Maryan was born Pinchas Burstein in Nowy Sącz, Poland, in 1927. His early life was defined by catastrophic loss — he survived Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, losing his entire family in the Holocaust, and was liberated in 1945 having endured experiences that would mark every aspect of his subsequent art. After the war he made his way to Israel, then to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, before settling permanently in New York in 1962.

Maryan's work is raw, urgent, and deliberately uncomfortable. His figures — grotesque, clownish, and deeply human — emerge from a visual language shaped equally by his traumatic history and his dark, sardonic humour. He painted and drew obsessively, producing images of masked figures, performers, and outcasts that oscillate between the tragic and the absurd. His art refuses the consolations of beauty or resolution, insisting instead on bearing witness to suffering while refusing to be defeated by it. He signed his work with a single name — Maryan — as both an act of artistic identity and a quiet reclamation of selfhood.

His prints Untitled and Dog, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, carry the same restless, searching energy as his paintings — figures and forms that seem to push against the boundaries of the page with barely contained force.

Maryan died in New York in 1977 at the age of forty-nine, leaving behind a body of work that is only now receiving the sustained international attention it has always deserved. see more

William Gropper was born in New York City in 1897, on the Lower East Side — the teeming, impoverished neighbourhood that shaped his entire artistic and political vision. The son of Jewish immigrant parents who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe, Gropper grew up in poverty and carried that experience directly into his art, spending a lifetime giving visual form to the struggles of working people, immigrants, and the dispossessed. He studied under Robert Henri and George Bellows, two giants of the Ashcan School, who encouraged his instinct for social observation and his belief that art should speak plainly to ordinary life.

Gropper became one of America’s most celebrated political cartoonists, contributing for decades to publications including the New York Tribune and Vanity Fair, where his sharp, economical draftsmanship and satirical wit made him a formidable and widely read voice. He was called before the McCarthy hearings in 1953, a distinction he wore as a mark of honour.

In 1967 Gropper was formally invited to collaborate as artist-in-residence at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles — one of the most significant printmaking institutions of the twentieth century. Founded by June Wayne in 1960 with a Ford Foundation grant, Tamarind was established with a clear mission: to revive the craft of fine art lithography in America by training master printers and bringing major artists to the stone. The workshop transformed American printmaking, and an invitation to work there represented the highest recognition of an artist’s standing in the field. Working directly with Tamarind’s master printers, Gropper produced his print suite including The Teacher and The Immigrants — subjects of deep personal resonance. The immigrant experience was his own inheritance, and the figure of the dedicated teacher a recurring symbol of hope in his visual world.

William Gropper died in Manhasset, New York, in 1977. His work is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and major collections across the United States. see more

Josef Albers was born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888. He studied and later taught at the Bauhaus — the legendary German school of art and design that fundamentally reshaped the visual culture of the twentieth century — before fleeing the rise of National Socialism and emigrating to the United States in 1933. He joined the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught for sixteen years, and later became chair of the Department of Design at Yale University. As both artist and educator, his influence on successive generations of American artists was immense and enduring.

Albers is best known for his celebrated series Homage to the Square, begun in 1950 and continued for the rest of his life — a sustained, systematic investigation into the interaction of colour through the simplest of formats: nested squares of flat, unmodulated colour. The series, comprising hundreds of paintings and prints, demonstrates that colour is never absolute but always relative — that the same colour will appear entirely different depending on what surrounds it. It is one of the most rigorous and illuminating bodies of work in modern art, as much scientific inquiry as artistic practice.

His print White Line Square, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, is a precise and beautiful expression of his lifelong preoccupations. The introduction of a white line between the nested squares creates a luminous interval — a breath of space that alters the relationship between the colour fields in ways both subtle and dramatic. Lithography, with its capacity for the flattest, most even areas of pure colour, was ideally suited to the demands of his practice, and the Tamarind workshop's exacting standards matched his own perfectly.

Josef Albers died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1976. His work is held in virtually every major museum collection in the world. see more