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The Arts Intel Report

My Name is Maryan

Maryan S. Maryan, Crematorium at Auschwitz, 1949.

Dec 20, 2022 – May 27, 2023
The Golda Meir Cultural and Art Center, Sderot Sha'ul HaMelech 27, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Maryan S. Maryan’s early painting Crematorium at Auschwitz (1949) depicts an expressionistic tangle of greenish limbs, grasping hands, reptilian faces, and the flames of an incipient furnace. It was created in Israel when the artist, who was born in Poland in 1927 and miraculously survived Auschwitz (though not without losing a leg), still called himself Pinchas Burstein. The painting was one of several Holocaust-themed pictures that featured in the young Burstein’s first solo exhibition, in Jerusalem in 1950. Later during that decade, Maryan, who was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, changed his name to rid himself from the persecution the Nazis had attached to it, but he would always be shadowed by the Shoah. The early paintings, signed “Burstein,” are included in “My Name Is Maryan,” a sweeping retrospective organized by Alison M. Gingeras. —Tobias Grey

Photo from the collection of Mr. Assaph Caspi

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