Yosl BERGNER

Austrian; Polish 1920–2017
emigrated to Australia 1937; worked in Israel 1950–2017

Yosl Bergner spent his childhood in Warsaw and fled Nazi Europe in 1937 for Australia. In Melbourne, Bergner created numerous images that fused memories of Europe with contemporary urban scenes of Melbourne. The dwellings depicted in House backs, Parkville are reminiscent of tenement houses in the Jewish ghettos of Europe. Bergner identified with urban Aboriginal people living in Fitzroy, depicting their poverty and dispossession, which he associated with Jews during the fall of Warsaw.

Yosl Bergner was born in Vienna into a family of artists and writers. His father travelled to Australia in the hope of locating a new country for the Jews that was free from anti-Semitism and fascism. Bergner spent his childhood in Warsaw, where he studied painting, until he fled Europe, arriving in Australia in 1937.

Bergner settled in Melbourne and found employment in factories and studied briefly at the National Gallery School. He befriended many contemporary artists, including Arthur Boyd, Noel Counihan, Vic O’Connor, Albert Tucker and James Wigley, who respected and were influenced by his knowledge of modern European art. From 1942 to 1946 Bergner served in the Australian army and received a rehabilitation scholarship to study at the National Gallery School. Returning to Europe in 1949, Bergner studied in Paris before settling permanently in Israel in 1951.

During his years spent in Australia, Yosl Bergner created numerous images that fused memories of Europe with contemporary urban scenes of Melbourne. The dwellings depicted in House backs, Parkville, c. 1938,1 are reminiscent of tenement houses in the Jewish ghettos of Europe that appear in several of the artist’s compositions of the 1940s. In works such as these, the use of outlined forms of monochromatic colour created sombre and disturbing iconography that profoundly influenced an Australian social-realist style of painting. Bergner identified with the urban Aborigines living in Fitzroy, depicting their poverty and dispossession, which he associated with Jews during the fall of Warsaw, and became one of the first visual artists to record the social ramifications of European settlement on Indigenous Australians in the twentieth century:

The lonely drinker, the city rat-catchers, scavengers, refugees from Hitlerism, the woman of the slums— street sweepers—these were his subjects. Voracious in his appetite for life, thin-skinned and emotional, obsessed with art, Bergner, a boy in a Carlton attic, picked up painting as he went along, as naturally as a bird sings. Daumier, Van Gogh and Picasso of the blue period were his gods. The compassion, humanity and deep sincerity of his art attracted immediate attention.2

1  According to Joseph Brown, Bergner lived in the house depicted.

2  Noel Counihan, quoted in Modern Australian Art: A Melbourne Collection of Paintings and Drawings (exh. cat.), B. Reid ed., Museum of Modern Art of Australia, Melbourne, 1958, p. 34.

Geoffrey Smith