Sali Yakubowiz Herman
Switzerland, Australia - 12 Feb 1898 - 03 Apr 1993
Born in Switzerland in 1898, Sali Herman arrived in Melbourne in 1937, well versed in contemporary art practices of the era, having viewed modern paintings in Switzerland and France. Forthright and articulate with ideas about painting, he strove to make a contribution to the modern movement in Australian art.
 |
|
Herman painted old Sydney, then slums, with sympathy, a fresh eye and a lively mind. "To anybody used to pictures of gum trees and the harbour,' he said, "My slum pictures were startling. But I painted houses because houses are part of people and people are part of houses."
|
 |
| Flower Piece 1949 |
 |
A woman in the doorway of No. 171, 1949
|
 |
The artist's wife (Paulette) 1940
French-born Paulette Briand married Herman in 1929. They migrated to Australia in 1937 along with his two children from a previous marriage, leaving Europe as part of an exodus in response to the rise of Nazism. These European émigrés settled in many corners of the world, not always receiving a warm welcome in their adopted homes. The Hermans initially settled in Melbourne, later moving to Sydney to escape what they (and many other migrants) felt to be a stultifying parochialism. Russell Drysdale, Herman’s fellow student at Melbourne’s George Bell School, followed shortly thereafter. Drysdale told Herman that if he wanted to paint Australia he would need to have been born here—an attitude that the migrant family no doubt encountered on a regular basis.
|
 |
In 1941 Herman enlisted in the Army and in 1945 was appointed as an official war artist in the Pacific, working for several months in New Guinea. Herman won the Wynne prize for landscape painting in 1944, 1962 and 1965, and the Sulman Prize in 1946 and 1948. He was the subject of a major retrospective held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1981 and has been included in other national exhibitions. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, all major state galleries, many regional galleries and other public collections.
|
Comments
Post a Comment