Yosl Bergner

Art Brokerage: Yosl Bergner Israeli Artist: b. 1920-2017. Yosl Bergner also known as Josl, was an Israeli painter. He was born in Vienna, Austria, grew up in Warsaw, Poland, lived in Melbourne, Australia from 1937 until 1948, when he moved to Israel. Yosl emigrated to Australia in 1937 and studied in the National Gallery School in Melbourne until the outbreak of War World II. He served for four and a half years in the Australian Army, and later continued his studies at the Art School. In Melbourne from 1937–48, Bergner befriended many of the local artists who now epitomize modern Australian art: Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Perceval and Arthur Boyd. Adrian Lawlor moved with his wife to a cottage at Warrandyte, an outer suburb of Melbourne, where they lived for 30 years. Bergner was a frequent visitor at their Warrandyte home. All the men socialized together. Bergner encouraged them to go beyond their traditional landscape style and introduced a more radical concern for working families, thus having an important impact on Australian art. He left Australia in 1948 and after two years of traveling and exhibiting in Paris, Montreal and New York, he settled in Israel. He lived in Safed until moving to Tel Aviv in 1957. Bergner has designed scenery and costumes for the Yiddish and Hebrew theatres, particularly for the plays of Nissim Aloni, and has illustrated many books. The acme of Bergner's paintings is his allegorical works; he uses kitchen tools such as squashed pots, oil lamps, wrecks and cracked jugs and he anthropomorphizes them. These old instruments symbolize distorted and poor world of wars, secrets and darkness. Listings wanted.