Eugene Berman, painter, illustrator, printmaker, designer, and sculptor, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on 4 November 1899. The stepson of a wealthy banker, he studied art in Europe before returning to Russia to begin formal studies with the Russian painter P.S. Naumoff. With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1918, he fled to Paris where he studied under Edward Vuilliard, Maurice Denis and Felix Valloton, and befriended Pablo Picasso, eighteen years his senior. Despite his exposure to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, he joined a smaller faction of artists in maintaining traditional techniques with Surrealist and Neo-Romanticist leanings.

Despite financial hardships, he began exhibiting in Paris in the 1920s, to some success. He met American gallery owner and art dealer Julian Levy and was offered a show at his gallery in New York. Berman continued to show at the Julian Levy gallery between 1929 and 1947.

In 1935, Berman immigrated to the United States. He designed covers for a variety of fashionable publications and sets for the Metropolitan Opera performances. By the time he’d become a citizen of the U.S. in 1944, he had settled in Hollywood, California. Guggenheim fellowships allowed him to tour the Southwest and Mexico, sources for much of his later landscape inspiration.

He exhibited internationally and his works are represented in the U.S. collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; the Philadelphia Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Eugene Berman retired to Rome in 1957, where he lived until his death on 22 December 1972.