MOCA Explores Holocaust Survivor’s Art and History

When a visitor to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami comes across the first walls exhibiting Holocaust survivor Maryan S. Maryan’s works, they’re introduced not to the paintings that represent his experiences in World War II, but rather to a mass of his personal collectibles – what show curator Alison M. Gingeras calls an “optical assault.”

The initial room of the “My Name is Maryan” exhibition is meant to resemble the hotel unit in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, where Maryan spent his final years from 1972-1977 before dying of a heart attack at age 50.

Maryan, born Pinchas Burstein in southern Poland in 1927, was imprisoned by the Nazis at age 12 and sent to various concentration camps throughout the war, including Auschwitz. He was the only member of his family to survive, after which his leg had to be amputated due to injuries he suffered while captive.

After the war, he moved to Jerusalem and enrolled in the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design. While there, Israel was declared an independent nation and soon after recognized as such by the United States. As a result, artists’ works were expected to serve as publicity for the new state, said Noa Rosenberg, the curator for Modern and Israeli art at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where the exhibition will travel to in 2023.

During this time, Rosenberg says, the political discourse of the Holocaust didn’t exist. Maryan, she added, was one of the first artists to discuss his experiences of the war through his paintings.

It was during this period, directly after the war, as well as during his final years, that Gingeras says Maryan’s most explicit works dealing with the war were created. She describes how the characters in his paintings are very visibly tormented, oftentimes being covered in tears or having objects protruding from their mouths.

“I think the reason why the mouth is such a big trope in his work is because it’s almost like he couldn’t verbally express what happened to him and how he lived with it,” she said. “It’s not just what happened to him, but the survivor’s guilt and all of the memories – you just couldn’t verbalize it.”

At the center of the exhibition, what Gingeras identifies as “the heart of the show,” there is a dark, isolated room screening a testimonial film, in which Maryan describes the circumstances he lived through during the war.

Next to the room are slides of notebook entries and illustrations that he created from 1971-1972 after being treated for a nervous breakdown. He had lost the ability to speak; his doctors advised him to write instead.

“These notebooks are really like a Rosetta stone for his paintings,” Gingeras said, noting how they help describe the feelings that had earlier triggered Maryan to create some of his more uninhibited works.

But, Gingeras added, Maryan himself rejected the label of Holocaust artist, which is why she chose to begin with something other than his history as a survivor.

Chana Sheldon, MOCA’s executive director, says the exhibition is part of the museum’s latest endeavor to bring attention to a series of underexplored artists. She added that Maryan fits the bill perfectly.

“He did have many opportunities to showcase his work during his lifetime,” Sheldon said. “But when he passed away, it’s almost like his work went away with him.”

Gingeras first discovered Maryan’s work while doing research on postwar art in Europe and America. She was particularly interested in art history as it related to humanism after World War II.

While conducting her research, she says, she began to look into an exhibition titled “New Images of Man,” which was displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. She wanted to know who was in the show and who was left out.

“I came across Maryan,” she said, “and I thought, ‘Wow, he really should’ve been in that show,’ because he was sort of dealing with this problem of what it means to be human after the Holocaust.”

Gingeras says there’s a number of reasons why Maryan’s work has been overlooked since his death. He died at a young age and had no children to carry on his legacy. Additionally, his galleries lacked continuity, she says, and he wasn’t part of a specific movement.

“He really was a lone wolf,” she said.

Still, Maryan had many colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. One wall of the exhibition displays Maryan’s works next to those from the COBRA movement, whose name was coined as a combination of the artists’ capital cities of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. The movement was active during the late 1940s and early ’50s and shared a similar aesthetic to Maryan’s work.

Gingeras continued to learn about Maryan and discover new artifacts even as she prepared for the exhibition. She uncovered a variety of oral histories from several people and even received word of new collectibles up until the day she flew to Miami.

But the most important takeaway, she says, is that Maryan wasn’t only concerned with his experience. She identifies him as an intersectional figure – one who dedicated his time to connecting his own encounter with genocide to the injustices that were happening around him after the war.

She relates this idea of social solidarity to contemporary politics, noting that Maryan was ahead of his time.

“His characters aren’t specifically Jewish or specifically Polish,” she said. “Even in his paintings, his characters are just trying to be human.”

“My Name is Maryan” opened to the public Nov. 17, 2021, and will remain on display until March 20, 2022.