Yosl Bergner was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920, and spent his childhood in Warsaw, 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 autobio-graphical, views of a dark, bleak urban environment, inhabited by lonely and dispossessed people, works which inspired many young Melbourne artists during the 1940s. Fellow student, Noel Counihan remarked that `The lonely drinker, the city rat-catchers, scavengers, refugees from Hitlerism, the woman of the slums - street sweepers - these were his subjects ... 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 1941-6 and after-wards 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.< p> Bergner 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". The painter Bergner belongs to the generation of painters who sought to express in their art feelings and ideas beyond the anatomical components of painting itself and therefore did not turn to the abstract. At the basis of their approach lies the understanding that the visual image is a more or less aesthetic representation of a meaning beyond it.
In the years that have passed since he acquired his art education at the Melbourne National Gallery Art School
