Max Ginsburg’s paintings are about people, the people one finds on the streets of New York. Simply put, he finds beauty in unglamorous reality. His paintings explore the range of daily human life, concerned as much with life’s ironies and social injustices, as with its many joys. He paints people that he can identify with, real people with regular lives.

Although he attended art schools his real mentor was his father. Abraham Ginsburg was a successful portrait painter who taught Max the skills needed to paint in the traditional, realist manner, and kindled within him a love of realism that would shape his work for the rest of his life.

Over the years Ginsburg has had many one man shows and participated in many group
shows in which he has won awards. During his career he has had to rely on teaching art and illustrating to earn a living. In his classes he taught and inspired students to draw and paint from life, to work in the tradition of the old masters, and more importantly, to think of art as a personal and deep expression of one’s own ideas. Generations of students have gone on to excel as artists and art teachers; Ginsburg has taken tremendous joy in their achievements.

During the twentieth century, while the world of modern art went through an endless sequence of “isms”, realistic painting was critically scorned. Galleries generally preferred abstract art, and most art schools discouraged realism in painting. Yet along with a few other painters, Ginsburg resisted the pressure to conform to the current tastes. He believed art had to more deeply and accurately reflect the world as he experienced it. He was, and is, moved to paint by his responses to the reality around him, and fidelity to that experience necessitated a realistic approach in his work. As he is a life long resident of New York City, his work has always reflected its beauty and intensity; the crowded streets, the subway rides, the pick-up ball games in schoolyards, as well as the quieter interior of apartments. His work is suffused with the energy of the city and it’s people: its vendors, its protestors, its athletes, and musicians. The power of his work stems from both his belief in the immediacy of a shared, realistic viewpoint and his strong belief in humanism. His work explores issues of class, race, and gender and in recent years has gone on to examine more subtle relationships within society, such as the way we care for our elderly, our young, and in the wake of 9/11, notions of patriotism.

Decades of life painting have opened him to the beauty found in reality: the choreography of gestures, the pattern of shadows falling across buildings and parks. His work explores the poetry of texture, of shape, of color and light that envelop us everyday. His skills, and choices, are such that looking at his paintings reminds us, in a profound way, how much beauty and meaning can be found in our own lives.

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