Bruno Bergner

Bruno Bergner
Bruno bergner foto1959.jpg Bruno bergner foto1959.jpg 1959
Born	Bruno Gurski 5 December 1923 Łódź, Poland
💀Died	2 June 1995(1995-06-02) (aged 71) Hamburg, Germany2 June 1995(1995-06-02) (aged 71)
💼 Occupation	Commercial artist and illustrator
👶 Children	Klaus Bergner

Bruno Bergner (born Bruno Gurski: 5 December 1923 – 2 June 1995) was a Polish-born West German commercial artist whose illustrations appeared on plates and stickers attached to thousands of cars, trucks and buses during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and whose graphic artistry underpinned the corporate identity of "Gasolin" service stations till 1971 (when the "Gasolin" brand was subsumed into the "Aral" brand which had been owned by the same corporation since 1961). He also produced the illustrations for "50 Tips für Kraftfahrer" ("50 tips for drivers"), a series of booklets of which millions of copies were distributed free of charge to customers visiting "Gasolin" service stations between 1957 and 1963.

The eventful early years of his own life provide a striking contrast with the æstival "Wirtschaftswunder" spirit of many of the illustrations for which he became known.

Life and works

Provenance and early years

Bruno Gurski was born in Łódź, an ethnically diverse and heavily industrialised city which had become part of Poland in 1918 (for the first time since 1793). After the 1939 invasion and renewed partition of Poland, Gurski found himself in the part of the country occupied by Germany. In 1940 Bruno Gurski, whose family had been classified by the military authorities as members of the ethnic German minority, became Bruno Bergner. Still aged only 17, in 1941 he was conscripted for labour service and sent to work on Texel (the Netherlands having by this stage also been occupied by the German military).

War years

At Christmas 1941 Bergner was conscripted into the German army and transferred as a "Panzerjäger" (loosely, "tank catcher") to the Balkans. He was switched later to Normandy. Fragments from a grenade explosion caused him a serious back injury. He was hospitalised first in Normandy, where he met the woman whom he would later marry, and subsequently in the part of Germany that had been Austria before 1938. By the time the war ended he was being held as a Soviet prisoner of war. In May 1945 he was taken to a prison camp at the city then called Dnipropetrovsk, in what was at that time the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, where he spent the next four years. A fellow prisoner taught him how to draw and paint: he evidently exhibited some talent. His first "public pieces" were drawings of the prison camp sent to his mother and brother. Some years later his son, Klaus Bergner, shared the opinion that his father probably owed his survival in the prison camp to that talent: "My father probably survived [because] ... he painted the apartments of the Russian officers and, from time to time, produced the odd painting"

Bruno Bergner with his "Idée" (Citroën ID)

ca. 1960

The fifteen years between 1956 and 1971, during which his professional focus was on the Gasolin account, represented a golden era in the career of Bruno Bergner. He himself drove a "Citroën Goddess" (as these cars were known at the time both in France and in Germany) starting off with the stripped down "ID" version and later switching to a more prestigious (and brisker) DS21, finished off in a fashionable shade of metallic silver, with leather seats the colour (according to the manufacturer's colour chart) of cognac.

No way home

During 1944/45 Poland was "ethnically cleansed" of its German-speaking minority, after which there could be no question of ever returning home. Following his release in 1949 he instead made his way to what was left of Germany and was reunited with his mother and brother in Armstorf (Langes Moor), a small municipality surviving in the marshy countryside north of Bremen. Here he lived between 1949 and 1952. He was able to undertake expeditions to nearby Worpswede where elements of the pre-war "artists' colony" were still to be found, and he was able to support himself with commissions for paintings in oil or gouache. There were also "exercises" in red and pastel colored chalk from this period. The misty ambience of the area would feature frequently in his subsequent water-color paintings.

Hamburg

In 1952 he moved to Hamburg where he accepted a job as assistant and "righthand man" with the illustrator Carl Busse, a commercial artist whose client portfolio included the still independent NITAG oil company. Working with Busse gave him the opportunity to learn more of the artist's craft, though sources insist that he remained in large part self-taught. It was also in 1952, in Hamburg, that he married the woman whom he had originally come to know in the military hospital in wartime France.

Bruno Bergner developed an excellent relationship, professional and personal, with Heinz Restorff, the head of advertising at NITAG and, following the corporate merger of 1956, at Gasolin:

"[Along with the effortlessness of his sheer talent] he was really a [typically] full-blooded West Prussian ... [with] outstanding artistic sensibility [and a strong preference for Bauhaus design]. He became a good friend."

"..... war er eigentlich ein schwerblütiger Westpreuße“, so Restorff. Er schildert Bergner auch als „sehr kunstsinnig“, mit Vorliebe für Bauhaus-Design. „Er ist ein guter Freund geworden."

Heinz Restorff, quoted in 2011

Gasolin years

Bergner created an appealing and powerfully differentiated brand identity for the Gasolin service stations.

Carl Busse moved to Cologne in 1956 while Bergner remained in Hamburg, now set up his own studio and worked alone as a "a free-lancer", becoming a member of the Professional Association of German Communications Designers (Berufsverband der Deutschen Kommunikationsdesigne / BDG). It was also in 1956 that the NITAG oil company and the Gasolin service station chain merged. Heinz Restorff, hitherto the head of advertising at NITAG, now took the same position with the merged company. Till now Carl Busse had always dealt with Restorff himself, but with Busse off the scene Bergner became Restorff's point of contact at the commercial art workshop, and Restorff quickly came to appreciate his talent. The men worked closely together on Gasolin advertising, with Restorff writing the scripts and Bergner producing the illustrations. "We developed ideas and advertising ideas together", he later recalled, "over the course of time Bergner came to earn a fixed annual salary of more than 50,000 Marks ..... from the start the advertisements always had to have "a certain frivolous light-heartedness" (... "eine gewisse Lustigkeit"). The annual salary quoted would have satisfied a company boss under other circumstances, but the oil business traditionally paid well, and the Gasolin management evidently thought Bergner was well worth the money. He continued to shape the oil company's brand-image till 1971 in ways that would have become impossible half a century later, with advertising agencies constantly chasing budgets. By the early twenty-first century it would have been unthinkable for a single artist using a single set of advertisements would be permitted define a company's public face for more than fifteen years.

Bergner's first Gasolin advertisements featured caricature figures with bulbous noses and humous which later generations might consider naive. They owed something to the style of Norman Rockwell. But by 1960 car drivers were becoming more aspirational, and there was a conscious attempt with the Gasolin branding to target those who would have seen themselves (or aspired to be seen) as "cool" or as more "classy drivers" ("Autofahrer von Rang"). In 1961 Bergner made his first dotted-ink sketch of a Gasolin service station, using a sharp-nibbed pen. The focus was on service, quality and modern practicality, using perfectly defined motifs appropriate to a service station context. For the drawings used in advertisements he drew on a collection of perhaps 30 photographs, often taking two weeks of meticulous work to produce a new poster design. The slogans were intended to catch the attention and then stimulate curiosity in the reader, and many still do: "Would you forgive infidelity?" ("Würden Sie eine Untreue verzeihen?"), or "Frauen sind kein schwaches Geschlecht" ("Women are not a weaker gender"). According to one appreciative (female) commentator, the slogans charmingly convey the way in which the relationship between a customer and the service station where he or she regularly buys petrol/gasoline is analogous to the love between a man and a woman.

Although most of his best known commercial art was produced for Gasolin, as a freelancer Bergner was also, throughout the 1950s, accepting commercial art contracts from other businesses. A case in point, working with airbrush technology, was his work for the Norderstedt-based office supplies manufacturer Tesa. He also accepted commissions for numerous oil and gouache paintings along with other visual media such as ink drawings. However, at the beginning of the 1960s, presumably with the Gasolin contracts becoming more time-consuming, he appears to have given up on the other work, though after 1971, when the Gasolin work finally came to an end (along with almost all public use of the Gasolin brand) he would return to a more diversified client portfolio.

After Gasolin

"Bei Blohm + Voss"

1976

During the 1960s Bergner was a co-founder of "grafik design studios" ('gds'), a loose community of freelance workshops brought together to facilitate the training of members' students-apprentices in various graphic arts (and related) topics. He also became a member of the (relatively short-lived) International Center for the Typographic Arts (ICTA) which had been founded in 1960 by Aaron Burns and Emil Ruder. A few years later, in the early 1970s, he received and turned down an offer to move into the universities sector, with the offer of a teaching chair from the newly founded "Fachhochschule Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften" ("University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt"). Through the 1950s and 1960s Gasolin business, which had been a richly lucrative source of remuneration for Bruno Bergner through most of that period, had itself been part of a constantly shifting Keiretsu of reciprocal shareholdings and ownership structures. In 1967 the Gasolin refinery at Dollbergen was rebranded as "Gasolin AG" and in 1969 the refinery closed down completely. Two years later, in August 1971, the nationwide chain of not quite 3,000 service stages were rebranded as Aral service stations. There was no longer any work to be had in promoting the now effectively defunct Gasolin brand. Having rejected the chance to become a university professor, his career returned to its former diversified freelance structure. Some of his more important clients were oil-sector firms that had hitherto been Gasolin rivals, such as Texaco and BP. Other significant clients included Techniker KK, Beiersdorf, Rotring and the Lübeck utilities company ("Stadtwerke Lübeck"). There was also more time for diversification away from commercial art as narrowly defined, with a particular focus, as during the 1950s, on watery landscapes and seascapes, with a number of further technical refinements, notably with regard to "aquarelle" (wet-on-wet) watercolors. His aquarelle painting "Bei Blohm + Voss" dates from this period.

Final years

During the 1980s the publisher Heinrich Bauer Verlag became Bergner's most important client. The wide range of commissions from the publisher included press illustrations and medical diagrams. The airbrush remained a favourite device: he also made increasing use of squirrel-hair paintbrushes, both for aquarelle works and when working with colored inks. He seems never to have felt much inclination to retire, and could be found working away in his studio almost every day till shortly before his death in the early summer of 1995. His body was buried at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery (according at least one source as the largest non-military cemetery in the world). Bergner predeceased his widow, whose body was placed with his at Ohlsdorf following her own death.

Personal

Bruno Bergner's son, Klaus Bergner, was born in 1961. He worked and trained in his father's studio between 1978 and 1982 and has followed his father into the art business, in 1989 opening his own studio in the central Kontorhaus District of Hamburg.

References

This article "Bruno Bergner" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Bruno Bergner. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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