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FEATURED ARTIST - October 2004
Yosl Bergner Yosl Bergner was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920, and spent his childhood in Warsaw, Poland. The son of a poet and a singer, Bergner took painting lessons before emigrating to Australia in 1937 as a seventeen year old. He struggled to survive in Australia, undertaking a series of menial jobs while studying painting at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne.
He painted images which were essentially autobiographical views of a dark, bleak urban environment, inhabited by lonely and dispossessed people - works which inspired many young Melbourne artists during the 1940s. Fellow student, Noel Counihan remarked that `The lonely drinker, the city rat-catchers, scavengers, refugees from Hitlerism, the woman of the slums - street sweepers - these were his subjects ... The compassion, humanity and deep sincerity of his art attracted immediate and deep attention.'
During the second world war Bergner served in the Australian Army Labour Company at Tocumwal 1941-6 and after-wards gained a Commonwealth Rehabilitation Scholarship to return to his studies at the National Gallery Art School. He left Australia in 1948, travelling first to Paris and then to Israel, where he currently lives and works.
Bergner's subjects and their manner of presentation are many and varied, but the have in common episodes which flow out of each other and back, driven, as it were, in a compulsive cycle.
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