The Missing Miracles of Marc Klionsky

One of the occasional gifts of life as an art critic is the opportunity to rescue from oblivion the work of a relatively unknown artist. In this case, unknown to oneself—for, until recently, and despite having written about Jewish art for nearly two decades, I’d been virtually unacquainted with Marc Klionsky, who was born in Russia in 1927 and from 1974 until his death in 2017 lived and painted in New York City. Today, the more I’ve become acquainted with his work, the more I’m reminded of the plea entered by Willy Loman’s devoted wife in Death of a Salesman: “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

Unlike the pathetic Linda Loman, Klionsky’s widow Irina speaks dotingly of her husband’s life as a series of miracles. In 1941, the Minsk-born fourteen-year-old, who had evinced artistic promise from an early age, fled the approaching Nazis with his family and 200 other members of the Jewish community to settle in Kazan (now the capital of Russian Tatarstan). At the end of the war, the young Klionsky moved to Leningrad, soon to become the star student at the city’s academy of fine arts. In the wave of regime-sponsored anti-Semitism stirred up by the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” he was forced out, only to be readmitted after Stalin’s death in 1953. Graduating with honors, he went on, in a first for a Jew, to postgraduate studies at the same academy.

Having set up shop as a working artist, Klionsky earned regular commissions from the Soviet Ministry of Culture, creating social-realist and propagandistic works. In Youth, for example, a young man dressed in khaki climbs a ladder into the painting; on a platform above, a joyous young woman holds her billowing hair in her hands as she takes in the view. But he was constrained from touching the themes most dear to him: namely, Jewish life and Zionism.