Yosl Bergner: Samovar In Landscape/ Australian Israeli Jewish Hand - Painted Litho
Item History & Price
Yosl Bergner1920, Vienna, Austria - 2017, Tel Aviv, IsraelSamovar in the LandscapeOriginal Hand-Signed Hand-Painted Lithograph
Past Provenance: the art collection of the Israeli cultural icon Dahn Ben-Amotz
Artist Name: Yosl Bergner
Title: Samovar in the landscape
Signature Description: Hand-signed in Hebrew lower right
Technique: Hand-painted lithograph
Size: 50 x 35 cm / 19.69" x 13.78" inch
Frame: Unframed
Condi...tion: The image is in very good condition, light aging spots, mainly on the bottom margins, consistent with the age and use. Artist's Biography:
Yosl Bergner, Painter. born 1920, Vienna. Died in January, 2017, Tel Aviv.Lived and worked in Tel Aviv.1937 Left Vienna for Australia. Immigrated to Israel 1951.Son of Yiddish poet, Melech Ravitch of Vienna.
Studies
Art School, Melbourne.Exhibited in Australia in framework of “Association of Contemporary Art”; participated in group, “Social Realism”.
Prizes
1955 Dizengoff Prize;1980 Israel Prize for painting (along with Anna Ticho).
Yosl Bergner (born 1920), 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.BiographyYosl Bergner was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1920 and grew up in Warsaw, Poland.With rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization was formed in the United States in July 1935, to search for a potential Jewish homeland. Soon afterwards a pastoral firm in Australia offered the League about 16, 500 square kilometres (6, 400 sq mi) in the Kimberleys, stretching from the north of Western Australia into the Northern Territory. As history showed, the plans went nowhere. But for a time, the Australian idea was at least worth considering. Bergner's father, Melech Ravitch, became involved in a serious investigation of the Kimberley Plan.In this way the Bergner family moved to Australia. 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.Bergner may not have been prepared for the plight of many struggling Australians. Yet he felt a strong connection between the suffering of people everywhere, whether they were the Jews that he remembered from Europe, landless blacks in the heart of Australia or hungry children in inner urban Melbourne.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.WorksBergner 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.Painter changed Australia's view of art
By David Langsam / The Sydney Morning Herald / January, 2017Yosl Bergner was arguably Australia's most important painter.He arrived from Warsaw in 1937 on the same boat as this writer's father and shared a house in Carlton with his sister, the dancer Ruth Bergner, and quickly found the "Heide" gang of Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Noel Counihan, Sid Nolan and Vic O'Connor.Unlike the Australian painters, at 17 Yosl was a fully developed painter of the German Expressionist tradition heading into Social Realism, which he preferred to call Social Humanism.He shocked the staid art world with his painting Aborigines Chained To A Tree, an image he had seen in The Sydney Morning Herald and then painted in oil on masonite – canvas being too expensive in an Australia still recovering from the Great Depression.While news pictures of such horrific events were acceptable, the idea that they could be reproduced as art was beyond contemporary belief. Even the young artists he met, who would go on to become our greatest artists, were still painting flowers in vases and pretty landscapes.Yosl said that with all the trauma in the world he couldn't paint pretty pictures, so he painted the human condition – and is believed to be the first Australian painter to do so. He and his contemporaries believed that art could change the world.The late University of Melbourne art historian, Professor Bernard Smith, coined the term "post-modernism" to describe the work from a 1944 Contemporary Art Society exhibition of Yosl Bergner with Noel Counihan and Vic O'Connor, depicting European Jewish refugees as well as scenes from Melbourne's poverty-stricken inner suburbs, primarily Fitzroy.Yosl was born on October 13, 1920 in Vienna, but his family moved to Warsaw when he was an infant and he grew up in the Jewish neighborhood around Novolipki Street. It was a vibrant community, but the rise of anti-Semitism was clear and many families were attempting to emigrate.His father, known as Melech Ravitch, was a writer and intellectual who translated Franz Kafka into Yiddish. In 1934 Ravitch undertook an expedition to the Kimberleys in Western Australia to see if the region would be suitable for the yet-to-be-formed Jewish homeland. The fruitless journey laid the groundwork for other members of the Bergner family to migrate to Australia, just before the Holocaust.Yosl's sister Ruth arrived in Australia in 1936 and in 1937 Yosl followed. He was accepted as a student at the National Gallery School and between a range of part-time and casual jobs, including selling socks at Victoria Market, painted some of his most impressive early works.Two of Yosl's early works stand out: Aborigines Chained To A Tree and The Ghetto Wall. The profiles of one of the Aboriginal men and the Jewish father are identical – an expression of "God, why have you forsaken me?"Yosl was briefly married to Marisha (Mary) Tauman but in 1948 left Australia for Paris, where he re-met fellow National Gallery School student Audrey Keller, who would become his life-long partner and mother of their daughter Hinda.Yosl and Audrey visited New York in 1950 and moved to Safed in Israel, later settling in Tel Aviv, where they both wrote and painted.Yosl is affectionately known in each country as one of their greatest painters. He was heavily influenced by the writing of Franz Kafka and following an exhibition of his Kafka paintings in the Czech Republic, hosted by the Franz Kafka Society of Prague, is also considered to be one the Czech Republic's leading painters, despite never living there. Yosl always found it easy to fit in.In Israel, Yosl was unable to paint the politics of the country, but there are allusions to it with birds flying through the wings of butterflies. Having grown up in the non-Zionist socialist Jewish Bund and later a member of the Communist Party of Australia, he said that he was never a Zionist, but hated anti-Semitism and that is how he ended-up in Israel. Much of his work – like Arthur Boyd's – is rich in symbolism and can take quite some time to understand.But there is also love and playfulness and joy at innocence. Everywhere in his studio are toys and cheese graters, hurricane lamps and other household objects that find their way into his paintings and drawings.In 1985, Yosl donated a body of work to the National Gallery of Victoria, and a retrospective exhibition was held at the Banyule Homestead in Heidelberg. While Audrey has returned to Melbourne for exhibitions, it was the last time Yosl would see the city of his most formative years.The film-maker Trevor Graham took the opportunity to interview Yosl while he was in Australia and the subsequent award-winning documentary Painting The Town, changed direction from the original concept of telling the story of the painters of the 1940s to focusing on Yosl. (The DVD is available through Ronin Films in Canberra.)Yosl was also the recipient of the Dizengoff Prize and the Israel Prize and was made a life member of the National Gallery of Victoria. His images have illustrated many books and he designed costumes and sets for numerous stage plays.Just 12 months ago – pretty much to the day – we said goodbye to Yosl and Audrey at their home in Tel Aviv, having earlier spent some time with them and introduced my children, Alex, Yosl Arthur (named after Yosl and Arthur) and Joshua.While he had slowed physically, he had not changed intellectually and was still working in his studio every day. The smell of oil paint and gum turpentine was rich to the nostrils.We went to the studio and Yosl pulled out pictures from the racks and toys and musical instruments and entertained us for several hours, even though we only dropped in for 30 minutes.His death is a great, although not unexpected, loss to the world arts community, but especially for Australia and lsrael.Yosl is survived by his wife Audrey, their daughter Hinda and her children and his sister Ruth. Additional Information:YOSL BERGNER DEAD AT 96The Jerusalem Post / January 18, 2017Artist, theater set and costume designer, book illustrator and Israel Prize laureate Yosl Bergner, perhaps best known for his individual and group portraits in which the subjects are featured with long pale faces, pointed chins and huge dark, soulful eyes that mirror both the sadness and the joy of the Jewish experience, died in Tel Aviv on Wednesday at age 96.
Much of his work for the theater was for plays by Nissim Aloni. He also designed sets and costumes for Yiddish Theater.
His father, Melech Ravitch, was a famous Yiddish journalist, poet and novelist, and his uncle Hertz Bergner was an internationally renowned Yiddish novelist and playwright who had a close friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer despite the geographic distance between them.
During World War I, the Bergner family left their Polish township and settled in Vienna where Melech met Yosl’s mother, a singer from Lodz. Yosl was born in Austria.
Antisemitism was rife in Europe, so Yosl’s father went to Australia in 1933, initially to raise funds for Jewish schools in Poland.
While he was there, he became interested in the Kimberley Project, which was similar to the Uganda Proposal, namely that it provided a settlement option for Jews where they could be free of persecution.
Like the Uganda Proposal, it was buried beneath the dust of history.
Melech returned to Warsaw with exotic photographs of Australia which generated great excitement and curiosity in his family and then went back down under. The rest of the Bergner family soon followed.
Yosl had already displayed an aptitude for art in Poland and had studied with Hirsch Altman in Warsaw.
After arriving in Melbourne, in 1937, he enrolled at the National Gallery Art School where the future icons of the Australian art scene were his fellow students and friends.
His studies were disrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Like many young Jewish immigrants from Europe who felt that they owed something to Australia, Yosl joined the army where he served for four-and-a-half years, after which he resumed his art studies.
In 1948, he decided to leave Australia and traveled for two years in Europe and North America. In 1950, he came to Israel, settling initially in Safed where he lived for seven years before moving to Tel Aviv.
Within four years of settling in Israel, he won the Herman Struck Prize. A year later he was awarded the Dizengoff Prize. Over the years, he won several other prizes and was named an honored citizen of Tel Aviv.
His studio was adjacent to his apartment, and he was very disciplined about going there each day to paint, and did so almost to the last day of his life.
In 1987, after an absence of half a century, he went back to Australia for a retrospective exhibition which largely featured scenes of the Warsaw and the Melbourne of his youth.
Inasmuch as he was a great artist, Bergner was also an engaging raconteur and could keep people spellbound for hours.Payment Methods: PayPal, Credit Card (Visa, Master Card), Bank Cheque. If you wish to send a personal cheque, please note that the item will not be shipped until the cheque clears. Shipping&Handling: All items are sent through registered mail or by E.M.S. Fast delivery service (up to 4-5 business days), depends on the weight and measures of the purchased item. You may add insurance for the item with an additional fee. Please e-mail us for other shipping methods. In case that the frame includes a glass, the item will be shipped without the glass in order to prevent any damage to the artwork caused by broken glass: be aware that such kind of a damage is not covered by the insurance! Terms of Auction: All sales are final, please only bid if you intend to pay. Refunds will be accepted only if the item is not as described in the auction. ISRAELI BUYERS MUST ADD 17% V.A.T. TO THE FINAL PRICE.
Artshik provides full assurance that all items sold are exactly as described! We guarantee all items we sell are 100% authentic!
00006
Past Provenance: the art collection of the Israeli cultural icon Dahn Ben-Amotz
Artist Name: Yosl Bergner
Title: Samovar in the landscape
Signature Description: Hand-signed in Hebrew lower right
Technique: Hand-painted lithograph
Size: 50 x 35 cm / 19.69" x 13.78" inch
Frame: Unframed
Condi...tion: The image is in very good condition, light aging spots, mainly on the bottom margins, consistent with the age and use. Artist's Biography:
Yosl Bergner, Painter. born 1920, Vienna. Died in January, 2017, Tel Aviv.Lived and worked in Tel Aviv.1937 Left Vienna for Australia. Immigrated to Israel 1951.Son of Yiddish poet, Melech Ravitch of Vienna.
Studies
Art School, Melbourne.Exhibited in Australia in framework of “Association of Contemporary Art”; participated in group, “Social Realism”.
Prizes
1955 Dizengoff Prize;1980 Israel Prize for painting (along with Anna Ticho).
Yosl Bergner (born 1920), 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.BiographyYosl Bergner was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1920 and grew up in Warsaw, Poland.With rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization was formed in the United States in July 1935, to search for a potential Jewish homeland. Soon afterwards a pastoral firm in Australia offered the League about 16, 500 square kilometres (6, 400 sq mi) in the Kimberleys, stretching from the north of Western Australia into the Northern Territory. As history showed, the plans went nowhere. But for a time, the Australian idea was at least worth considering. Bergner's father, Melech Ravitch, became involved in a serious investigation of the Kimberley Plan.In this way the Bergner family moved to Australia. 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.Bergner may not have been prepared for the plight of many struggling Australians. Yet he felt a strong connection between the suffering of people everywhere, whether they were the Jews that he remembered from Europe, landless blacks in the heart of Australia or hungry children in inner urban Melbourne.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.WorksBergner 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.Painter changed Australia's view of art
By David Langsam / The Sydney Morning Herald / January, 2017Yosl Bergner was arguably Australia's most important painter.He arrived from Warsaw in 1937 on the same boat as this writer's father and shared a house in Carlton with his sister, the dancer Ruth Bergner, and quickly found the "Heide" gang of Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Noel Counihan, Sid Nolan and Vic O'Connor.Unlike the Australian painters, at 17 Yosl was a fully developed painter of the German Expressionist tradition heading into Social Realism, which he preferred to call Social Humanism.He shocked the staid art world with his painting Aborigines Chained To A Tree, an image he had seen in The Sydney Morning Herald and then painted in oil on masonite – canvas being too expensive in an Australia still recovering from the Great Depression.While news pictures of such horrific events were acceptable, the idea that they could be reproduced as art was beyond contemporary belief. Even the young artists he met, who would go on to become our greatest artists, were still painting flowers in vases and pretty landscapes.Yosl said that with all the trauma in the world he couldn't paint pretty pictures, so he painted the human condition – and is believed to be the first Australian painter to do so. He and his contemporaries believed that art could change the world.The late University of Melbourne art historian, Professor Bernard Smith, coined the term "post-modernism" to describe the work from a 1944 Contemporary Art Society exhibition of Yosl Bergner with Noel Counihan and Vic O'Connor, depicting European Jewish refugees as well as scenes from Melbourne's poverty-stricken inner suburbs, primarily Fitzroy.Yosl was born on October 13, 1920 in Vienna, but his family moved to Warsaw when he was an infant and he grew up in the Jewish neighborhood around Novolipki Street. It was a vibrant community, but the rise of anti-Semitism was clear and many families were attempting to emigrate.His father, known as Melech Ravitch, was a writer and intellectual who translated Franz Kafka into Yiddish. In 1934 Ravitch undertook an expedition to the Kimberleys in Western Australia to see if the region would be suitable for the yet-to-be-formed Jewish homeland. The fruitless journey laid the groundwork for other members of the Bergner family to migrate to Australia, just before the Holocaust.Yosl's sister Ruth arrived in Australia in 1936 and in 1937 Yosl followed. He was accepted as a student at the National Gallery School and between a range of part-time and casual jobs, including selling socks at Victoria Market, painted some of his most impressive early works.Two of Yosl's early works stand out: Aborigines Chained To A Tree and The Ghetto Wall. The profiles of one of the Aboriginal men and the Jewish father are identical – an expression of "God, why have you forsaken me?"Yosl was briefly married to Marisha (Mary) Tauman but in 1948 left Australia for Paris, where he re-met fellow National Gallery School student Audrey Keller, who would become his life-long partner and mother of their daughter Hinda.Yosl and Audrey visited New York in 1950 and moved to Safed in Israel, later settling in Tel Aviv, where they both wrote and painted.Yosl is affectionately known in each country as one of their greatest painters. He was heavily influenced by the writing of Franz Kafka and following an exhibition of his Kafka paintings in the Czech Republic, hosted by the Franz Kafka Society of Prague, is also considered to be one the Czech Republic's leading painters, despite never living there. Yosl always found it easy to fit in.In Israel, Yosl was unable to paint the politics of the country, but there are allusions to it with birds flying through the wings of butterflies. Having grown up in the non-Zionist socialist Jewish Bund and later a member of the Communist Party of Australia, he said that he was never a Zionist, but hated anti-Semitism and that is how he ended-up in Israel. Much of his work – like Arthur Boyd's – is rich in symbolism and can take quite some time to understand.But there is also love and playfulness and joy at innocence. Everywhere in his studio are toys and cheese graters, hurricane lamps and other household objects that find their way into his paintings and drawings.In 1985, Yosl donated a body of work to the National Gallery of Victoria, and a retrospective exhibition was held at the Banyule Homestead in Heidelberg. While Audrey has returned to Melbourne for exhibitions, it was the last time Yosl would see the city of his most formative years.The film-maker Trevor Graham took the opportunity to interview Yosl while he was in Australia and the subsequent award-winning documentary Painting The Town, changed direction from the original concept of telling the story of the painters of the 1940s to focusing on Yosl. (The DVD is available through Ronin Films in Canberra.)Yosl was also the recipient of the Dizengoff Prize and the Israel Prize and was made a life member of the National Gallery of Victoria. His images have illustrated many books and he designed costumes and sets for numerous stage plays.Just 12 months ago – pretty much to the day – we said goodbye to Yosl and Audrey at their home in Tel Aviv, having earlier spent some time with them and introduced my children, Alex, Yosl Arthur (named after Yosl and Arthur) and Joshua.While he had slowed physically, he had not changed intellectually and was still working in his studio every day. The smell of oil paint and gum turpentine was rich to the nostrils.We went to the studio and Yosl pulled out pictures from the racks and toys and musical instruments and entertained us for several hours, even though we only dropped in for 30 minutes.His death is a great, although not unexpected, loss to the world arts community, but especially for Australia and lsrael.Yosl is survived by his wife Audrey, their daughter Hinda and her children and his sister Ruth. Additional Information:YOSL BERGNER DEAD AT 96The Jerusalem Post / January 18, 2017Artist, theater set and costume designer, book illustrator and Israel Prize laureate Yosl Bergner, perhaps best known for his individual and group portraits in which the subjects are featured with long pale faces, pointed chins and huge dark, soulful eyes that mirror both the sadness and the joy of the Jewish experience, died in Tel Aviv on Wednesday at age 96.
Much of his work for the theater was for plays by Nissim Aloni. He also designed sets and costumes for Yiddish Theater.
His father, Melech Ravitch, was a famous Yiddish journalist, poet and novelist, and his uncle Hertz Bergner was an internationally renowned Yiddish novelist and playwright who had a close friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer despite the geographic distance between them.
During World War I, the Bergner family left their Polish township and settled in Vienna where Melech met Yosl’s mother, a singer from Lodz. Yosl was born in Austria.
Antisemitism was rife in Europe, so Yosl’s father went to Australia in 1933, initially to raise funds for Jewish schools in Poland.
While he was there, he became interested in the Kimberley Project, which was similar to the Uganda Proposal, namely that it provided a settlement option for Jews where they could be free of persecution.
Like the Uganda Proposal, it was buried beneath the dust of history.
Melech returned to Warsaw with exotic photographs of Australia which generated great excitement and curiosity in his family and then went back down under. The rest of the Bergner family soon followed.
Yosl had already displayed an aptitude for art in Poland and had studied with Hirsch Altman in Warsaw.
After arriving in Melbourne, in 1937, he enrolled at the National Gallery Art School where the future icons of the Australian art scene were his fellow students and friends.
His studies were disrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Like many young Jewish immigrants from Europe who felt that they owed something to Australia, Yosl joined the army where he served for four-and-a-half years, after which he resumed his art studies.
In 1948, he decided to leave Australia and traveled for two years in Europe and North America. In 1950, he came to Israel, settling initially in Safed where he lived for seven years before moving to Tel Aviv.
Within four years of settling in Israel, he won the Herman Struck Prize. A year later he was awarded the Dizengoff Prize. Over the years, he won several other prizes and was named an honored citizen of Tel Aviv.
His studio was adjacent to his apartment, and he was very disciplined about going there each day to paint, and did so almost to the last day of his life.
In 1987, after an absence of half a century, he went back to Australia for a retrospective exhibition which largely featured scenes of the Warsaw and the Melbourne of his youth.
Inasmuch as he was a great artist, Bergner was also an engaging raconteur and could keep people spellbound for hours.Payment Methods: PayPal, Credit Card (Visa, Master Card), Bank Cheque. If you wish to send a personal cheque, please note that the item will not be shipped until the cheque clears. Shipping&Handling: All items are sent through registered mail or by E.M.S. Fast delivery service (up to 4-5 business days), depends on the weight and measures of the purchased item. You may add insurance for the item with an additional fee. Please e-mail us for other shipping methods. In case that the frame includes a glass, the item will be shipped without the glass in order to prevent any damage to the artwork caused by broken glass: be aware that such kind of a damage is not covered by the insurance! Terms of Auction: All sales are final, please only bid if you intend to pay. Refunds will be accepted only if the item is not as described in the auction. ISRAELI BUYERS MUST ADD 17% V.A.T. TO THE FINAL PRICE.
Artshik provides full assurance that all items sold are exactly as described! We guarantee all items we sell are 100% authentic!
00006
