Georges Mora

Georges Mora (26 June 1913 – 7 June 1992) was a German-born Australian entrepreneur, art dealer, patron, connoisseur and restaurateur.

Mora was born Gunter Morawski on 26 June 1913 in Leipzig, Germany, of Jewish Polish heritage.

As a young medical student Mora became a member of a communist cell and fled Germany to Paris in 1930.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Georges left Paris to join the cause.

After a plane crash, he was a prisoner of war for a short time.

He was active in the French Resistance in World War II, using the alias Georges Morand.

After the War, Georges worked as a patent dealer and became the director of a Jewish rehabilitation home for children run by Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) in Paris.

Later In 1947 he married Parisian artist and fellow Jewish refugee Mirka Zelik, becoming a French citizen.

In 1949, after the birth of Georges' and Mirka's first son Philippe Mora (a filmmaker), they joined his family in New York, then in July 1951 moved on to McKinnon, Melbourne where he adopted the name Georges Mora.

With characteristic adaptability he took up management of a matzo factory.

Seeking more romantic quarters Georges and Mirka moved into Grosvenor Chambers (Ola Cohn's former studio) at 9 Collins Street Melbourne (the so called 'Paris End').

Sons William Mora, born in 1953, and Tiriel Mora (1958), are respectively an art dealer and an actor.

Recognising that their hospitality and cuisine were marketable, the Moras opened a coffee lounge.

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 the first in Melbourne where patrons could eat at tables on the pavement in the Parisian style and the café became the watering-hole of Melbourne's avant-garde.

Patrons ate from Expressionist crockery by Arthur Boyd and John Perceval, were seated on surrealist furniture, and surrounded by murals and sculptures by Clifford Last, Ian Sime and Julius Kane.

In 1956, Georges Mora was elected President of the Contemporary Art Society and declared at a CAS meeting that: "We must break down this prejudice in the world that Australia is an artistically backward country. There is only one solution: that is, the pushing of Australian artistic achievements into the world and to bring the world’s artistic achievements into this country."

Artists donated paintings towards an inaugural fundraising exhibition in 1957.

In 1958 Mora helped John and Sunday Reed transform the Contemporary Art Society gallery, where George's wife Mirka had exhibited in August the year before into the 'Museum of Modern Art (and Design) of Australia' (MOMAA), modelled on MoMA in New York, with John as its director and located in Tavistock Place, a lane-way off 376 Flinders Street, Melbourne.

In 1958 Mora established Café Balzac in East Melbourne gaining a reputation as a restaurateur serving classic French cuisine to an eager clientele, which included a gathering of the most significant contemporary Australian artists, to whom he proffered the walls of his establishment.

It survives as the largest, and one of the best known, examples of the Australian Pop Movement of the early 1960s.

Ross Crothall's panel has an inscription "To George(sic) Mora, with love."

The Moras' modernist house at bayside Aspendale was designed in 1961 by architect Peter Burns.

The house opened onto a common courtyard shared by the Moras' close friends Sunday and John Reed art patrons and founders of the Heide Circle and was regularly visited by artists Charles Blackman, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Gareth Sansom, Mike Brown, Martin Sharp, Asher Bilu and Ivan Durrant.

They were joined by prominent journalists and writers Barrett Reid, Brian McArdle and Philip Jones, who found company amongst the likes of French mime Marcel Marceau, Barry Humphries, photographers such as Robert Whitaker and Mark Strizic, and filmmaker Nigel Buesst.

A mural commissioned by Mora in 1962 was painted as individual panels by three Sydney-based 'Annandale Imitation Realists'; Colin Lanceley, Mike Brown and Ross Crothall in exchange for meals and accommodation.

Georges and Mirka relocated their business, opening in 1965 the Tolarno Restaurant and Galleries in Melbourne's bohemian St Kilda.

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.

The rear of the building became a venue for exhibitions of avant-garde art and was soon surrounded by other galleries.

Exhibitions in the first years (1967–69) of the new gallery also presented radical hard-edge abstractions by Dale Hickey and Robert Hunter and sculpture by Ti Parks.

William Mora joined his father in running the gallery before setting up his own in the city.

In 1969, to avoid bankruptcy, Mora sold the Tolarno hotel and leased out the restaurant and gallery.

In the early 1970s he separated from Mirka.

Georges travelled to the USA and Europe promoting the international reputation of Australian art, and selling European, American and Australian art into his adopted country's national, state, regional and corporate collections, lending work for a very significant Bonnard exhibition touring Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth state museums in 1971.

In 1979, Mora sold the restaurant to Leon Massoni and relocated the Tolarno Galleries to River Street, South Yarra.

The opening show there included lithographs by Renoir secured through his work as a dealer for Daniel Wildenstein.

In 1985 Georges married artist Caroline Williams when their son, Sam, was born.

Jan Minchin, who came from a position at the National Gallery of Victoria, was Georges co-director from 1989.

Throughout its career, Tolarno Galleries supported challenging contemporary art, including eight shows of highly-charged politico-sexual imagery by Juan Davila.

Georges was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1989 and he was a strong supporter of the move toward multiculturalism in his adopted country.