Ginsburg Retrospective - Tapa dura

Max Ginsburg, one of the most respected and highly accomplished realist painters today, presents for the first time, a collection of his paintings from 1956 to 2010. Exquisitely presented, this book accompanies his exhibitions during 2011 at The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, as well as at the Salmagundi Club in New York City.

As a New York City painter with a conscience, Max Ginsburg offers us a personal, insider's view of his city. He identifies with the people he paints. The streets, the subways, and the buses are used as vehicles through which he expresses his feelings about the human condition. He is a humanist, not a sentimentalist. His friend Irwin Greenberg said, “Glamour is anathema to him.†He is a Social Realist not afraid to paint provocative social issues of our times. He is outraged by the war in Iraq, the hypocrisy and lies of our leaders leading up to the war, and the criminality of torture by our government in our name without our consent. These concerns are powerfully expressed in his paintings Torture Abu Ghraib, War Pieta, and Peace March. His concern for social justice can be seen in his city paintings on issues of poverty, race, gender, and even “patriotism†in Coffee Break, Flag Vendor, Homeless, Subway Bench, and High Profile.