TERRIFYING

You do not come out of « Maryan - The human menagerie ». untouched.  The Jewish Institute rightly exhibits artists which did or did not survive the Holocaust.  I have seen many of them. For this one, I literally came out shaking.


Poster for the Exhibi

Maryan was the only member of his family that survived the hell of the Shoah. It’s strange though, he is little known or not known at all in France. Born in Poland in 1927, educated in Jerusalem before coming to France working with Fernand Légèr. Then he went to the USA where he died in 1977.

The exhibition is articulated around personnages that he created from the 1960’s onwards. Robots, men-animal, figures in the camps, screaming Napoleons. The horrors of it all.


Human and dog 1960

personnage


personnage






personnage










personnage








personnage














 Probably what is really touching are his notebooks. Towards the end of his life he was unable to articulate his feelings at all, and his psychiatrist asked him to draw everything.
There are 9 notebooks which have never been shown before. They are displayed on Ipad screens and flashed by at a slow rate showing the hell of what the man must have lived.












There was also a film he had made « Ecce Homo ».15 minutes is not long but after 5 minutes I couldn’t take it any longer.

The disasters of war are probably best described by his tribute to Goya or avec the series on Napoleon. 








After Goya

The Napoleon series

The Napoleon series













There is one large room of Robert Combas’s work As I am not a cartoon follower, the name means something, and I have seen quite a lot of his work - there is even a chapter on an retrospective of his work. These paintings are dedicated to Maryan. He sums it up with :-

« After Maryan, pain cries in painting…. »




2013

2013

2013

2013




When I left the Museum, I walked at random for over two hours. There have been ups and downs in my life but this exhibition made me ask " why do people complain at all?" most of us have lived a comparitively calm existence next to this.

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