The Tea Drinkers

Yosl Bergner (Warsaw, Poland 1920–2017 Tel Aviv-Yafo)
Tel Aviv, 1966
Hand colored lithograph, h. 13 ¾ x w. 19 9/16 in.
Cincinnati Skirball Museum, gift of Nancy M. Berman and Alan J. Bloch, 2018.8

Bergner was born in Warsaw, Poland, reached Australia by the age of 17, and emigrated to Israel in 1951, settling first in Safed and afterwards in Tel Aviv. Surrealism served as a source of inspiration for Bergner, though he identified more as a lover of stories, and narrative elements appear frequently in his work.  In this work, he does use the Surrealist method of detaching his figures, objects, and landscape from their logical context and into a poetical-magical climate.  A group of people, perhaps an immigrant family, is drinking tea from a decorative samovar that recalls their eastern European roots. They sit neatly dressed in their stiff clothes in a field surrounded by mysterious plants. The narrative is enigmatic and features Bergner’s trademark frontal figures with big, dark, and staring eyes.