Aaron Birnbaum (Ukrainian American, 1895–1998)

Aaron Birnbaum with painting

In 1995 the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City celebrated Aaron Birnbaum’s one-hundredth birthday. The painter had been making art for thirty years, depicting memories of his childhood from the distance of two generations. As the images of his youth in Eastern Europe faded and receded in his mind they reappeared with new life and form in the growing body of paintings that Birnbaum executed from his studio apartment in Brooklyn. Birnbaum moved to New York from Ukraine in 1913 at the age of seventeen. Though he lived the majority of his life in the United States nearly all of the subject matter of Birnbaum’s paintings is drawn from his memories of Eastern Europe. He avoids depicting the more troubling subject matter of his childhood—the tailor shop where he worked 17-hour days, the anti-Semitism he faced from his peers, and the specter of war looming on the horizon—preferring to preserve the sweetest memories. His pictures of farms, cafés, ice skaters, children with their pets, and pastoral landscapes are highly individualistic, celebratory, and uncritical. There is a profound innocence in his figurations that is not naive in the slightest. People and animals float in the flattened space of an eternal present, neither receding into the past nor waiting for the future. In Birnbaum’s mind and in his paintings the space of years collapses, mingling with memories of yesterday.