Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip discusses an anti-fascist art exhibition held in Adelaide and Melbourne in 1942, shows examples from the exhibition and then focuses on examples of Yosl Bergner’s work depicting Indigenous Australians. The narration explains that the exhibition was a response to the devastation of war and the persecution of Jews in Europe. The clip shows Bergner’s paintings of Indigenous Australians from the exhibition as he describes his response to their plight. The soundtrack features an avant-garde jazz performance.

Educational value points

• The clip focuses on the work of artist Yosl Bergner (1920–) from the Anti-Fascist Exhibition of 1942 to emphasise his sympathetic portrayal of Indigenous Australians. While the narration says that he compared their suffering to that of the Jews under Nazism, he could not yet have known the full horror of the Nazi Holocaust. His view of Indigenous Australians as outcasts in their own land was unusual at the time but shared by others in the anti-fascist movement.

• Yosl Bergner was born in Austria in 1920 and fled to Australia to escape Nazism in 1937, bringing with him new ideas about art, from his European training, that inspired the artist friends he made in Melbourne. He was an active member of the Contemporary Art Society in Melbourne. In the clip he is seen being interviewed in his studio in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he has lived since 1951, having left Australia in 1948.

• The clip begins with examples of the work of some other artists who, like Bergner, saw their work as having an important social and political role in documenting the suffering of the oppressed. Bergner’s friends Noel Counihan (1913–86) and James Wigley (1918–99) shared his social conscience.

• The Exhibition was organised by the Contemporary Art Society (Victoria), founded in 1938 by young radical artists to loosen the grip of the conservatives who dominated the art establishment of the time. These artists believed that art had an important role in expressing political and social criticism but the art establishment held the view that art and politics were separate realms and it opposed the exhibiting of art inspired by social concerns.

• The subject matter of the clip, the disquiet and anguish of artists responding to what they saw as the ills of society, is reflected in the jazz soundtrack and the images in the art montage. The artists’ response to news of war’s brutality is apparent in images of skulls, the destruction of cities, soldiers and the dead. Modern jazz music, rejected along with modern art by conservative critics, was played at the original Anti-Fascist Exhibition.

• Albert Tucker (1914–99), John Perceval (1923–2000) and Sidney Nolan (1917–92), whose work is shown in the clip, went on to become major Australian artists but were at the beginning of their careers in 1942. They all served in the army and their work reflects that experience. However, their styles were more influenced by Surrealism and German Expressionism than by the social realism that influenced Bergner and the others.