often these women are mythological figures in a high tragic vein.
Arched forms around Cassandra echo the shape of her head. The drapery and her garments repeat the soft tendrils of her hair, which are a counterpoint to the hard, jagged edges of the wooden structures.
Bones and other natural objects, possibly implements of divination, rest on the wooden structure behind her. Berman’s signature—E.B. in an oval—appear attached to the front of the wooden structure.

Russian-born painter and stage designer Eugene Berman was the son of a banker father and an artistically inclined mother. After his father’s death in 1907, he spent five years, with his brother Leonid, in schools in Germany and Switzerland. With his mother’s remarriage to his father’s brother, he returned to St. Petersburg. Fascinated by theatre and dance at an early age, Eugene attended productions of Mozart operas and the Ballets Russes, including performances by the dancer Vaslav Nijinksy who lived
in the same building as Berman’s family. Through family friend who was an architect, Berman developed an early interest in all things Italian: architecture, art, opera, and ballet. The inclusion of Italianate architecture in his paintings is a hallmark of Berman’s style. After the Soviet revolution, Berman fled with his family to Paris in 1918. Enrolling at the Académie Ranson, he became friends with a group of painters that were later called the Neo-Romantics. With financial support from his family, Berman traveled throughout Italy, seeking out works by Italian Renaissance masters and refining his drafting skills through sketchbook drawings of everything that interested him without concern for how or when these sketches would become a painting. When he returned to Paris, he painted transmuted memories, often retaining the somber blue palette that he used in half nocturnal reveries. Many recognized his paintings of dim interiors and melancholic piazzas as the strongest works of the Neo-Romantic painters. In 1936, because of the political advances of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Europe, Berman immigrated to the United States, where curators and dealers were captivated by the Neo-Romantics. He executed
a series of mural decorations, beginning with his apartment. After a lifetime of making drawings and models for imaginary stage settings, as well as incorporating theatrical architecture in his paintings,
Berman became an acclaimed theatrical designer for classical ballet and opera, working for, among
others, the Metropolitan Opera Company.