[6] Berman achieved early success in his career, receiving the Joseph N. Eisendrath prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1950 for his encaustic painting titled The Storm.

He was familiar with Katharine Kuh through past exhibition juries and knew she was curating a collection of American artists to showcase at the next Venice Biennale.

It was, as Tom Lidtke (Retired Executive Director of MOWA) wrote, "a luminous and intentionally ambiguous urban scene that was as much atmospheric as it was architectural.

"[9] At 29, Berman was the youngest artist featured in the exhibition alongside the likes of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

[16] Berman's art shifts between abstract and representational, often merging the two to varying degrees, forming intentionally ambiguous pieces.

By the early 1960s, he traded this angular vision for a softer, more expanded revelation of light and color in his more freely painted landscapes.

"[18] Like Great Primer (1964), shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art,[12] his creations are often dominated by highly organized wood type characters with the inclusion of printed materials, photo images and other objects designed to conjure nostalgia and mystery.

[4] An exchange lectureship gave him the opportunity to explore Europe more deeply and by the end of the decade he was influenced by J. M. W. Turner and his rendering of light by combining layers of color.

His style was unconventional for the time given that he didn't develop his own film, resented artificial light, shot spontaneously with a hand-held camera and worked exclusively in color.

As a student at the Milwaukee State Teachers College, he received praise from German-born regionalist artist Robert von Neumann and was influenced by Carl Holty's modernist paintings.

He exhibited with contemporaries Arthur Thrall and Joseph Friebert, the latter of which was a major inspiration to some of Berman's most recognized works in architectural abstraction.