American · Realism · Social realism
Max Ginsburg
b. 1931
Max Ginsburg (born 1931) is an American realist painter and teacher from New York, known for street scenes of the city and antiwar paintings, above all War Pietà (2007), a mother cradling her maimed soldier son.
1 work in the collection
Works by Max Ginsburg
Max Ginsburg is an American figurative painter and longtime New York art teacher, born in 1931, whose work ranges from crowded street scenes of the city to openly political paintings against war and injustice. His best-known picture is War Pietà (2007), painted at the height of the Iraq War.
Life in brief
Ginsburg was raised in Brooklyn; sources give his birthplace as Paris, where he was born in 1931 before the family moved to New York when he was small. He has said he learned realism chiefly from his father, Abraham Ginsburg, a portrait painter. He attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, earned a BFA at Syracuse University and a master's degree at City College of New York. He taught for many years, at the School of Visual Arts from 1984 to 2000, and at the Art Students League of New York, and alongside painting he worked as an illustrator for book covers and magazines.
Style
Ginsburg paints from life and from his own photographs in a direct, solidly modeled realism, with strong light and a keen eye for faces and gesture. His New York pictures, of subway riders, street vendors, protests and shoppers, carry on the tradition of the Ashcan School and the American social realists of the 1930s. He names Caravaggio, Goya, Käthe Kollwitz and Picasso as models for his antiwar work, artists who made suffering specific rather than abstract.
War Pietà
War Pietà takes the composition of Michelangelo's Pietà, the dead son lying across his mother's lap, and moves it to a modern battlefield. A young American soldier, bloodied and maimed, lies on a crumpled flag while his mother throws back her head and howls; oil derricks burn on the horizon. Ginsburg has described painting it out of anger at the war. It won Best in Show in the Art Renewal Center's international competition of 2011 and traveled with an exhibition of American realism to museums in China in 2012. Compare the very different, grieving father of Jago's Pietà.
Where to see his work
Ginsburg's paintings are mostly in private collections and shown through galleries; his website documents his work. See more in Death in Art.
Questions & answers
Who painted War Pietà?
War Pietà (2007) was painted by the American realist Max Ginsburg. It shows a mother cradling her maimed, dying soldier son before burning oil fields, a Pietà recast as a protest against the Iraq War.
What does War Pietà by Max Ginsburg mean?
It borrows the Christian Pietà, the Virgin holding the dead Christ, to show an ordinary mother's grief for a son destroyed by war. The flag, rifle and burning oil derricks tie it to the Iraq War, which Ginsburg painted out of anger.
Who is Max Ginsburg?
Max Ginsburg is an American realist painter born in 1931 and raised in New York. Son of the portrait painter Abraham Ginsburg, he taught at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League and paints city life and antiwar subjects.