Ernestine Betsberg sat at her kitchen table in Webster Groves, telephone at hand and frequently ringing, a walker to one side and a cat prowling for lunch. Her thoughts scattered only slightly as she fielded calls from friends and, between conversations, looked back on her life as an artist. A line drawing of her mother, nude, hung behind her—“and it’s a very good sketch, too,” noted Betsberg, 97, whose hand inked those fluid lines some seven or eight decades earlier.
Her husband, Arthur Osver, 94, was hospitalized at Barnes-Jewish, his lanky frame slight under a blanket but his grip as firm as a wrestler’s, his brown eyes clear and his smile lively. He apologized for having the first beard of his life because he hadn’t been able to shave. His main concern was not the diabetes threatening a leg or the systemic infection affecting his heart but the fact it would be weeks before he could get back to painting.
Together these two painters have forged a life in art.
Her canvases are luminous explorations of color—a French patisserie window infused with sunlight and memory, a self-portrait aglow with the oranges, yellows, reds and pinks of a silk Chinese robe. His explore the contrast between structure and ephemera, be it the play between the stacks of a factory and its plumes of smoke or the trunk of a Missouri redbud and its heart-shaped leaves.
“We had the same ultimate goals—just to do our art,” Osver said from his hospital bed. At home, waiting for word of his condition, Betsberg finished his thought: “Our life is very involved with art and painting.”
They met in 1934 as students at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was more abstract, she more representational. A love of color bound them.
Asked separately how they made it work, husband and wife used the same phrase, explaining that neither offered criticism of the other’s work “unless we were invited.”
Each had a studio in their spacious old house—she painted downstairs, and he took a bag lunch upstairs to work in the light from the northern exposure. They didn’t drop in on each other casually.
“There are all different ways of being an artist. Everyone has to find their own way,” Betsberg said.
Osver was better known. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Columbia and Yale before being recruited in 1960 to teach at Washington University. Résumés don’t get much better—his paintings have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Life magazine ran a full-page reproduction of one painting, and Fortune magazine commissioned another for its cover story on the “Chemical Century”—“a feather in my cap,” Osver called it.
His fascination with the industrial landscape began at age 6.
“My father had a meat market and a grocery store in Youngstown, Ohio, right opposite the steel mills,” he said. “They used to come and dump slag, and there would be these wonderful billows of smoke.
“It looked scary—it looked like hell—but it appealed to me, the ambiguity of it, the elegance, the beauty of the structure and, underneath it all, this hot fire, the energy of it. That contrast.”
Over the decades, his paintings evolved from urban realism, focusing on the smoke-stacks, to a more abstract style, emphasizing the wisps of smoke. Years later, he began painting redbuds after noticing much the same contrast between the structure of the trees and their distinctive leaves.
His wife’s work, he said, “was never properly evaluated” in the art world—perhaps because she was a woman and especially after they settled for good in St. Louis. That may be why she projects a certain fierceness, the slight edge of an artist whose independence led her to maintain her own name and identity long before St. Louis accepted that as the norm. “She is,” said her husband, “a strong-minded woman.”
Betsberg painted every day until a year or two ago, and she refused to be distracted by the telephone before 2:30 p.m. “If it’s good news, it’ll keep,” she’d say. “And if it’s bad news, that’ll keep, too.”
Her paintings chronicle the ordinary scenes of life—a shop window, a potted plant, a household cat. “If you take my paintings, they tell you a story of where I’ve been,” she said. “The world is full of wonderful things.”
When Betsberg painted those wonderful, ordinary things, she revealed color a casual observer might easily miss. In one painting, the leaves of a wandering Jew are deeply purple against the lines of a wrought-iron table and an intense backdrop of rust-red brick. She is a colorist in the way that Matisse was a colorist.
She could, she said, write an essay on color but could hardly sum it up in a sentence or two:
“It’s very insidious; it’s very involved. If you look at the world, there is color all around, even though a lot of people don’t see it. I don’t think I could get along without the color in my paintings.”
Osver found Betsberg’s work “lyrical and beautiful, a wonderful overall vision of the world.”
“She’s been a big influence on me,” he said. “I’ll look at a painting of hers and think, ‘Holy cow! Let me use something as daring as that.’ It causes me to lighten up and use stronger color.”
And how did he influence his wife’s work?
“I didn’t. She influenced me, but I don’t think it’s reciprocal.”
That was pretty much her opinion, too:
“I don’t think we’ve influenced each other. Arthur has never done color the way I do. You absorb it without knowing it ... Arthur and I never competed. We just painted what we felt like doing. We never talked about each other’s work unless we were invited.”
In February, their paintings were exhibited together at the Philip Slein Gallery in the Washington Avenue loft district. Osver was planning a second exhibit later this year. “I want to have a show of our works on paper,” he said in July. “That’s my big desire, to get back into the studio.”
He died in late July, still in the hospital.
Now, with their long partnership drawn to a close, Ernestine mulls their devotion to a life in art. “You don’t even consciously know you have it,” she says. “You have to look back to see it.”
Upstairs, Arthur’s studio is as he left it.
A painting in progress, awash in magenta and powerful blues, leans against one wall; paint tubes, sorted by color on narrow shelves, await the brush, and redbud leaves dapple the northern light. In one corner stands an exercise bike so well used, its seat wrapped round and round with duct tape. The framing bench holds a Smithsonian DVD collection of blues music alongside a folding artist’s cane with a tiny seat.
A Post-it note on the door invites visitors. “I’m in the studio,” it reads. “Come in!” .
A memorial service for Arthur Osver will be held at 3 p.m. October 22 at Graham Chapel, on the Washington University campus. Paintings by Ernestine Betsberg and Arthur Osver may be seen at the Philip Slein Gallery, 1319 Washington, 314-621-4634.
