Abstract Composition, 1958. Hand signed, and numbered 287/300

MARYAN, Pinchas. Abstract Composition, 1958. Hand signed, and numbered 287/300

Pinchas Burstein, mainly known by his nickname Maryan, was an American painter of Polish origins born in 1927, who died in 1977 in New York.

A teenager during the World War II, he was sent to Auschwitz and was the only one of his family to survive from there. When the Russians arrived, the Germans decided to shoot the prisoners; he survived but had one leg amputated. He then went to Jerusalem to study art and painting at the New Bézalel Art School. Three years later, he moved to Paris and studied lithography in the studio of Fernand Léger at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Maryan is considered one of the fathers of New Figuration. In the 1950s, his art oscillated between abstraction and figuration. In the 1960s, he switched to an expressionist and symbolic figuration, representing derisively solitary characters. His work was exhibited at the Breteau Gallery in 1952, then at the Gallery of France in 1956. The Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris also devoted a monographic exhibition to him in 2014.