Aaron Birnbaum

Aaron Birnbaum was born in 1895 in Skole, Ukraine, an area of conflict between Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. In Skole's marginalized Jewish community, Birnbaum apprenticed as a tailor from the age of thirteen. He emigrated with his family to the United States in 1913, settling in New York. The diminutive Birnbaum (only four feet nine inches tall) worked as a tailor and dressmaker and only began painting in his late sixties. Like many outsider artists, Birmbaum often created his paintings on found panels of masonite or plywood, or even wood serving trays and board games. He worked with oil paints and acrylics, often with a final coat of varnish, sometimes resulting in a glazed appearance and sometimes a yellowing aged look which Birnbaum preferred. Subject matter ranged from idyllic scenes from his small-town life in Ukraine to recent observations in New York. Birnbaum received wide recognition very late in life, when, in 1995, his work and his 100th birthday were celebrated with an exhibition at the Museum of American Folk Art (New York) which was lauded in the New York Times. This was quickly followed by a 1997 solo exhibition Aaron Birnbaum - Paintings, 1960-1996 at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Connecticut), and his work being exhibited at the Andrew Eldin Gallery (New York, 2003), The Museum of Everything (London and Turin, 2010) and the Kerry Schuss Gallery (New York, 2015), among others. Aaron Birnbaum died in 1998 at the age of 103 in Brooklyn, New York.