Stefan Alexander

Abstract Composition with Figures Israeli Mid Century Modernist

Mixed Media, Watercolor and Gouache Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surrealist, surrealism. belongs to the generation of people uprooted from childhood landscapes and forced by circumstance to build a life elsewhere. Uniquely, he became an Israeli without shedding his Jewish cosmopolitan-refugee identity, an identity he zealously guarded in the melting pot of Israel of the "fifties" and "sixties". In the years that have passed since he acquired his art education at the Melbourne National Gallery Art School in Australia, concepts in the art world have changed many times over. from the Jewish paintings and the depictions of Australian Aborigines through the children of safed, the wall paintings, the masks, the angels and kings, the still lifes, the "Surrealistic" paintings, the toys and flowers, the paintings inspired by the Bird-head Haggada, the Kafka paintings, the Pioneers, the Kimberley fantasy (about his father's excursion in 1933 to northern Australia, in search of a "territory for the Jews"), Brighton Beach and the seascapes inspired by Eugene Boudin, through the chairs in the "Kings of Nissim Aloni" episode to the "Zionists" and the recent "Tahies". "During the six years that Bergner has lived in Israel," wrote Eugene KoIb, Direct. or of the Tel Aviv Museum, in the catalog of the Bergner exhibit in 1957, "he has established himself among Israeli artists." Bergner was indeed one of the artists who represented Israel in the Venice Biennial (1956; 1958) and in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957; this, in spite of the fact that Yosl Bergner did not harness his art to serve the Zionist ethos, that being, at the time, the order of the day (his paintings were in fact rejected at first as being those of a "Diaspora Jew"); he didn't "naturalize" himself by alliance to the country's landscape or its special light, nor did he turn to abstract painting. Painter of "the Jewish condition". the painter involved in Nissim Aloni's theater and the popular illustrator of poetry books...

Hanna Ben Dov is an Israeli abstract painter who was born in Jerusalem in 1919 and died in Paris in 2008. Ben Dov's father, Yacov Ben-Dov, was a famous Israeli photographer who founded the photography department in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 1910. Hannah herself attended Bezalel during the 1940s, and later continued to Camberwell College of Arts in London. After the completion of her formal education she moved to Paris, where she exhibited for the first time in 1948 and has been living and working there since, as a part of the local abstract artists school. She took part in the first French Biennale of 1951, that was held in Menton. Collections Her paintings can be found in several collections, including the French State Collection, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art collection, the Bezalel National Museum collection in Jerusalem and the Rockefeller Museum collection in New York. Ben Dov resided for her last two years at the Maison Des Artistes Home in Nogent-Sur-Marne, France, just outside Paris. Exhibitions Gallery97 Tel Aviv Paintings...

Signed Lower Right Vaclav Vytlacil (1892-1984) He was born to Czechoslovakian parents in 1892 in New York City. Living in Chicago as a youth, he took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, returning to New York when he was 20. From 1913 to 1916, he enjoyed a scholarship from the Art Students League, and worked with John C. Johansen (a portraitist whose expressive style resembled that of John Singer Sargent), and Anders Zorn. He accepted a teaching position at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1916, remaining there until 1921. This enabled him to travel to Europe to study Cézanne’s paintings and works of the Old Masters. He traveled to Paris, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich seeking the works of Titian, Cranach, Rembrandt, Veronese, and Holbein, which gave him new perspective. Vytlacil studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, settling there in 1921. Fellow students were Ernest Thurn and Worth Ryder, who introduced him to famous abstractionist Hans Hofmann. He worked with Hofmann from about 1922 to 1926, as a student and teaching assistant. During the summer of 1928, after returning to the United States, Vytlacil gave lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, on modern European art. Soon thereafter, he became a member of the Art Students League faculty. After one year, he returned to Europe and successfully persuaded Hofmann to teach at the League as well. He spent about six years in Europe, studying the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Dufy. In 1935, he returned to New York and became a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936. He later had teaching posts at Queens College in New York; the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California; Black Mountain College in North Carolina; and the Art Students League. His paintings exhibit a clear inclination toward modernism. His still lives and interiors from the 1920s indicate an understanding of the art of Cézanne. In the 1930s, his works displayed two very different kinds of art at the same time. His cityscapes and landscapes combine Cubist-inspired spatial concerns with an expressionistic approach to line and color. Vytlacil also used old wood, metal, cork, and string in constructions, influenced by his friend and former student, Rupert Turnbull. He eventually ceased creating constructions as he considered them too limiting. The spatial challenges of painting were still his preference. During the 1940s and 1950s, his works indicated a sense of spontaneity not felt in his earlier work. He married Elizabeth Foster in Florence, Italy, in 1927 and they lived and worked in Positano, Italy for extended periods of time. Later on, they divided their time between homes in Sparkill, New York and Chilmark, Massachusetts, where Vyt, as he was affectionately called, taught at the Martha's Vineyard Art...

Elfi Schuselka (Austrian, b. 1940), Abstract Composition, Oil on Canvas, stamped "Studio / Elfi Schuselka" to verso. 21.25" H x 23.25" W. Provenance: From the Collection of the artis...