Ben Uri collection

Work by Stacha Halpern

Biography

Painter and potter Stanislaw 'Stacha' Halpern was born into a working-class Jewish family in Zolkiev, Poland (today Zhovkva, Ukraine) on 20 October 1919. In 1938 he enrolled at the School of Commercial and Fine Art, Lviv, until his studies were abruptly terminated by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the onset of the Second World War. After fleeing to Australia, he was reunited with his brothers in Perth, before settling in Melbourne, where among his circle was the Austrian-Jewish émigré painter Yosl Bergner. While working as a mould-maker in a commercial factory, Halpern became interested in pottery and eventually established his own home studio, becoming a full-time ceramist and painter. He also continued his training at the George Bell School in Melbourne (1948-49) and held his first solo exhibition of pottery, paintings and sculpture at the Stanley Coe Gallery in Melbourne in 1950.

In 1951 Halpern travelled to England, when he was among the many Australian expatriate artists who stayed at the Abbey Art Centre, Barnet, north London, established by art dealer William Ohly, and was captured at work on a British Pathé newsreel in 1952. Afterwards, Halpern moved to the south of France, but maintained a peripatetic lifestyle and set up a studio in Paris at the end of the decade. During this period, he specialised in abstract and expressionist landscape paintings, exhibiting in Venice (1952), Milan (1958 and 1959), Copenhagen (1962) and Paris (1962). He executed expressionistic landscapes and streetscapes, thickly and fluidly painted, culminating at the end of the decade in a series of paintings of beef carcasses, which have been described as 'powerful meditations on violence and death, and possibly his most abstract works'. His work was collected by Alexander Margulies, then Chairman of Ben Uri Gallery, who gifted a painting to the Ben Uri Collection, and in 1960, Halpern's works were featured in a touring exhibition with The Margulies Collection to various UK galleries, sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1961, he returned to England and married his second wife, Betty Ann Hamilton, at the Brondesbury Synagogue in Middlesex. He returned to Australia in 1966, where he focused on portraits, again executed in an expressionistic manner, and also resumed pottery, inspired by European folk art.

Stacha Halpern died of heart disease on 28 January 1969 in Hampton Australia, at the age of 50. His work is held in the Ben Uri Collection in the UK and in collections in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the La Trobe Art Institute in Victoria, as well as in Israel. A retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1970, followed by two touring exhibitions at the Nolan Gallery, Canberra (1989-90) and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne in (1993).

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1 work/s by this artist from the collection are shown below. For a more detailed record and image please click on the link.

Untitled

Object type painting

Accession number 1987-128