Aaron Birnbaum

Art Brokerage: Aaron Birnbaum American Artist: b. 1895-1998. Aaron Birnbaum was a dress manufacturer who became a folk painter at age 70. Birnbaum was born in Skole, a summer resort in what is now the Ukraine. His father was a tailor, his mother a dressmaker. At 13, he was apprenticed to a tailor, working from 5 in the morning to 10 at night, six days a week. This memory and the anti-Semitism he endured as a boy of 10, when teen-agers tore buttons off his new suit, were never depicted in his paintings. Birnbaum, who always sketched the dresses he created, took up painting after the death of his wife and closure of his shop. To help ease his loneliness, his daughter, brought him paints, recalling that he had sketched the dresses he produced. Often compared to Grandma Moses, he was a "memory painter," depicting the houses, streets and bridges of his Brooklyn neighborhood as they looked in his youth. He worked in oil and acrylic on paper, wood, glass and tin. His fame came some 30 years after he started painting, when the Museum of American Folk Art celebrated his art and his age, at a party at the museum for his 100th birthday. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.