Pinchas Burstein

Pinchas Burstein, later known as Maryan S. Maryan, was a Polish-born Jewish post-expressionist painter. He was born in Nowy Sącz, Poland, into an Orthodox Jewish family and was only 12 when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Burstein was subsequently captured by the Nazis and imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp. After Poland was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945, Burstein was the sole survivor of his family and required a leg amputation due the injuries sustained while at the concentration camp. In the aftermath of the war, he spent two years in displaced persons camps in Germany.

In 1947, Burstein moved to Mandatory Palestine, where he faced challenges due to his disability and briefly lived in a kibbutz. He later attended the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and witnessed the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In 1950, Burstein relocated to Paris, adopting the name Maryan Bergman, and enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied with the French avant-garde artist Fernand Léger. His artistic career flourished in Paris, where he received a commission to design the Monument to the Unknown Jewish Martyr and was awarded the Prix des Critiques d'Art in 1959.

In 1962, after being denied French citizenship, he moved to New York City, where he continued to paint, creating an extensive body of work that included his best-known Personnage paintings series. His figurative style, often violent and exaggerated, reflected the influence of Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, and the CoBrA group. In 1971, following a mental breakdown, he produced a series of drawings depicting his life story, which have since been interpreted as the artist's response to the traumatic experiences of living through the Holocaust. In 1975, he co-created a film titled Ecce Homo, a blend of performance art and historical imagery. Maryan died of a heart attack in 1977 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York, which is where he was living at the time, and was buried at Montparnasse Cemetery Paris.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023