Felix Lembersky

Felix Lembersky (Lublin, Poland, November 11, 1913 – Leningrad, December 2, 1970) was a Russian/Soviet painter, artist, teacher, theater stage designer and community organizer of Jewish origin.

Internationally and critically acclaimed artist, Lembersky was among influential figures of Russian mid-twentieth century art. His painting style spanned from academic realism to expressive, semi-abstract and symbolist forms that rely on rich vibrant color, pastose texture and complex geometries. Despite his modernist tendencies in the later years, Lembersky considered himself a realist; in his autobiography he cited Russian icons and Russian avant-garde among the main influences on his art. Formal transformations in his work served the to heighten the expression of human condition. The human image is at the center of Lembersky’s paintings, from his earlier portraits to the later compositions. His landscapes reconstruct human forms and gesture through still objects, retaining the memory of human activity, even in their absence.

The themes in Lembersky's art focused the Siege of Leningrad, the Miners of the Urals, Staraya Ladoga, Russian Revolution (1917), industrial sites of Nizhny Tagil and Holocaust. Three Babi Yar paintings (1944–52), which Lembersky painted following the death of his parents at the hands of the Nazis in Ukraine, are the earliest known artistic record of the massacre. The final painting of the Babi Yar cycle was created during Stalin’s vicious anti-Semitic campaign in 1952. The second painting Babi Yar painting was never exhibited in the Soviet Union, it was shown publicly for the first time at Brandeis University in 2011 marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

He was married to Lucia Keiserman Lemberskaya (1915–1994).

Lembersky’s paintings are in the holdings of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Norton and Nancy Dodge collection at The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Nizhny Tagil Art Museum, which he co-founded in the Urals in 1944. Large part of his oeuvre is in private family collection in the USA.