bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Victoria Finlay

THE Russian White House has never been much of an architectural landmark. Small windows, drab concrete and an architect with a penchant for functionalism, make this one of the dullest state buildings in the world. More of a Grey House than anything.

  'I want to make it bright, make it bold,' said artist Yankel Ginzburg enthusiastically, showing his sketches for a monolithic portal to the White House called Monument to Democracy.

   The piece, which he is working on at the moment, consists of huge acrylic pyramids, coloured with bright air-brushed paints so as to refract the Moscow light in ways that are intended to be intriguing.

  If, as he said, the raw materials alone for his 30-centimetre high acrylic sculptures cost around HK$40,000, then the 10-metre high sculptures will certainly give a bit of a jolt to the Russian national debt.

  Ginzburg would not reveal the cost, although he said the project was already well underway, suggesting that financing had been agreed.

  Ginzburg has, in the past few months, come to an arrangement with Hong Kong gallery owner, Vincent Lee, who will now be responsible for the worldwide distribution of his paintings and sculptures.

  It is a surprising move for an artist who has already gained a following throughout the world, and whose exhibitions attract messages of congratulations from that other White House, in Washington DC.

   By the age of 17, a student in the Academy of Arts of the Museum of Bat-Yam in Israel, he had startled the artist Marc Chagall who was visiting, into saying: 'It took me 40 years to capture Paris. This youngster will capture the world even before his hair turns grey.'   'When I was younger I thought of being involved with many places in the world, but Asia wasn't one of them,' admitted Ginzburg.

  He said the agreement with Vincent Lee was 'an honour thing' - a continuation of the business relationship that they had developed over the past three years. Nothing had been signed, but both were convinced this was the way ahead.

  With contacts with 150 galleries worldwide, and branches opening in Vancouver and elsewhere, the Vincent Lee connection is likely to be good for Ginzburg's bank account.

   But it is also a reflection of Ginzburg's very apparent modus operandi. He needs to surround himself with love.

  Vincent is not only his collaborator, he is 'the brother he never had' (the feeling appears to be mutual); their wives are 'best friends'; their business arrangement is 'pure, mutual respect'.

  Ginzburg, now an American, arrived via Israel, has a fondness for his motherland, which is perhaps surprising: the Soviet Union never served him or his family well when they lived there.

  His maternal grandfather (he didn't mention this in the interview: his name-dropping is surprisingly undeveloped) was Marshall Zhukov, head of the Russian armed forces during the siege of Leningrad, but later discredited under Stalin. When his father, a Polish Jew, married his mother it was under the agreement that they took the name Zhukov rather than the Jewish surname of Ginzburg. Hitler had not, by then, lost the war.

  Ginzburg grew up as Yuri Zhukov, and only learned of his Jewish descent when he was nine years old, and found a clockwork parakeet by the river that had been distributed by the SS to instill race hatred against the Jews.

   'You know, beak-like nose, a bowing motion like a praying Jew. My father saw it, and said we'd better talk.'   His childhood memories include waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of four men breaking down the door, and seeing his parents carried away in their night-clothes.

   'I looked out of the window and saw them being put into an open police van, my father handcuffed to one side, my mother to another.'   His mother was released, but his father was sentenced to five years of hard labour - for contradicting State law by giving private advice to members of the Jewish Community in Moscow.

   He was released after two because of failing health. 'I used to sit at the front of the class; after my father was arrested I was sent to the back. No one ever asked if I had done my homework; no one even talked to me.'   Ginzburg's paintings are very bright; many would call them gaudy. He likes to paint fantasies and baubles and other shiny things.

  'In Russia when I was growing up I didn't have anything. I was a communist so I didn't question it,' he said. He recounted how, a few months after his father had been released from prison, in 1957, his entire family escaped from Russia on a freight train. It took nearly six days, 'with 20 people in one stinking car, with just a chamber pot in the corner.'   He was 12, and the first thing he saw of the West - in the streets of Vienna - was the sight of children on bicycles. 'There was a welcoming committee, and I remember asking one of them whether the children would have to give the bicycles back after we left. I still thought it was all a show, put on for our benefit for propaganda reasons.'   Since then, metaphorically, he has been painting bicycles - the things that he had never had.

  He also paints flowers. 'These flowers aren't realistic ones, I don't put a real one by my easel and paint it.'   He said the flowers in his paintings were inspired by something his father had said, after going back to Poland to help Jewish families rebuild themselves, and to find that he himself had not even a third-line cousin who had survived the Holocaust.

   'He looked at one of my early paintings [almost Joan Miro-like, a very different style from his later work] and he pointed to the head of a flower, and said it looked so much like his sister.

  'Often when I paint flowers I think of all those beautiful and clever people who died,' he said gently.

  His explanations gave a new dimension to work that I had, on first view, dismissed as uncomplicated, and therefore uninteresting.

  For years, Ginzburg's father could not sleep properly, he would wake in the night crying out 'why me when all the others died?'.

   He was partly startled out of his nightmares by a remark made a couple of years ago by Ginzburg's son, Aviel, who was then nine.

  Aviel asked his grandfather why, even on the holiest day, he never went to the temple. Ginzburg Senior answered that he had an argument with God that hadn't been resolved.

   He explained about the covenant that he had grown up under - that God would not let Abraham sacrifice his only son - and that he knew, from eye witnesses, that his mother had comforted his sisters with the argument, as they went towards the gas chambers, that God would also not let them die.

  'My son thought about that overnight,' Ginzburg recounted. 'Then at breakfast he came downstairs and suddenly asked what an angel is.'   After establishing that an angel was often the spirit of a good person who had died, he then asked how many people had been alive at the time of Abraham. About 100,000, was the answer.

   And at the time of Hitler? About one and a half billion.

  'Then don't you think that what might have happened is that God found himself in the situation that he had one and a half billion souls and not enough angels?' was the boy's next, devastating question.

  Ginzburg paused, and wiped his eyes. 'Too much coffee,' he muttered. I wiped mine too.

   At Vincent Lee Fine Art's annual ball last week at the Regent, everything was glitz, and Ginzburg became the showman.

  'Everyone wants Yankel,' said the MC, Frances Yip, as each speech-maker demanded that Ginzburg accompany them to the podium. He managed to joke better and more often than everyone else.

  And as the chefs of the Regent later paraded into the room to the sound of an Oompah band (and gained deserved applause for a banquet in which every course was inspired by a painting), Ginzburg grabbed his coloured pens and signed their hats. Even a New York gallery owner said this was 'more showbiz than we ever get in America.'.

  As everyone left the party, Ginzburg caught my eye. 'Be gentle with me,' he said, referring to our interview the day before. 'I'm just a sentimental old fool.' Ginzburg's work is on permanent show at Vincent Lee Fine Arts, Ritz Carlton Hotel, Central 



Exile paints a story of persecution