Yosl Bergner (Jewish Painter)

Yosl Bergner was born in 1920 in Austria, and spent his childhood in Poland. The son of a poet and a singer, Bergner took painting lessons before immigrating to Australia in 1937 as a seventeen year old. He struggled to survive in Australia, undertaking a series of menial jobs while studying painting at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne. He painted images which were essentially autobiographical, views of a dark, bleak urban environment, inhabited by lonely and dispossessed people, works which inspired many young Melbourne artists during the 1940s. The compassion, humanity and deep sincerity of his art attracted immediate and deep attention.

During the second world war Bergner served in the Australian Army Labour Company at Tocumwal 1941-1946 and afterwards gained a Commonwealth Rehabilitation Scholarship to return to his studies at the National Gallery Art School. He left Australia in 1948, traveling first to Paris and then to Israel, where he currently lives and works.

Bergner's canvases draw their images from his childhood world, from Yiddish and from the Jewish culture of Poland. Although he did not personally experience the Holocaust, his works are overshadowed by the trauma of the Jewish refugee. Broken furniture and kitchen utensils, clowns, kings and angels, characters from Kafka's stories, children's toys, flowers and pioneers are only part of his wide range of themes. Bergner has designed scenery and costumes for the Yiddish and Hebrew Theaters, 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. Bergner participated in the Venice Biennaials in 1956, 1958 and 1962, and at the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1957. In 1980, he was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting.

Art Deco

Art Deco is a movement in the decorative arts and architecture that originated in the 1920s and developed into a major style. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares. The intention was to create a sleek and anti-traditional elegance that symbolized wealth and sophistication.

Among the formative influences on Art Deco were Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Decorative ideas came from American Indian, Egyptian, and early classical sources as well as from nature. Characteristic motifs included nude female figures, animals, foliage, and sunrays, all in conventionalized forms. Although the style went out of fashion during World War II, beginning in the late 1960s there was a renewed interest in Art Deco design.

The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a streamlined look, ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms and unusually varied.

Pewter

Pewter is an alloy whose main element is tin. Copper, lead, bismuth, zinc, and antimony added in varying amounts give the mixture its variable weight and hardness.

It was used mainly in the home. It was the common table ware of Colonial America in the 18th century and was used well into the 19th century. Nearly every conceivable form was made of pewter: plates, basins, serving dishes, mugs, tankards, pots and more.

How was it made?

Most pewter objects were made by casting the melted alloy into molds, which were made most frequently of bronze, brass, and bell metal. The products of the molds were then trimmed, spun on a lathe, and soldered together to make the finished piece. 

How old is pewter?

Pewter has been in use for several thousand years. The Egyptians, Greeks, and the Chinese were proficient in the art of making pewter. Roman pewter has been excavated in Britain, suggesting a pewter industry of reasonable size in the third and fourth centuries.