Pinchas Burstein

Maryan
Born	Pinchas Burstein (1927-01-01)1 January 1927 Nowy Sącz, Poland
Died	15 June 1977(1977-06-15) (aged 50) New York City, United States
Nationality	Polish, American
Known for	painting
Movement	post-expressionism

Pinchas Burstein (1927–1977), later known as Maryan S. Maryan, was a Polish-born Jewish post-

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

Pinchas Burstein (Pinkas Bursztyn) was born in

In 1947 Burstein moved to Palestine. In a later interview he said that he had been persuaded to move there while in a displaced persons camp, but once he arrived, found himself labeled "handicapped" and sent to a kibbutz that had "a residence for elderly and disabled immigrants".^[4]

After I received the certificate, they left me alone on the platform. No one came to me. I found a pile of oranges and sat on it. I waited. Yes, I waited for someone to come and take me to the kibbutz, as that official had promised me. I waited for several hours and suddenly I was horrified. I began to see the truth. No one was waiting for me. This clerk, his name will be omitted, lied to me. They left me on the platform. After a while I realized that it was worse than a concentration camp, because I was not alone there, we went to die together, whereas on the platform at the port of Haifa I went to die alone.^[4]

He left that kibbutz after five months, when he was admitted in the

In Paris Pinchas Burstein took a new name, Maryan Bergman,[3] "which he "borrowed" from his schoolmate in Bezalel, the painter Marian (Meir Marinel), who committed suicide a few years later."^[4] There, he had works included in several major exhibitions and was commissioned to design a tapestry for the Monument to the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris, and was awarded the Prix des Critiques d’Art at the Paris Biennale. His first solo exhibition in the United States was held at the famed André Emmerich Gallery in 1960.^[6]

USA

Maryan moved to New York in 1962, after being denied French citizenship. Together with his wife, Annette, a Holocaust survivor he met in France,^[4] he arrived in the USA aboard the SS Leonardo da Vinci.^[1] In 1969 he received American citizenship and officially changed his name to Maryan S. Maryan.^[2]

His best-known works, the movie Ecce Homo,^[2] the painting After Goia,^[3] and a series of paintings called Personnage, were done in New York.^[6] The Personnage paintings were described by Grace Glueck as

brutal, exaggerated

de Kooning, winding up as slobbering, almost illegible bundles of mouths, flailing limbs, and flying organs.^[6]

In 1971 Maryan had a mental breakdown, and temporarily lost his ability to speak.[2]^[1] To overcome this state, his psychiatrist told him to draw depictions of his life story. In a year he created a series of drawings, later titled Ecce homo, and completed 9 notebooks with 478 drawings, each 20x30 cm.^[1][2] Daniel Kupermann examined these drawings as a psychoanalyst, and found them to be a "blend of infantile and monstrous, with their incontinent bodies and with the omnipresence of death in the form of grotesque terror-filled faces, seem to reveal an attempt to find a language in images that is able to transmit the experience of the obscene tragedy lived by the inmates of concentration camps".^[2]

In 1975 Maryan and Kenny Schneider created a 90-minute film, also titled Ecce homo, in his hotel. Katarzyna Bojarska describes the film as

a series of staged recollections where photographic images and reproductions of Maryan’s paintings, drawings, and lithographs alternate with a disturbing performance. Maryan reenacts Holocaust memories with the use of numerous accessories such as an M16 gun, dummies of SS officers, a straitjacket, ropes, and paint. The film opens with the following sequences of images appearing one after another: the

Christ in a crown of thorns covered in paint. Religious motifs, iconic images of historical events and people, press clips and holy images are all montaged in a sequence that stimulates imagination and affect, driving both to the very limits of alarm.^[1]

Maryan lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York.^[6] He died of a heart attack in his hotel room in 1977,^[3][6] and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

References