Yosl Bergner

The Tree of Knowledge, 1940s,
Oil on board, 60X50 cm.
Signed.

In his content, images and paint brush – this painting belongs to a group of paintings Yosl Bergner painted in Australia (1937-1948), – even more so to the second half of the 1940’s. While painting the poverty struck aborigines of Australia, Bergner also painted ”Jewish” paintings in Melbourne, figuratively expressionistic in the manner of the Jewish school of Paris with Jewish subjects related to the village and the holidays, the songs, folk tales, some in Yiddish.
”The past demanded attention and the contact between Yiddish literature and the canvas was like touching childhood landscapes that are now gone”. (Carmela Rubin, ”Yosl Bergner”, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2000, page 18). The accurate background to this painting is unknown, also because Yosl Bergner is now gone.
However, in the light of his familiarity with Jewish songs and tales, the boy standing beneath the tree, while little children play betwixt its branches, echoes the story told by I.L Peretz. It is as though Bergner translated the singing birds in the branches to the souls of the children.
But even more than this association, it seems as though this painting responds to a folk poem by Bialik (originally in Yiddish). It is noteworthy that this painting was painted at the end of WWII and after the massacre of Jews in Europe and especially in Poland (from which Bergner and his sister fled).
It is, therefore, that this painting laments the extermination of Jewish children and channels the happiness of a lost childhood, a perished home. The alive-dead children in the tree branches solidify the way to Bergner’s future paintings that will explore the notion of grief for a childhood cut short: these are paintings from the 1960’s and onwards, of dying children, crucified children and children escaping from windows of buildings.
(Translated and adapted from Gidon Ofrat)

Estimated price: $25,000 - $35,000

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About: Yosl Bergner

Yosl Bergner is one of Israel's most valued and important artists. Bergner was born Joseph Vladimir in Vienna, and grew up in a house full of culture and matters of the spirit: his father was a poet who among other things translated some of Franz Kafka's books into Yiddish. His mother was a singer, his uncle Moshe, one of the people who influenced him most was a painter. In general, Yosl remembers a household that was constantly filled with culture and matters of the spirit, whether in creation or in a dialog about it. At the age of 17 he immigrated to Australia with his sister, where he studied at the Melbourne Academy of the Arts and continued to surround himself with cultural people, especially one who became his closest friend for decades to come: the poet Yosl Birstein. Yosl Bergner's wife, Audrey, is a painter. And after the two immigrated to Israel together in 1950 their home was always a meeting place for intellectuals of sorts - first in Safed, and a few years later on Bilu Street in central Tel Aviv. After immigrating to Israel, he changed his first name to Yosl and soon became one of the busiest and most admired artists in Israel. His paintings documented the different walks of life in Israel's early days, mainly through motifs that were considered exilic. . Over the years, the public grasp of his paintings changed as those exilic motifs ostensibly became an inseparable part of Israeli lives, and Bergner's style changed as well. his paintings became brighter, more colorful, and to a certain extent happier, though one of the main characteristics of his work over the years was the delicate fusion between sadness and joy. In addition to his expressive paintings, Yosl Bergner was also known to illustrate books, including many classics, he was even known to be a set designer - especially for plays of the late Nissim Aloni (by the way, Aloni wrote The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter after being inspired by a series of famous paintings Bergner painted, it included The Three Girls and the Butterfly and The Butterfly Eaters). Another prominent motif in Bergner's work is the kitchen grader, which appears in many paintings and was greatly anthropomorphized by the artist. Other kitchen utensils also appear in of Yosl Bergner's paintings. His explanation for it is that during his childhood, in the absence of "ordinary" toys, he would play with kitchen utensils. In many interviews Bergner defines himself as a professional and not as an artist, although there is no doubt that he is one of the greatest painters in the history of Israel, evidence to that is the Israel Prize for Arts he received in 1980.