Born in the Ukraine his family moved to England when he was a few weeks old. He studied at Liverpool School of Art and then briefly in Paris before returning with a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, 1912-13. He had his first major show at the Goupil Gallery in 1919.

Meninsky painted still lives and more frequently landscapes which have since been compared in style to the Neo-Romantic movement of this period. In 1928 he published Mother and Child: 28 Drawings by Bernard Meninsky It was a subject matter which he returned to many times depicting the figures with a monumental solidity.