Max Avadievich Birshtein was a Soviet painter and graphic artist. He graduated from the Surikov Moscow Art Institute, where his teacher was the prominent artist and art critic Igor Grabar.
The museum’s collection includes 16 works by Max Birshtein, some of which were donated by the artist himself.
In the 1960s, he worked on a series of portraits of
his fellow artists and cultural figures. He described in detail his process of
painting one of the portraits — of Alexander Osmerkin and Robert Falk — in his
autobiographical book “Life and Paintings” as follows,