Julius David Berger was born in 1906 in Denver Colorado. He was the youngest of five children. At the time of his birth, his forty year old Jewish father, Adolph Berger, was a saloon keeper, who had emigrated from Zboro, Hungary, in 1882. His thirty-year-old Jewish mother Sophie (Sonya) had emigrated from Russia in 1888. The family lived at 958 Corona Street.
The artist's father, Adolph Berger, had first been married to Ida Levy, who had been born in Germany in 1869, but she had died after giving birth to Hazel (1898) and Alma (1899). In 1902 Adolph Berger married his second wife Sophie (Sonya). She gave birth to Josef (1903) Rae (1904) and Julius David (1906).
By 1919 his father was a prosperous merchant and proprietor of a liquor store and a men's furnishing store.
In 1920 David Berger began to study art classes in Denver, while his older brother Josef moved to Kansas City to attend college at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
In 1923 he joined his brother in Kansas City, where he also attended college. While still a student Josef Berger worked for newspapers in Kansas City.
By 1928 Josef and David Berger had both finished college and decided to move to New York City. Their three sisters had all married, so their mother and father decided to pull up stakes in Colorado and join their sons' adventure. Adolph Berger had lived in NYC for nine years, from 1882 to 1891, before moving out to Colorado. So Dad and Mom and the two sons of the Berger family all lived together in an apartment building at 195 Claremont Avenue, which is on the Upper West Side, one block away from Grant's Tomb and Riverside Church.
In 1929 Josef Berger's first book for juvenile readers was published, Captain Bib. Curiously, "Bib" was the pen name that David Berger signed to many of his early illustrations. In fact the artist was called "Bib" by everyone in his family.
By 1930 at the age of twenty-three David Berger had opened an art studio and had begun to work for a New York newspaper, where his older brother was employed as a journalist. That same year his father died in a tragic elevator accident in their apartment building.
David Berger's first freelance assignments were book covers and interior pen & ink illustrations for books published in New York, such as Thirteen Women in 1932 and The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman in 1934.
From 1935 to 1940 he drew interior story illustrations for pulps and painted pulp covers for Adventure, All Western Terror Tales, Argosy, Short Stories, Star Western, 10-Story Western, and Western Story.
In 1939 he married his first wife, whose name is not known. They moved to 4 Peter Cooper Road, which is east of First Avenue on 22nd Street in Manhattan.
In 1940 he joined an artist agency and began to sell freelance illustrations to slick magazines, such as Colliers, Esquire, Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post, and Woman's Day.
On February 5, 1943, at the time of his draft induction, he was recorded to be 5'-8" and weigh 146 pounds. He served in the U.S. Army Engineer Corps during WWII and saw action at the Battle of the Bulge. He became an artist and reporter for the Continental Edition of YANK magazine, which was published in Paris.
After the war he divorced and remained to Paris to study at L'Acadamie de Grand Chaumier, while also working as an illustrator for Marie-Claire magazine.
In the 1950s he returned to New York City worked for men's adventure magazines, such as Argosy, For Men Only, and True.
In 1960 he returned to live in Paris, where he married his second wife, Martha. He continued to paint landscapes of his country home and published a fine art lithographic print of one for The Collector's Guild in 1968.
According to his friend, Walter Baumhofer in a letter written to Norman Saunders in 1980, "About Dave Berger, he always had a knack of landing on his feet. He's living in Paris, with a little house in the country. He married a gal whose family owns a business that prints labels for the boxes of all the greatest haut couterier fashion design houses in Paris. We correspond quite regularly, Chirstmas cards and long letters. I saw him once a few years back in Shelter Island*. He was marvelously funny as usual, clad in an old fashioned black bathing suit, completely white haired." *(David Berger's older brother, Josef Berger, owned a summer home on Shelter island. He had become a renowned author and was a regular contributor to The NY Times.)
According to his family oral history, David Berger died in Paris at the age of seventy-six in 1982.
© David Saunders 2009 |
