Yosl Bergner (Yosef; b. 1920), Israel painter, son of the Yiddish poet and essayist Melech Ravitch. Bergner was born in Vienna and grew up in Warsaw. In 1937 he emigrated to Australia, and in 1951 settled in Israel with his wife Audrey Bergner, also a painter. He lived first in Safed, and many of his expressionist paintings of this period feature high walls perforated by windows in which strange, anonymous figures enact dramatic scenes. Later work suggested the emotional world of the early Russian settlers in Palestine. Sophisticated figures in 19th-century costume were incongruously placed in Middle Eastern settings. This world had its characteristic symbols: halves of apples, butterflies, birds of ill omen, waiting or weeping figures, looming horizons, marshes, and stormswept skies. After 1961, Bergner's paintings tended toward abstraction. Bergner illustrated Kafka and other authors and made designs for various theaters. He contributed to the Venice Biennales of 1956, 1958, and 1962, and the Sao Paulo Biennale of 1957. He was awarded the Israel Prize for art in 1980.