Yosl Bergner Art
Israeli, 1920-2017
Yosl Bergner was an Israeli painter who was born in Vienna in 1920 and grew up in Warsaw. With rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization was formed in July 1935 to search for a potential Jewish homeland. Soon afterwards a pastoral firm offered the League about 16,500 square kilometers 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 Kimberleys. Thus the Bergner family moved to Australia.
Yosl emigrated to Australia in 1937 and studied in the National Gallery School 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 where they lived for 30 years.
Bergner was a frequent visitor at this Warrandyte home. All the men socialized together. Bergner encouraged them to go beyond their traditional landscape style, and he 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.
Bergner 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.to
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Artist: Yosl Bergner
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surrealist, surrealism. belongs to the generation of people...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surrealist, surrealism. belongs to the generation of people...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Rare Israeli Modernist Figurative Abstract Gouache Painting
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
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 land...
Category
20th Century Expressionist Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Mixed Media
1959 Israeli Yosl Bergner Modernist Color Woodcut Woodblock Print
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Composition, 1959 Silkscreen Lithograph "Phoenix".
This was from a portfolio which included works by Yosl Bergner, Menashe Kadishman, Yosef Zaritsky, Aharon Kahana, Jacob Wexler...
Category
1950s Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph, Screen
Israeli Yosl Bergner Modernist Watercolor Painting Drawing Pots, Pans
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Composition, Kitchen Utensils.
Ink and watercolor of kitchen implements. Hand signed in Hebrew upper left. Dimensions: (Frame) H 25" x 18" (Sight) H 18.5" x W 11.75"
Bergn...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Archival Ink, Watercolor
THREE BIRDS Israeli artist oil on canvas black and blue colors trompe l'oeil
By Yosl Bergner
Located in New York, NY
Yosl Bergner is an Israeli painter who was born in Vienna in 1920 and grew up in Warsaw. With rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, the Freeland League
for Jewish Territorial Colonization...
Category
1940s Post-Impressionist Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Israeli Expressionist Oil Painting Yosl Bergner Modernist Abstract Composition
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Yosl Bergner (Israeli 1920-2017)
Untitled, 1961
Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 19 5/8 x 24 3/8 in. Framed, 32.25 x 28 inches
Hand signed in Hebrew and dated lower left
Bears gallery stamp...
Category
1960s Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Israeli Yosl Bergner Modernist OIl Painting Kitchen Bottles Coffee, Vase
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Yosl Bergner
Abstract Composition, Kitchen Utensils.
Oil painting of kitchen implements. Hand signed in English bottom right
Titled and signed ve...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Archival Ink, Watercolor
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surrealist, surrealism. belongs to the generation of people...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
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Lithograph
Noah’s Ark, 1967 beautiful painting by Yosl Bergner
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Jerusalem, IL
This mesmerizing and richly detailed work by acclaimed Israeli artist Yosl Bergner offers a unique and dreamlike interpretation of Noah’s Ark. The composition is divided into arched ...
Category
1960s Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Plywood, Oil
The Solemn Morris Dancer
By Yosl Bergner
Located in London, GB
Oil on board
Image size: 5 3/4 x 7 inches (14.5 x 17.75 cm)
As can be seen in this painting, Surrealism served as a source of inspiration for Bergner, though he did not consider himself a surrealist but a lover of stories, and indeed narrative elements appear frequently in his work. He uses the “displacement” element, as the Surrealists did, and that is detaching the figures, objects or landscapes from the logical context and into a poetical-magical climate.
Nissim Aloni noted in 1983 He paints as though to install stabilizers against the turbulence of the dream, and perhaps these stabilizers serve him in time as a touchstone'.
The Artist
Yosl 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. During World War 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...
Category
Mid-20th Century Surrealist Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Oil, Board
Vessels by Yosl Bergner - Still life painting, 1965
By Yosl Bergner
Located in London, GB
*PLEASE NOTE UK BUYERS WILL ONLY PAY 5% VAT ON THIS PURCHASE.
Vessels by Yosl Bergner (1920-2017)
Oil on canvas
65 x 81.4 cm (25 ⁵/₈ x 32 inches)
Signed and dated upper left
Execute...
Category
1960s Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
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Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
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By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Composition, Coffee Grinder
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. limited edition. Dimensions: H 18.5" x 24.9"
Bergner, Yosl (Vladimir Jossif) (b Vienna, 13 Oct 1920). surr...
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Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
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A very typical painting by Yosel Bergner, a girl dressed in red in the window. Very nicely framed, signed front and back
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Rare Israeli Modernist Figurative Abstract Gouache Painting
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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...
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20th Century Expressionist Yosl Bergner Art
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Mixed Media
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
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...
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Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
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...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
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...
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Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
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...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
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...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. Dimensions: H 19.5" x 13.5"
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...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Lithograph
Israeli Expressionist Yosl Bergner Modernist Lithograph Kibbutz Coffee Grinder
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Composition, Coffee Grinder
Hand signed in Hebrew Lower right. limited edition. Dimensions: H 18.5" x 24.9"
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 Haggadah, 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 and literary texts, he stuck to the narrative which drew its images from his childhood world, from Yiddish and from the Jewish culture of Poland in whose bosom he grew, with its literature, theater and fantasy. From this point of view his position as an "outsider", first in Australia and later in Israel, like that of the European Jew on the periphery of the dominant culture, afforded him a special dialectic vantage point from which to view his human and cultural surroundings. He was and remains a figurative painter even when he verges on the abstract. Israeli painter of Austrian birth, active in Australia. He grew up in Warsaw. His father, the pseudonymous Jewish writer Melech Ravitch, owned books on German Expressionism, which were an early influence. Conscious of rising anti-Semitism in Poland, Ravitch visited Australia in 1934 and later arranged for his family to settle there. Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1937. Poor, and with little English, his struggle to paint went hand-in-hand with a struggle to survive. In 1939 he attended the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school and came into contact with a group of young artists including Victor O’Connor (b 1918) and Noel Counihan...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Screen, Lithograph
Israeli Yosl Bergner Modernist Watercolor Painting Drawing Pots, Pans
By Yosl Bergner
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Composition, Kitchen Utensils.
Ink and watercolor of kitchen implements. Hand signed in Hebrew upper left. Dimensions: (Frame) H 25" x 18" (Sight) H 18.5" x W 11.75"
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 Haggadah, 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 and literary texts, he stuck to the narrative which drew its images from his childhood world, from Yiddish and from the Jewish culture of Poland in whose bosom he grew, with its literature, theater and fantasy. From this point of view his position as an "outsider", first in Australia and later in Israel, like that of the European Jew on the periphery of the dominant culture, afforded him a special dialectic vantage point from which to view his human and cultural surroundings. He was and remains a figurative painter even when he verges on the abstract. Israeli painter of Austrian birth, active in Australia. He grew up in Warsaw. His father, the pseudonymous Jewish writer Melech Ravitch, owned books on German Expressionism, which were an early influence. Conscious of rising anti-Semitism in Poland, Ravitch visited Australia in 1934 and later arranged for his family to settle there. Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1937. Poor, and with little English, his struggle to paint went hand-in-hand with a struggle to survive. In 1939 he attended the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school and came into contact with a group of young artists including Victor O’Connor (b 1918) and Noel Counihan...
Category
Mid-20th Century Modern Yosl Bergner Art
Materials
Archival Ink, Watercolor
Yosl Bergner art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Yosl Bergner art available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Yosl Bergner in lithograph, paint, oil paint and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Yosl Bergner art, so small editions measuring 6 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann, Nissan Engel, and Virgilio Guidi. Yosl Bergner art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $400 and tops out at $12,500, while the average work can sell for $525.








