Yosl Bergner

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Yosl Bergner (born 1920) is an Israeli painter.

[edit] Biography

Bergner was born in Vienna, grew up in Warsaw, and immigrated to Australia in 1937, where he studied in the National Gallery Art School until the outbreak of War World I. He served for four and a half years in the Australian Army, and later continued his studies at the Art School. 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.

[edit] Works

Bergner has designed scenery and costumes for the Yiddish and Hebrew Theatres, particularly for the plays of Nissim Aloni, and has illustrated many books. In 1980, he won the Israel Prize.

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.