Yosel bergners biography of michaels

In the 20th century, social realism developed in response to the social and political turmoil of the inter-war years. He served for four and a half years in the Australian Army, and later continued his studies at the Art School. Believing that art is not a passive factor in life, we strive to create an art which will influence men towards the solution of their universal problems.

Yosl Bergner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, on 13 October 1920 and grew up in Warsaw, Poland.

Bergner left Australia in 1948, travelling in Paris, Montreal and New York City. 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. Bergner may not have been prepared for the plight of many struggling Australians.

But for a time, the Australian idea was at least worth considering. All were members of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), established in 1938 in opposition to the perceived conservatism of the Australian Academy of Art. Newly arrived from Europe, Bergner and Vassilieff introduced their Australian contemporaries to the urgency of expressionism and socially motivated art, influencing other members of CAS, including Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, who would later all emerge as some of Australia’s best-known artists.

In 1944, Bergner, Counihan and another CAS member, Vic O’Connor, included a statement in the Contemporary Art Society Sixth Annual Exhibition catalogue outlining the aims of their art as social realists:

Each seeks to create a democratic art combining beauty of treatment with a realistic statement of man in his contemporary environment.

During the Second World War Bergner served in the Australian Army, afterwards continuing his studies. 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. They drew on subjects from their inner-city Melbourne surrounds, painting workers, dispossessed Aboriginal people and the urban poor, and creating images that reflected the ongoing impact of the war and Depression while capturing their subjects' humanity, dignity and resilience.

Bergner was a frequent visitor at their Warrandyte home. 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.

Yossel Bergner died in Tel Aviv, Israel on January 18, 2017.

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).

In Melbourne from 1937–48, Bergner befriended many of the local artists who now epitomize modern Australian art: Syndey Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Percival, etc.

Bergner's father, Melech Ravitch, became involved in a serious investigation of the Kimberley Plan.