Josl Bergner
City lane
Arriving in Melbourne from Warsaw in 1937 Bergner had already
been exposed to the social and political conditions that had
nurtured European modernism. A fiery social realist and a
member of the Melbourne Angry Penguins group that included Tucker,
Nolan, Vasilieff, Perceval and Boyd, Bergner brought to this group
direct experience of hardship and the feelings of being an
outsider. For most of the other artists of the time the notion
that raw feelings could be expressed through art was difficult to
accept.
In City lane, a lone figure weighed down by a sense of despair
trudges across a laneway with his hands clasped before
him. With its exaggerated tonal range, the dark, menacing
buildings and the figure partially lit by the angry sky convey the
emptiness as well as the pain and suffering that accompanies social
deprivation. This powerful painting of a Melbourne Street was
one of the first in Australian art to confront the poverty and
despair that was a reality for so many people during the Great
Depression.