Anything-but-Still Life

The lines and shadows shown in the etchings hanging on the Los Angeles gallery wall are dark and deep.

So are the ones etched in Ida Bernstein’s heart.

Over here is the image of Bernstein fleeing toward a ditch where she can hide from rampaging bandits who have slaughtered much of her family.

Over in the next picture is the outline of the brave villager giving her refuge in a haystack until the marauders leave.

It is a hot August day in 1919 in Ukraine, and Russia’s tumultuous civil war has just devastated her family. Bernstein remembers it like it was yesterday.

The etchings displayed side by side at the A Shenere Velt Gallery on South Robertson Boulevard represent the defining moment in the 90-year-old Bernstein’s life. The dozens of other drawings and oil paintings displayed along with them reflect the eight troubling decades since then.

It’s not exactly what you’d expect from a gentle, white-haired artist who resembles Grandma Moses more closely than some dark chronicler of 20th century mankind’s suffering at the hands of repressive authorities.

Like Grandma Moses, Bernstein did not begin painting until late in life. But unlike the more famous artist’s works, Bernstein’s stylized oils hardly romanticize the past.

There are paintings that reflect the difficult days of the 1930s, when Bernstein labored in the garment industry, and the gruesome Holocaust of the ‘40s.

Somber canvases depict the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the McCarthy period of the 1950s and the antiwar protests during the ‘60s. Others touch on contemporary issues such as immigration and anti-Semitism. Missing are such art show staples as fruit-bowl still lifes and landscapes.

“I’m not interested too much” in that type of art, Bernstein said Tuesday during a visit to her one-woman show at the gallery, operated by the Workmen’s Circle at 1525 S. Robertson Blvd.

“I don’t hate anyone,” she said. “But there are a lot of problems in the world. Somebody always needs a victim. You can’t feel happy about that.”

Bernstein, born in Dubova, Ukraine, in 1907, became a victim at age 11 when the bandits attacked her family. They hacked her 17-year-old sister to death and killed her 2-year-old brother as the older girl cradled him in her arms. Nearby, they murdered her father as he prayed at the town synagogue, Bernstein said.

“One of my other sisters was cooking in the house when somebody shouted that the bandits were coming. We left everything in the oven and ran. Bullets were flying over our heads. We ran to the village, and I got separated from my family,” she recalled Tuesday.

“I hid in the woods by myself until it got dark. Then I went to the ditch and hid there with a boy I knew. When it got light the next morning, we met a woman who hid us beneath the haystack.

“She took a real chance. They would have killed her family if they had found out. But she brought us bread and water and we hid there two nights.”

Bernstein was reunited with her mother, who had been away when the bandits rode up, and two other sisters. But the girls were orphaned a short time later when their mother took ill and died. They took her body to the cemetery in a wheelbarrow.

A painting depicting Bernstein’s mother is included in the show, which runs through Sept. 2. It shows a sad, weary figure.

“I don’t have a picture of my mother, so I visualized her,” the artist said. “She’s lost her children, her husband, her home, her money, and she’s sick and no one will help her.”

Bernstein and surviving members of her family immigrated to the United States in 1923 and settled in Chicago. She moved to Los Angeles in 1935. Married, she raised a son, Marvin, and twin daughters, Marianne and Rozanne.

Bernstein began painting 30 years ago when she decided her life needed to be documented.

“I’m not a writer,” she said. “But I always wanted to tell my story. When we came here, nobody paid attention to why we came.”

Her images pack a punch, say those who have visited the gallery.

“She’s able to evoke memories about things not only important in her life but extraordinarily important for the 20th century,” said Paul Von Blum, a Mar Vista educator who lectures in African American studies and communication studies at UCLA.

Gallery director Eric Gordon said the 4-foot-6 Bernstein is delicate-looking. “But that’s where it stops. Experience did not defeat her. Hers is a strong work that reflects the traumas of this century through a very highly developed, humanistic prism,” he said.

Mary Koukhah, assistant director of the Workmen’s Circle, said Bernstein’s choice of moments to chronicle on canvas tells as much about her as it does about this century. “A woman’s experience is not always pretty,” Koukhah said.

As for Bernstein, she offers no apology for causing viewers to stop and ponder her work.

Other artists may say painting is their life. But when Bernstein says it, she means it literally.

“This is my life,” she said.