Pinchas Burstein alias Maryan (1927 Nowy Sącz - 1977 New York), Untitled, 1955

Gouache, paper pasted on fiberboard, 50 x 65 cm, signed l.d.

Polish painter and printmaker of Jewish descent. During the occupation, he and his family were imprisoned in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where he was the only survivor. As a result of an accident, he lost his leg. In 1947 he went to Palestine and attended the Bezalel Art Institute, where he took up studies in graphic design. From 1950 he settled in Paris, where he studied in Fernand Léger's studio at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux. In 1952, he had an exhibition at the Bretau gallery, and from 1956, he began working with the Galerie de France. In 1962 he moved to New York, where he presented his works in an exhibition at the Allan Frumkin Gallery. On December 15, 1976, he received the Knight's Order of Arts and Letters, a French national honor. Burstein's works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, among others.One of Maryan's most important retrospective exhibitions, entitled "My Name is Maryan," premiered at MoCA North Miami in 2021. In Poland, Maryan's work was virtually unknown until 2009, when Krzysztof Bojarczuk founded the Maryan Association in order to be able to deepen the knowledge of this remarkable artist. He managed to find the widow of the Sącz painter, who told what his private and artistic life was like. In 2012, the Andy Rottenberg exhibition "Maryan's Room" was presented at the Old Synagogue Gallery as part of the Andy Rottenberg exhibition entitled "VOID," for which mementos donated by Annette Maryan were brought from the artist's apartment in Manhattan. 5 years later, in 2017, the Maryan Association published the book "MARYAN'S ROOM. Maryan (Pinchas Burstein) in New Sącz and New York". In 2019, New York-based curator Alison Gingeras came to New Sącz to see Pinchas Burstein's personal objects. She chose a palette, a rocking horse, a handwritten list of medicines, papier mâché figures and Mexican funeral masks for an exhibition she was preparing on Maryan's work in North Miami (and later in Tel Aviv). Maryan's true place in post-war art history was restored by an exhibition in North Miami that ran from November 2021 to October 2022, an exhibition that directly placed the artist in the broader context of Europeans and Americans of his time. Maryan's works in the exhibition were also juxtaposed with works by artists of his generation, such as Asger Jorn, Constant, Egill Jacobsen and members of the COBRA group, as well as American artists. In December 2022, the same exhibition (curated by Alison Gingeras and Noah Rosenberg) opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It was here that another recent designation of Maryan's work as a forgotten forerunner of Holocaut art was made. 2027 will mark the 100th anniversary of Pinchas Burstein's birth and 50th death.