The Postman

Inscriptions

Signed, lower right: Maryan 59

Label

We must see the world, but this is a very difficult experience. All of this burden can be seen in my paintings.

--Maryan S. Maryan

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland, Maryan was deported as a teenager to Auschwitz, where at the end of the war he was found shot and left for dead. Nobody else in his family survived. In the following years, he made it to Israel, where he began his art studies, then moved on to Paris in 1950 to attend the famed École des Beaux Arts. He relocated to the United States around 1962, at which point he officially changed his name, ostensibly to mark his fresh start. 

This painting is representative of Maryan’s Paris period. Very much in the orbit of later Picasso, it also nods to the Van Gogh paintings of the postman Roulin. The work is disturbing in its lack of facial features for its subject and the frenetic energy of the brushstrokes. We can perceive the postman’s shoulders and recognize his hat, but otherwise the jumbled grouping of colored planes just barely suggests a person. Maryan’s compositions of this type are often read as the outcome of his brutal years in Poland and Germany, and even in Israel, where he struggled to fit in.

Written by John Stomberg, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director, 2023

Exhibition History

First Floor, Elevator Wall, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 14, 2023.

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