Marc Klionsky

Marc Klionsky was born in Minsk, into a Jewish family. His father, who worked as a typesetter, enrolled him in the Art School for Gifted Children in Minsk, in the Belarusian SSR (now the Republic of Belarus). During World War II the Klionsky family was evacuated to Kazan, in the Tatar ASSR (now Tatarstan, Russian Federation). There the young artist supported himself by creating anti-fascist posters and illustrations for local newspapers and other publications. He studied at the Drama Institute of the Kazan Theater, focusing on costume design for various productions. In the late 1940s, Klionsky moved to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), where he enrolled in the Leningrad College of Art and Design (in 1948 renamed the Leningrad Higher School of Arts and Industry, now the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design). He then studied in the painting department of the Leningrad Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (now the Saint Petersburg Repin Academy Academy of Arts) under Professor Boris Ioganson (1893–1973). His thesis work, After the Meeting (1957), was a success and was published as a poster with an edition of fifty thousand copies.

While in Leningrad, Klionsky exhibited his portraits, genre, and historical paintings in local, republican, and all-Union exhibitions. During this time, he was said to have been the youngest artist to exhibit at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow—he showed his work there at least by 1955, when he was about twenty-eight. In 1957 he received a PhD. It was during this period that Klionsky also met his future wife, Irina Korolik, with whom he had two daughters. In 1958 he became a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists and worked with the Leningrad branch of the Art Foundation of the RSFSR.

In the USSR he established his reputation by creating official works in the style of socialist realism, depicting political figures and everyday life of Soviet people, such as his canvas Komsomol Members (Battle Friends) (1957–59). However, in the solitude of his studio in the 1960s and ’70s he began to explore the theme of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, creating a large graphic series entitled Chtoby lyudi ne zabyli [Lest the People Forget] (c. 1962), using various techniques such as etching, aquatint, lithography, and monotype. These images were radically different from his socialist realist work. Here he used an expressive, stark, illustrative, and flat style based on contrasting forms, tones, and textures. The series primarily consisted of portraits and multifigure compositions depicting images of war and motifs of Jewish life. Among the iconic images from the series are Spring, Old Man and Child, A Teacher, and others. In some works from the series, more surreal narratives emerge: hands protruding from under the floor, distorted and fragmented figures that embody the psychological trauma, and tragic stories of the Holocaust and its victims.

In 1974, due to anti-Semitism in the USSR and restrictions on artistic freedom, he and his family left the Soviet Union for permanent residency, first in Rome, then in New York. In the same year, he had his first international solo exhibition in Paris. In 1979 he organized his first solo exhibition in New York at the Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts Gallery on Madison Avenue. He immediately expressed in his work the freedom he had newly found in the United States. Shortly after his arrival, Klionsky was the subject of an ABC film, Canvas of Freedom, devoted to his art. In addition, the US State Department, likely through the US Information Agency, produced a film about his exhibition at the Hammer Galleries, New York, possibly in 1984. According to available sources, the film was shown in ninety-two countries. During this period, Klionsky also taught courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. During this time, his work moved away from the conventions of socialist realism, such as depictions of social reality and the lives of workers, and reliance on academic traditions of figure and compositional construction.

Klionsky’s art can be characterized as highly eclectic, with the artist constantly exploring and experimenting with a variety of styles and genres. Some of his works incorporate techniques and motifs borrowed from hyperrealism, pop art, surrealism, and metaphysical painting, as well as salon painting and kitsch art. In the United States, Klionsky used his creative freedom to explore various media and styles, including abstraction. One of his unique and iconic paintings is Waiting for the Train (1986, Yad Vashem Art Collection, Jerusalem, Israel), in which a realistic image of a pregnant woman with children by her side is juxtaposed with a fragment of another painting, which depicts Jewish men, women, and children arriving at a concentration camp. The painting operates between two temporalities: in each image, women and children (the contemporary family and the historical Jewish figures) are waiting for the train. The echo creates a powerful parallel between past and present, linking individual, personal experience with collective trauma. This work vividly represents the range of Klionsky’s artistic identities and influences, referring to generational memories and the collective past that reverberates in the present. Indeed, his works often bridge the past and present in a suggestive and often melancholy way.

Eventually, Klionsky gained recognition as a master of portrait painting and American realism—a broad artistic current that extends back to the Ashcan School, including artists such as John Sloan (1871–1951) and George Bellows (1882–1925), and forward to later forms of figurative realism in the second half of the twentieth century, exemplified by Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and Wolf Kahn (1927–2020). His works include many portraits of political leaders and humanitarians, such as Golda Meir, Elie Wiesel, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, and Vernon Jordan; musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Mstislav Rostropovich, and B. B. King; and business leaders Armand Hammer, Steve Forbes, and Dwayne Andreas. Klionsky was also selected to design the Nobel Peace Prize Commemorative Medal for Elie Wiesel. One of the most characteristic and recognizable features of his formal portraits is the seated, full-length figure positioned at the center of a horizontal canvas. The figures are set against a flat wall, with windows, openings, carpets, paintings, and other background surfaces appearing to the left and right, adding depth to the composition and providing contextual references to memories and spaces that further define the role and interest of the subject. This compositional approach effectively creates a compositional triptych or polyptych on a single canvas.

The artist died in New York on September 17, 2017. Since that year, his estate has been cataloguing his studio works and materials to preserve his memory and legacy.

KALEKTAR platform

Photo portrait by James Purefoy, 1986. Used under Creative Commons License.