Portrait completes the circle

A painting finds a new home honouring the artist's modernist legacy and tragic fate

- Bongo Mei

Else Berg was a modernist Jewish artist who played a significant role in European avant-garde circles in the early 20th century.

Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Berlin University of the Arts in Germany, she focused on painting as her primary discipline.

Her work embraced the hallmarks of modernism — abstraction, innovation and self-expression — and her portraits share affinities with the stylistic sensibility of Amedeo Modigliani.

After extensive travels through Eastern Europe with her husband, the established painter Mommie Schwarz (1876-1942), Berg settled in Amsterdam.

When the Nazis came to power, many of their friends and family fled to England or the US. Berg and Schwarz initially felt safe in the Netherlands, but when the wearing of the yellow badge became compulsory, they refused and went into hiding in the village of Baambrugge.

After returning to their studio apartment in the Sarphatipark, Amsterdam, they were ultimately betrayed and arrested in November 1942. Both were deported to Auschwitz and murdered shortly after their arrival on 19 November.

Their possessions, including artworks, were probably looted in the same fashion as the homes of more than 140 000 Jews in the Netherlands — emptied by Abraham Puls & Sons, the notorious Amsterdam moving company that collaborated with Nazi-directed Dutch police.

Following World War II, it was mistakenly assumed that Berg and Schwarz had no surviving family.

It is now known that they did and these heirs are the rightful claimants to any of Berg's looted possessions.

Professor Frederik P Scott (1915-1976), a medical student from the University of the Witwatersrand, travelled to the Netherlands in 1938 with a scholarship from the Dutch-South African Association for Medical Education to complete his studies at the Rijksuniversiteit of Groningen.