Charlotte Bergman

Biography

Charlotte Bergman was born in Antwerp in 1903. She was the daughter of a Polish-born diamond merchant. Charlotte Bergman married Louis Bergman, an English architect with whom she shared a great love of travel and art. They resided in London for many years. The Bergmans traveled to Israel and the Middle East for the first time in the 1920s. They came into contact with many artists, including Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and many others. They were very close to Raoul Dufy, a friend who often joined the couple on their travels, the Bergmans collected his are including a portrait of Charlotte which currently hangs in their salon. Other artists collected by the couple include Braque and Chagall, as well as Antal Biró.

Charlotte and Louis Bergman found themselves in the United States during the outbreak of the Second World War. They never returned to live in England. Charlotte lost many members of her European family during the Holocaust. In New York City, the Bergmans were involved with the leading events and personalities of the day. Their apartment became a salon for music, art and politics. They became fervent supporters of the Zionist movement and the nascent State of Israel.

Louis Bergman died in 1955. After his death, Charlotte continued to travel and collect new works of art. She immigrated to Israel following the Six-Day War. Sharing Teddy Kollek's early vision for a national museum in Jerusalem, she had been involved in the establishment of the Israel Museum. She also became an active, though often anonymous, supporter among other philanthropic concerns in the country.

In the 1970s, Charlotte Bergman built her permanent home on the Museum grounds, with the encouragement of Teddy Kollek. Bergman brought her collections of art and ethnography with here. Just as she did in New York, in Jerusalem, Charlotte hosted may events and welcomed visitors from Israel and abroad in her home.

On July 17, 2002 - one month before her 99th birthday - Charlotte Bergman died in her bedroom, today referred to as the Henry Moore room. The house and its paintings, sculptures, ceramics and works on paper were bequeathed to the Israel Museum. Charlotte Bergman asked that the house be used as a venue for special events, as it was in her lifetime, and that it be viewed as the home of an art lover at the end of the 20th century, in the spirit of the Israel Museum's period rooms. The legacy of Charlotte Bergman lives on in the house she built on the Israel Museum's grounds.