Labor of Love

Erin Shaver

Marc Piscotty

A decade after Bill Berger’s passing, the Berger Collection of British art remains a Colorado gem.

To step into the Denver home of Bernadette Berger is to step into a portion of one of the most important private collections of British art in America.

With a living room adorned with original paintings by artists such as John Constable and Benjamin West, just to name a few, the home boasts a total of 50 works by a variety of world-famous artists, all amassed over the course of the last 15 years by Bernadette and the late Bill Berger.

Yet despite the proliferation of old masters on every wall (including the bathroom!), there is nothing stuffy or staid about the Berger home. Beyond the jaw-dropping Bouchers and Whistlers and Sargents are the ebbs and flows of real people and real life: the vitality of three young grandchildren playing in the background and Bernadette, wrapped in blankets in her chair, frail from the cancer she has valiantly fought for more than a decade, eager to share her story.

The Beginning

The love between Bernadette and her husband Bill — who passed away in 1999 — and her daughter, Cindy Hayes, is deeply apparent. Bill was, of course, the love of her life, and while the art also arouses a passion deep within her, you can tell being a mother to her three daughters is, by far, her proudest achievement in life.

During our interview, in which Hayes often had to help translate for her mother, the two laughed and even cried over reminiscences (“I just feel so honored now to be her voice,” Hayes says). In a way, I almost felt like the experience of the interview was as rewarding for their bond as it was for the story I was writing.

The story of how the Bergers became a pair of Denver’s most famous art collectors goes something like this: Bernadette Johnson was a stockbroker and divorced mother of three — and not at all wealthy — when she met W.B. “Bill” Berger at a Christmas party for Janus “sometime in the 1970s,” forever altering the course of each of their lives.

Bill came from old money — his ancestors founded the Colorado National Bank in 1862 — but made the bulk of his wealth in the early 1990s when his Berger Associates mutual funds “went from million-dollar funds to billion-dollar funds in, like, one year,” says Hayes.

Upon meeting, Bill immediately offered Bernadette a job (which she declined), and the two went on to date for roughly 20 years before they got married in 1996. The couple sort of accidentally became art collectors, Hayes says, through a simple newlywed request. Bernadette sent her recently retired husband, who was perhaps a tad restless, on a mission to find some art for the house they were building — really just to get him out of her hair.

“He was driving her crazy,” says Hayes, “so she gave him a job to do, something to keep him busy, and it really turned into this thing that they did together.”

And so began the industrious three-year period between 1996 and 1999 in which the couple accumulated a very strong 600-year composite of British painting, as well as substantial Asian, American, and French collections.

How exactly did they do it? “Very early,” says Bernadette, who, along with her husband, got up at 3 am to bid for works over the phone at London auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, among others, many, many times during that prolific collecting period. They also traveled the world several months out of every year, constantly looking for art to augment their burgeoning collection.

“It became an obsession,” says Hayes.

British Revival

While the Bergers had a variety of art interests, they decided to focus on British art, not only because of its accessibility and good value at the time, but also because it seemed to offer something to which nearly everyone could relate.

The story has it that the 1996 purchase of Elizabeth I by Hans Eworth, which currently is on view at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), was the painting that truly converted the couple from casual to serious art buyers.

“Bill Berger is said to have commented when he bought this painting — he kind of looked at it and sat back and took a deep breath — ‘Well, I guess I am now really collecting art,’” says Kathleen Stuart, curator of the Berger Collection at the DAM, where the majority of the collection resides. “He didn’t think of himself as a true collector until he bought this.” (Bernadette confirms this anecdote with a nod.)

It happened that the Bergers’ hurried acquisition pace was somewhat prophetic. Just a year after the first big retrospective of the couple’s collection in 1998 — 600 Years of British Painting, which brought great notoriety from The New York Times and several U.K. publications — Bill died rather suddenly at the age of 72.

And it was around the same time that Bernadette, 13 years his junior, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, one that she has rallied against for a decade. While she has remained cognitively sharp, it has affected much of her fine motor skills, including speech, and put her in a wheelchair.

While Stuart says the Berger Collection (now administered by the staff of the DAM) still adds “one to two objects a year,” the crux of the collection has remained constant for several years, holding at roughly 400 objects. That fact, coupled with the DAM’s opening of the new Hamilton wing three years ago, has unintentionally kept publicity away from the collection, which has had a longtime home on the (quite lovely) sixth floor of the North Building.

Each year the DAM and the Berger family decide which objects can go back and forth between the museum, storage, and the Berger home. The DAM’s current rotation focuses on 16th- and early 17th-century British portraits, which Stuart calls “the collection’s greatest strength.”

Giving Back

While the DAM is certainly the most accessible place to see the Berger Collection, Bernadette opens her home to an estimated 500 people a year, including the DAM Friends of Painting and Sculpture group, local art students and teachers, art dealers from around the world, and Denver public figures.

According to Hayes, that open-door policy was always in the family’s blood with involvement in the community a focus since they were very young.

“If someone was in need or in crisis, we were always there for each other,” she says. “And I’ll never forget the time my mother invited a homeless man to the house for Thanksgiving. And it was just us five girls — my grandmother was there — and it was like, ‘Mom, this is going too far.’”

Now that she has the financial wherewithal, Bernadette is able to give on a much greater scale. Among her many charities, which include the DAM, the Met, Save Venice, the Smithsonian, and the Huntington Library, is local nonprofit ArtReach, which helps bring art to low-income and disadvantaged students in Denver.

This past February, ArtReach awarded Bernadette with its ArtStar award, thanking her for a decade of support through hosted events, financial gifts, and helping leverage numerous art-world connections and resources.

“We are so lucky that she lends herself to ArtReach,” says organization director Karla Johnson-Grimes. “She’s just so supportive and so giving of herself, whether it be monetarily or advice, whatever. [She and Cindy] are really down-to-earth people that just want to share.”

It was true. In the hours leading up to my interview with the Bergers, I was anxious about entering such an esteemed home and art collection; now, that sentiment seems almost comical. In retrospect, the openness and genuine love I felt in the room instead left me feeling uplifted.

“They are true collectors in how much they love the art and love the process and the sharing of the art,” says Stuart. “Bernadette really has a generous heart.”