Still Life with Lamp and Little Clown
Yosl Bergner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, on 13 October 1920 and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. In 1937, fleeing antisemitism the family moved to Australia (his father was involved in an ultimately unfulfilled plan by the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization to search for a potential Jewish homeland) and he studied in the National Gallery School in Melbourne. During the Second World War Bergner served in the Australian Army, afterwards continuing his studies. He lived in Melbourne from 1937–48, socialising with a wide circle of local artists, among whom were Sidney Nolan and Stacha Halpern. Bergner left Australia in 1948, travelling in Paris, Montreal and New York City. Two years later he settled in Safed, Israel, moving to Tel Aviv in 1957 with his wife, the artist Audrey Bergner. He is best-known as a painter of allegorical still lifes and also designed scenery and costumes for the Yiddish and Hebrew theatres. In 1956, Bergner was a co-recipient of the Dizengoff Prize for painting, receiving the Israel Prize for painting in 1980 and he exhibited widely in Melbourne, Paris, Tel-Aviv, New York, Montreal and in the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Biennale. His work was included in the 2008 Ben Uri exhibition 'Israel & Art: 60 Years Through the Eyes of Teddy Kollek', and in 2018, in the exhibition: 'Out of Austria', examining forced journeys by Austrian artists following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria). Yosl Bergner died in Tel Aviv, Israel on 18 January 2017.
