Boris Naumovich Ginsburg (June 21, 1933, Kryvyi Rih — October 23, 1963, Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR) was a Soviet painter and graphic artist.
Biography
Boris Naumovich Ginsburg was born on June 21, 1933, in the city of Kryvyi Rih. He spent his youth and his brief life in Kyiv. From 1941 to 1944, together with his mother and younger sister, he was evacuated to Krasnodar and later to Turkmenistan. In 1947 the family joined their father in Magadan, where Boris spent his childhood years. His talent for drawing, discovered in early childhood, brought the young man to T.G. Shevchenko Kyiv Republican Art School. Having graduated, he entered the Graphic department of the Kyiv Art Institute (1952–1958). He was fortunate to have V. Kasiyan and I. Pleschinsky as his tutors, and A. Paschenko, a famous Ukrainian graphic artist and a talented teacher, as his thesis supervisor. He graduated from the Art Institute with the honours degree and in the same year the twenty-five-year-old became the member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine. While still a student, his works were exhibited at Ukraine and USSR wide exhibitions. They attracted the attention of laymen and specialists alike with their perfection of form, profound meaning and accomplished craftsmanship. During his brief life the artist managed to create, monumental in their stature and execution, a series of lithographs dedicated to creative labour: "About People of Work" (1957–1958), "The New Ukrainian Semiletka Buildings" (1959–1960), "People of the Semiletka" (1960–1961) Like the majority of Ukrainian artists of the time, he engaged with the literary classics, creating a series of works dedicated to T. Shevchenko (1961–1962), illustrations to the great poet's works and to L. Ukrainka's poetry. Despite these considerable achievements for a budding artist, in 1960-1962 he continued to study at the creative workshops of the Academy of Arts of the USSR in Kyiv, under the patronage of the National Artist of the USSR Michail Deregus.
Work
The artist was destined to create his entire legacy in just five years. There was no early, middle or late period in his professional life. This established gradation was compacted into five short years filled with creative search, struggle with humdrum existence, faith in his talent and irrepressible strive for perfection. At the time there were neither monographs nor extensive articles in art journals dedicated to his work, as he was just a budding young artist. All this and recognition, success and fame were just a beckoning alluring dream then. And it all was bound to happen to the artist, as, with his thesis alone, he revealed his great talent to the world. His thesis series of easel graphic works About People of Work (1958) demonstrated not only a rather high level of academic proficiency, but also Boris’ own perspective on the obligatory, in those days, depiction of socialist everyday life. He brought a personality to the foreground of his graphic sheet, abandoning the stereotype of portraying "an ordinary Soviet man". For the six completed lithographs of the series the artist created numerous sketches, demonstrating a wide variety of the compositional ideas and subject interpretations. Alongside genre drawings, the artist completed portraits in coal, creating an expressive gallery of manly, proud and intellectual images of steelmakers.
The New Ukrainian Semiletka Buildings (1959–1960) is also a lithographic series, created on a commission by the Union of Artists, in which, alongside the key moments of Kremenchug Hydro Electric Station construction, a lot of attention is paid to the rank and file participants of the grandiose building project. In this series the artist emphasizes images of women, as if juxtaposing the beauty and fragility of the female figures with the surrounding construction giants. The artist also remained true to the humanistic concept of art in the third lithographic series The People of Semiletka (1960–1961). Reminiscence of the Black Sea became the most vivid and the most unconventional of the series. Through the prism of his depicting the fishermen's work one could clearly observe the unmistakable romantic notes of the European art tradition.