![]() The museum tore out all its interior walls and built new ones for this show. ![]() “I Am Maryan” is the largest exhibit MOCA has ever mounted. Sign up here to receive our essential morning briefing of American Jewish news and conversation, the afternoon’s top headlines and best reads, and a weekly letter from our editor-in-chief. Maryan’s art spoke to broader histories of trauma, resistance, diaspora and resilience. But she also saw in Maryan’s art and extraordinary story a legacy that would resonate powerfully not only in the Jewish community, but amongst Miami’s many immigrants - especially the many Haitians in North Miami. Sheldon had just taken over MOCA, then emerging from a period of financial and organizational turmoil, and was looking to make a mark with projects with under-explored artists. A teenager when her parents were arrested by French Vichy police, the grandmother was saved at the last minute from boarding a train to Auschwitz, then spent the rest of the war hiding in convents. ![]() Courtesy of Venus Over ManhattanĪlmost two decades later, in 2018, Sheldon encountered Maryan’s paintings at a gallery at the Art Basel fair, and “almost fell over.” They awakened her memories of that early visit, and of her grandmother’s stories. “Clearly, I was in the presence of a great artist,” Sheldon said. The wealth of Maryan’s visceral images made a powerful impression on her. When Sheldon was a young woman starting out in the art world, she visited Annette’s Manhattan apartment and found a time capsule of Maryan’s world: artwork, writings, even one of his paintbrushes in a cup on his drafting table. The two Jewish women met while in hiding at a French convent during World War II. Sheldon’s maternal grandmother was a close friend of Maryan’s wife Annette. Sheldon’s personal history, and a chance encounter, led her to bring Maryan’s work to MOCA. They teased Holocaust survivors for being weak.” “He was a young Holocaust survivor with one leg. “The narrative there was being strong, complete, everyone was painting fields and sun and reborn Jews,” said Rosenberg. It was a time when the new nation rejected the history of Jewish Diaspora and what it saw as Holocaust victimization in favor of a story of a powerful new state, and people, driving their own fate. “He was really out of place,” Rosenberg said at the MOCA opening. Maryan’s time in Israel was also traumatic, said Noa Rosenberg, curator of Modern Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, who is organizing the exhibit there. In the 70’s, Maryan began confronting his Holocaust experience in therapy, reams of drawings and notebooks, and the 1975 film Ecce Homo, screened at MOCA, where he sits in his Chelsea Hotel studio, in a straitjacket, a Star of David on his chest, and juxtaposes stories of piles of Jewish corpses and Nazi attack dogs with images of contemporary atrocities like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and police dogs attacking Civil Rights protestors. Many of his paintings depicted grotesque, almost cartoonish power figures he called personnages. One is a tortured human tangle entitled “Crematorium at Auschwitz.”īut the trauma appears to have reverberated in his art in many other ways. Maryan rejected the label of Holocaust artist, and the MOCA show includes just one small room with paintings from his time in Israel that directly reflect that horrifying experience. ( Courtesy of Collection of Anne Wachsmann Guigon
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