With his great musical gifts, Rubinstein played his instrument with astonishing ease and authority and with a rich, warm, opulent tone that made his colleagues jealous. "With the lightness of a butterfly where it was needed," as one American reviewer once put it. Rubinstein's energy and generosity were legendary. In a consecutive six-week period in 1961, he performed ten recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York and raised $ 100,000 for his favorite charitable purposes. "It's nice that people want to listen to me," Rubinstein once said. "By the way, if they didn't want to, I would play anyway."

When he had to admit that his time was over, he noted that at least he would no longer divert attention from young people “who are much better pianists than I am.” Rubinstein never knew false modesty. When he was 4 years old he engraved scattering business cards that read "Artur, the great piano virtuoso".

At the age of 8, Artur was sent to the Warsaw Conservatory. At the age of nine he studied in Berlin under Heinrich Barth, who had been a student of Franz Liszt. His formal debut in Berlin took place when he was eleven and a Mozart piano concert was on the program.

As a teenager, Rubinstein made a European tour and in 1902 and in 1906, when he was 15 years old, he played with the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra under Emil Mylnarski, his future father-in-law. Here he made his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at New York's Carnegie Hall. The reception was calm. Americans were not prepared for Rubinstein's clear and direct play and he had gone too fast and had not cared much about the discipline a concert pianist, however gifted, must apply. "I was no longer a child prodigy," said Rubinstein later in an interview. "And I was not a mature artist. I honestly hated practicing."

Before his twentieth birthday, Rubinstein was a celebrity in his hometown, Paris. He dealt with artists and writers and studied avant-garde music. He wrote in his 1973 memoir "My Young Years" that he was a "losbol" who lived well and took music seriously. He is now especially popular with his works of Chopin.