Pinchas Burstein, alias Maryan - a painter and printmaker of Jewish origin - was born in 1927 in Nowy Sacz. During the war he survived the hell of the ghetto and the Auschwitz camp, from where he was the only survivor of his family. In 1945, his gangrene-infected leg was amputated. Two years after the war ended, he left for Palestine. He studied at the New Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. It was then that his first works were created - totems and cubist faces. In 1950 he went to France and began studying at the School of Fine Arts in Paris in the studio of Fernand Léger. Two years later his first exhibition took place at the Bretau gallery in Paris, and from 1956 the artist established a permanent collaboration with the Galerie de France. In 1959, he was awarded the art critics' prize at the Paris Art Biennale. The artist's American career began in 1960, when an exhibition of his works "Paintings, Pastels and Drawings" from Galerie de France was shown at André Emmerich Gallery in New York. In 1962, Maryan accepted American citizenship and moved permanently to New York. There he presented his works at the Allan Frumkin Gallery. The artist died suddenly as a result of a heart attack on June 15, 1977 in New York. He was only 50 years old. According to critics, Pinchas Burnstein's art was a constant struggle with the trauma of the Holocaust, and in his works he created an image of a suffering human being, but depicted in figurative forms close to cartoonish, grotesque figures. Vibrant colors gave his works additional expression and expression. Maryan's works are in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Staatliches Museum in Berlin, the Musée de Grenoble and the Tel Aviv Musée de Beaux Arts.
In the minds of contemporary collectors, Maryan's art was recalled by one of the most important retrospective exhibitions organized in 2021 at MoCA North Miami in the United States, entitled "My Name is Maryan." A book with the same title was also recently published, and this year the exhibition can be seen in Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where it has attracted great interest. In Poland, the knowledge and memory of this remarkable artist is being spread by the Maryan Association. In 2012, as part of the Andy Rottenberg exhibition titled "VOID", an exhibition titled "Maryan's Room" was presented in Nowy Sącz, where the artist's personal memorabilia was displayed. In 2017, the Maryan Association published the book "MARYAN'S ROOM. Maryan (Pinchas Burstein) in New Sącz and New York". The year 2027 will mark the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth and 50th anniversary of his death.
