Summer

In the noonday sun a cow stretches its head above the garden fence, before which phlox and mallow are in bloom. The darkness of the sky at the right presages an approaching thunderstorm in the summer heat.

After Werner Berg left the academy in Munich, he made contact with Emil Nolde, a painter who he admired and who became a friend and fatherly role model. Werner Berg later remarked: “This painting, Summer, shows Nolde’s influence most strongly, but at the same time it is a total departure from it, a transformation of my painting into surface, into pictorial significance.”