Aaron Birnbaum

1895-1998 · Brooklyn, New York, USA

A Brooklyn dressmaker who sold the business, picked up a brush around seventy, and spent his last three decades painting his way back to the Ukrainian village of his childhood.

The life

Birnbaum was born in 1895 in Skole, in what is now Ukraine, into a family of tailors and dressmakers, and was apprenticed to a tailor at thirteen. The family emigrated to New York in 1913, fleeing the marginalisation of Jews and the coming war. He enrolled in design school, built a women’s apparel business in Brooklyn with thirty employees, and sold it on retiring in 1957. After the death of his wife Sadie his daughter bought him paints to ease the loneliness, and he simply started. The Museum of American Folk Art celebrated his hundredth birthday in 1995, and he kept painting until he was 101.

The work

He called them his remembering pictures: scenes of village life in old Ukraine and of the New York around him, painted in oils and later acrylics on whatever came to hand, masonite scraps, plywood, wooden trays and game boards, often popped into found frames to look properly finished. Sixty years in the garment trade taught him his method, and he used cardboard templates to repeat motifs the way a cutter repeats a pattern. His work is held in the Museum of Everything in London.

Why we love them

Seventy years of tailoring taught him pattern, colour and cut. He spent the last thirty stitching memory straight onto board.

Go deeper

• Aaron Birnbaum at the Outsider Art Fair
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

← Back to the field guide