Pinchas Burstein

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

Early life

Pinchas Burstein (Bursztyn) was born in Nowy Sącz, Poland, on January 1, 1927, the second son of an Orthodox Jewish family. His mother was Gitel Burstein;his father, Avraham Schindel, was a baker. Burstein was 12 when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. He lived in the Rzeszów Ghetto in 1942–1943, in which period he was shot in the neck while delivering food to Jews in hiding.In 1943 or 1944 he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp and worked in Gleiwitz. Burstein was given the inmate number A17986. On the night of his arrival he was chosen as one of 22 Jews who were to be shot, but survived. In 1945, when the Soviet army liberated prisoners of the Auschwitz death camp, Burstein was found "wounded among bodies in a lime pit", and had his leg amputated. After the war, in 1946, he left Poland and spent two years in Germany in camps for displaced persons. Burstein was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Israel and France

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".

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.

He left that kibbutz after five months, when he was admitted in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. He saw the Israeli War of Independence and creation of the state of Israel, and witnessed Battle for Jerusalem. His first solo exhibition was at the YMCA in Jerusalem. In 1950 Burstein arrived in Paris, where he studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts for three years, including two in the lithography workshop.

In Paris Pinchas Burstein took a new name, Maryan Bergman, "which he "borrowed" from his schoolmate in Bezalel, the painter Marian (Meir Marinel), who committed suicide a few years later." 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.

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, he arrived in the USA aboard the . In 1969 he received American citizenship and officially changed his name to Maryan S. Maryan.

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

brutal, exaggerated Piccasoid forms in which could be seen the influence also of Dubuffet and the CoBrA group of young European painters that included Karel Appel and Asger Jorn. They were mocking, clownish zombies with mask-like faces and lolling tongues, suggesting visual realizations of characters from Gunter Grass's '' Tin Drum''. Later, they got wider and more gestural, with maybe a touch of de Kooning