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Yosl Bergner, Israeli, Austria, 1920-2017

Yosl Bergner was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1920, and named Vladimir Jossif Bergner. His father was the Yiddish poet Melech Ravitch, and his mother was the opera singer Fanya Bergner. He was sent to study in the school of the organization known in Europe as the Bund. In his youth he studied at the Warsaw University of Technology Division of Metallurgy and Metals, and also studied painting with Hirsch Altman. In 1937, with the growth of antisemitism, his family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia. There he studied art and joined the “Contemporary Art Society of Australia,” which sought to free itself from. academic painting in Australia. During World War II, Bergner was drafted into the Australian army and served in its Labor Division. During this period he married his first wife, Mary Tauman, whom he divorced shortly after. After the war, he returned to his studies for a time.

In 1948 he immigrated to Paris, where he separated from his second wife, the painter Audrey Bergner. In 1950 he immigrated to Israel, where he settled first in Safed and then in Tel Aviv, where he designed for the theater, particularly for the plays of Nissim Aloni. In 1980 he was awarded the Israel Prize for painting.

The early works of Bergner, from the period when he lived in Australia, are social and realistic in style, paintings with obvious brush strokes, using dark colors and a thick impasto technique. From the 1950s we see in his works a transition from realistic painting to symbolic painting, influenced by Australian art. In these works he uses imagery such as kitchen implements or symbolic images that reflect memories from the Jewish shtetl. Among his best known series of drawings are his drawings for Kafka’s stories (1959), Four Women (1964), etc.

Education

1937 Art School of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Awards And Prizes

1955 Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa
1956 Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa
1980 Israel Prize for Painting
2006 Worthy Citizen of Tel Aviv Award, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa