Viennese-born painter, illustrator, and set designer Yosl Bergner grew up in Warsaw, the son of Yiddish writer Melekh Ravitch. He emigrated to Australia in 1937, where he studied painting at the Art School of the National Gallery of Victoria and became influential in the Australian art scene. In the early 1950s, after serving in the Australian Army, Bergner and his wife settled in Israel. He won the Dizengoff Prize for painting and sculpture in 1956 and, in 1980, the Israel Prize for painting. In 1985, Bergner paid a return visit to Australia, where a major retrospective exhibition of his paintings was held at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Yosl Bergner was only twenty-one years old and living in Australia when he painted this bleak picture. Many of his paintings were drawn from memories of his childhood in Warsaw but he also portrayed…
The Last Breath is one of the genre paintings depicting the lives of fishermen and their families for which Josef Israëls was best known. In this scene, a woman is weeping over the body of her husband…
Song without Words, painted in Jaffa ca. 1911–1913. Like many of Jan’s works, this painting is suffused with poetic and atmospheric symbolism. Here, a beautiful young woman with haunted eyes holds a…