TEL AVIV.- The exhibition, which presents Israeli viewers with an astounding body of work, follows the life of the artist Pinkas Bursztyn, who reinvented himself in the 1950s as Maryan S. Maryan. In the four decades he moved through Auschwitz, Jerusalem, Paris and New York, Maryan created an abundance of paintings, drawings, photographs, films and archival materials, many of which are now on display for the first time.

Pinkas Bursztyn was born into a family of bakers in Nowy Sącz, Poland. The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, when he was 12 years old, was the beginning of his torment in the Nazi concentration camps, until in 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz. At the end of the war, during a death march, he was shot in his leg, which was later amputated in a Displaced Persons camp. The only member of his family to survive, Bursztyn arrived in Eretz Israel in 1947, and deemed “handicapped,” he was sent to a convalescent home for elderly immigrants in the Haifa neighborhood of Bat Galim.

With the help of the Youth Immigration movement, Bursztyn managed to enroll for art studies at the New Bezalel, where he became friends with a small group of peers, all Holocaust survivors and war refugees, including the painters Avigdor Arikha, Yehuda Bacon and Meir Leibner – who called himself Maryan Marinel and committed suicide in Jerusalem in 1955. Bursztyn’s friend, the poet Nathan Zach, said that Bursztyn was inspired by Marinel to take the name Maryan for himself.




In 1950, after holding his first solo exhibition in Jerusalem, Maryan set sail for Paris to continue to study art, and after that did not return to Israel. In Paris he met and married Annette Sonnenblueck, a Holocaust survivor from Antwerp, and as early as 1952 held his first solo exhibition there. However only in 1960 – with the display of several of his “personage” paintings at the Galerie de France, and in parallel in New York – did he receive substantial recognition in the Paris art scene. In 1962, after he was denied French citizenship, he moved to New York, and in 1969 was granted American citizenship and an official acknowledgment of his chosen name, Maryan S. Maryan.

In the final decade of his life Maryan lived and worked at New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel – the avant-garde and bohemia hub on West 23rd St. Manhattan. The time he spent at the hotel, in a room stuffed with emotional and mental anguish, coincided with that of figures such as Patty Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Allan Ginsburg, and some of Andy Warhol’s Factory clique: Brigid Berlin, Viva and her husband the artist Michel Auder.

On 15 June 1977, at the age of 50, Maryan died from cardiac arrest in his Chelsea Hotel studio. During that year he had mounted a comprehensive solo exhibition in Paris, accompanied by the publication of a catalog that included a text he wrote, which opens with the sentence “My name is Maryan.” He was buried, according to his desire, in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

This is the second Maryan retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (the first opened in the summer of 1979, two years after his death). It brings back to mind an artist who was active in the country for only a short while, yet preserves their place in the history of Israeli art. The works in the exhibition, whose origins are biographical, are hardly a preoccupation with the life of a single person. In his work Maryan evokes a human menagerie of figures who are sentenced to stand in for the fate of humans in the second half of the 20th century. This spirit is echoed in Nathan Zach’s eulogy for his friend: “He died as he had lived: not a ‘cursed artist,’ but a great painter in accursed times.”

Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Director, Tel Aviv Museum of Art: “We are excited to mount in Israel this significant exhibition of works by Maryan, one of the most fascinating and astounding artists of the 20th century, whose personal story is to a large extent also the story of the art circles and cultural institutions that operated in the country at the time. The exhibition offers an opportunity to reexamine and reposition historical and social contexts. It was realized thanks to the comprehensive research conducted in collaboration with MOCA North Miami, the Maryan Fund in New York and the generous lending of artworks.