Yosl Bergner

Yosl Bergner was born in 1920 in Vienna

Yosl Bergner was born in Vienna in 1920 to the singer Fania Bergner and the poet Melech Ravitch. He grew up in Warsaw in a home full of writers and poets, and there he began studying painting with Hirsh Altman.

In 1937 he moved to Australia, where his father was involved in the Kimberley Plan for Jewish settlement. He studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne until World War II and later continued his art studies.

After serving in the Australian Army, he formed a group of social realist painters with his friend Yosl Birstein. In Melbourne he was close to artists such as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd, and pushed them toward themes of working families.

He left Australia in 1948, exhibited in Paris, Montreal and New York, and settled in Safed in 1950 with his wife, the painter Audrey Bergner. From 1957 he lived in Tel Aviv. He also illustrated books and designed sets and costumes for theater, mainly for plays by Nissim Aloni.

In 2013 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa. He died in 2017, and his personal archive is kept at the National Library.