Mirka Mora

Mirka Madeleine Mora (18 March 1928 – 27 August 2018) was a French-born Australian visual artist and cultural figure who contributed significantly to the development of Australian contemporary art. Her media included drawing, painting, sculpture and mosaic. Early life Mirka Mora was born on 18 March 1928 in Paris to a Lithuanian Jewish father, Leon Zelik, and a Romanian Jewish mother, Celia Gelbein. She was arrested in 1942 during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv). Her father, Leon, managed to arrange for her release from the concentration camp at Pithiviers (Loiret) before Mora and her mother were scheduled to be deported to Auschwitz. The family evaded arrest and deportation from 1942 to 1945 by hiding in the forests of France. After the war, 17-year-old Mirka met a wartime resistance fighter Georges Mora in Paris. They married in 1947. In an interview in 2004, Mora said: Migration to Australia Having survived the Holocaust, Mirka Mora and her husband migrated to Australia in 1951 in order to settle in Melbourne. They chose Melbourne over Casablanca or Saigon because Mirka had read about it in Henri Murger's novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, in which a young Parisian photographer (probably based by Murger on Antoine Fauchery) makes regular trips to Melbourne to make his fortune. They occupied studios in Grosvenor Chambers in the 'Paris End' of Collins Street, and quickly became key figures on the Melbourne cultural scene. Mirka worked initially as a dressmaker while also making art, and Georges became an influential art dealer, in 1967 with his flair and entrepreneurship adding the Tolarno Galleries to Melbourne's only very select number of commercial art galleries. The Mora family also owned and operated three significant Melbourne cafés. The Mirka Café was opened by Jean Sablon in December 1954 at 183 Exhibition Street and was the venue for the first major solo exhibition by Joy Hester. It was followed by the Café Balzac at 62 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne and then by the Tolarno in Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, which opened in 1966, and where Mirka created a bas-relief behind the bar and painted murals on walls and windows of the restaurant and bistro, hallway and toilets, over the period 1965 to 1978. All three were focal points for Melbourne's bohemian subculture. As Mora's son Philippe recalls, "my parents literally fed artists at our home and in our restaurants". In a 2004 interview Mora stated: