BIOGRAPHY

Felix Lembersky was a Soviet painter, stage designer, teacher, public lecturer, and organizer of artistic groups. He studied art during Soviet Avant-Garde in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the 1920s before moving to Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Soviet Russia, to study realist painting. He created work in realist and modernist styles that fell outside of Soviet-mandated Socialist Realism. As his art developed, he began depicting individual suffering and historical trauma, including the Nazi massacre of civilians at Babi Yar, before a period during which he abstracted the emotional and spiritual dimensions of human experience, presenting painting as a visual puzzle that invites the viewer to ask, “What do I see?” and find answers through interpretive engagement with his art. His paintings, initially acclaimed, were suppressed when they no longer conformed aesthetically or politically with the demands of Soviet authorities.

A witness to two world wars, the revolution, and terror, Lembersky offers a candid reflection of those events, infusing his images with hope and optimism. He turns to vulnerable, neglected, and marginalized people: children, the elderly, ethnic minorities, and industrial workers who are forced into unbearable labor and dangerous work environments. Regardless of their circumstances, he shows their humanity with empathy and admiration. 

Lembersky was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1913, to a Jewish family. His mother was a pianist and a foreign-language teacher and his father was a mathematician and, evidence suggests, a small business owner. When Felix was one, his father was wounded during World War I and became permanently disabled. The family moved to Berdychiv in western Ukraine, where Felix grew up. The city was an important economic, religious, and cultural center, with a large Jewish population known for its spiritual Hasidic movement and Haskalah, Jewish enlightenment.

Lembersky began his formal art education in Kyiv, first at the Jewish Arts and Trades School (1928–30), founded as a part of Kultur-Lige, and later at the Kyiv Art Institute, now the National Ukrainian Academy of Art (1933–34). Both schools were centers for the Soviet avant-garde: the Kultur-Lige curriculum was shaped by its founding members Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Mark Epshtein, among others; the Kyiv Art Institute program was influenced by major avant-garde artists, including Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Mikhailo Boychuk, Victor Palmov, Aleksandr Bogomazov. Many of the artists were later repressed, executed during the Great Terror, or killed during World War II. The visual culture of Lembersky’s formative years became an inspiration for his mature work of the 1960s.

In 1933, the artist Isaak Brodsky invited Lembersky to study at the Russian Academy of Art in Leningrad, a preeminent art institution he directed. Lembersky graduated in 1941, completing a thesis on the Urals industry, a subject to which he would return throughout his life. He completed his thesis in the besieged city and defended it in a historic session that took place in December 1941. The session was described in the Soviet press as an act of resistance by Leningrad artists and likened to the performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony during the Siege. Lembersky met Shostakovich, and the two continued their contact after the war.

In 1942, Lembersky was evacuated to the Urals, where he joined the industrial home front and organized an artists’ union, an art school, and an art museum in Nizhny Tagil that still exists. His deeply felt portraits of industrial workers were widely exhibited and published in the Soviet Union, bringing him into the national spotlight. His professional success, however, coincided with personal tragedy. His parents, having remained in Berdychiv during the war, were murdered by the occupying Nazis.

Returning to Leningrad in 1944, Lembersky married Lucia Lemberskaya (née Keiserman), whom he had met nine years earlier when he was at the Academy of Art; she was to become his most devoted and passionate advocate. That same year, he joined the Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists (LOSKh). His realist works of the 1940s and ’50s were on view in major national exhibitions. In 1961, his portraits of Lucia and their daughter Galya (Galina), born in 1945, were displayed at the Russian Museum in Leningrad. His paintings were collected by museums and several were on permanent view in public buildings across the Soviet Union.

In the late 1950s and ’60s, Lembersky began to move toward expressionism. He was a vocal critic of Soviet censorship and argued vigorously at artists’ meetings for reform, including the establishment of artists’ unions to encourage free experimentation and stylistic diversity in Soviet art. His later nonrepresentational work was broadly, and disparagingly, labeled as “formalism” by the Soviet art officials. He continued to show it privately in his studio.

Lembersky died in Leningrad in 1970. Lucia, his daughter Galina, and granddaughter Yelena emigrated to the United States in the 1980s, taking with them his works in their possession. In a recent memoir, Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour (Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, 2022), Galina and Yelena Lembersky recount the story of the family’s life in Soviet Russia and their dramatic departure to the United States. Most of the artist’s oeuvre is now in the family’s collection in Massachusetts. Lembersky’s art has been the subject of books, essays, videos, podcasts, radio interviews, lectures, and academic papers in the U.S., U.K., Russia, Canada, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Israel. His work was included in a course syllabus at the University of Michigan, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the European University in Saint Petersburg, among others. His artwork is held by the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey; Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts, Russia; and many other public and private collections around the world.