Masha Ainbinder (biography)

    Masha Ainbinder was born in Moscow. She began to study art in the Moscow art-technological Kalinin college. In 1949, Masha Ainbinder with her family moved to Riga, Latvia. There she worked as a draughtsman on the former Kuznetsovsk porcelain factory. In 1962, the artist graduated from the Latvian Academy of Arts on the faculty of painting. Occasionally, she also was involved in various theatrical performances as a set designer. Masha Ainbinder left for Israel in 1992. Now, she lives in Jerusalem. The artist has been rewarded with honorable prizes: Gelberg award (1998) and Ish-Shalom award (2002). Masha Ainbinder's artworks can be seen in the Art Museum in Riga, Latvian Art Foundation and numerous private collections in Israel, Russia, Latvia, France, USA and other countries.

Not about myself.

    We lived in Riga. I was a teenager when I began to accompany my mother to the art exhibitions. And every time leaving into the street, I thought how fresh and colorful the real life looked in comparison to just seen pictures. It was a hard time for Latvian art, which is essentially West European: Moscow bureaucrats were forcibly promoting “social realism” in a former “bourgeois” republic.

    But gradually, the situation changed. The exhibitions became more interesting. I entered the Academy of Fine arts, department of painting. At the time one of the greatest Latvian landscape painters, Konrad Uban, was teaching there. He was laughed at because of his eccentricities. Round and elderly, he looked like “duckling Tim”, he even walked like a duck, with his hands eternally struck in his pockets. He appeared in class without attracting notice, apart from continually singing some tune under his breath. Hearing a song behind them, the students began to work very diligently. We painted a nude model for no less than 50 hours, in an enormous classroom with grey walls and an equally grey floor (we call it “fuzz”).

    Huge gothic windows with dark frames didn’t add much color. Even draperies in the Academy were somehow dark and dull.

Urban was lenient towards our creations. He stood behind our backs for a time, and didn’t make any criticisms. But sometimes, a thing happened that amused the whole Academy. The old man took a student by the shoulder and quietly led them away from the easel, saying “And now, let’s take a look out of the window”.

    When Urban played this trick on me, I was astounded - behind the window was a real painting and on my canvas just some tortured constructions.

    And then many more years passed and I noticed that true pictures don’t hang on walls, but float in the air. And this quality doesn’t depend on time or style.

    And though painting nowadays may be considered a “Vanishing Art Form”, I believe that people with special vision would continue to be born. That sort of  vision, which can win pieces of space away from chaos. Those shards that we later call paintings.