Max Ginsburg Painter France 1931

Max Ginsburg was born in 1931 in Paris, where his artist father, Abraham, had studied in 1922, having won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York. Two years later, in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, the family moved to Brooklyn, where they shared a house with grandparents and also pensioners. “Growing up in those hard times, times even worse for the many who were out of work, made me aware of the struggle and suffering of ordinary people,” says Ginsburg.
«I wanted to draw attention to the horror of war, and in this case war in Iraq. I thought of a mother losing her son, of the Pietà paintings of the Old Masters, and of Michelangelo's sculpture showing a Madonna mourning the death of her son. In my painting I sought to symbolically connect and contrast the image of a real mother crying out in anguish over the death of her soldier son, with images of the Madonna mourning the death of her son in a rather unreal, calm and serene way. The torn uniforms, the mutilated soldier's body, and the flag symbolize one of the many young Americans who have died in this war. I tried to paint the mother as a woman in her forties and yet look similar in appearance, including the shawl, to Michelangelo's classic Madonna of the Pietà.»
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Music: Searching - Nat Keefe
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