Personnage (Napoléon)

Pinchas Burstein, better known as Maryan S. Maryan (1927–1977), was a Jewish artist of Polish origin whose life was marked by tragedies. The sole survivor from his family, it was only by a miracle that he emerged alive from the hell of the concentration camps. He became a painter and exhibited for the first time in Israel in 1949, lived in Paris during the 1950s, and then moved to the United States in the early 1960s. In his paintings and his drawings, Maryan created a pictorial ‘human comedy’, populated with frightful, outrageous beings, steeped in cruelty. His work has influenced many figurative artists since the 1960s. With its blaring colour and twisted lines forming expressions that are sometimes close to caricature, Maryan’s work records and represents both marginal and powerful figures, such as the disturbing Napoléon from this masterly series.