At the age of ten, he started rowing fishing with his father and eventually participated for many years in the Lofoten fishery. In 1910 he worked as a shopkeeper in Tromsø and went from there to Svolvær where he started his own business in 1913.
He later worked as a mail opener, ship clerk and manager in a factory. In 1920 he settled as a fishmonger in Oslo, but went bankrupt.
Without any formal education, he began to paint, and he soon attracted attention as the mystical naturalist that some believed him to be. In the first years, he traveled around with his paintings and sold them on the streets, without much financial success. On posters and advertisements, he advertised “the Lofoten painter Einar Berger”.
But in 1933, an art dealer in Oslo had Berger exhibited on his premises. The pictures caused a stir, sales were rapid, he also received invitations from abroad. Einar Berger was declared a genius by some, and especially by the Swedish art historian Bernd Lodewiges, who wrote his own book about the artist.
According to his own statements, Berger painted on the inspiration of the moment. He could only close his eyes for a moment and the motifs appeared, motifs from the years with his father on the Lofoten Sea. The vast majority of Einar Berger’s paintings are from Lofoten.
Einar Berger is one of the more controversial North Norwegian painters from this period. Self-taught as he was, he had a hard time being accepted in the finer salons, but he eventually achieved considerable recognition and participated in exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Oslo, the Netherlands, New York, Chicago, Italy and Sweden.
