Michael Mazur (1935–2009)

Michael Mazur
A FOREIGN SHORE (detail), 2000s
Oil on canvas, 60 x 120 in.

Michael Mazur
MOONLIGHT II, 2007
Woodcut, 26 x 24 in.

Michael Mazur
WAKEBY DAY (detail), 1983
Monoprint on paper, with pastel and other hand additions, 30 x 61 in.

Michael Mazur
POND EDGE III, 2005
Etching and woodcut, 32 × 42 in.

Michael Mazur
ROCKS AND WATER II, 2002
Oil on canvas, 72 × 72 in.

Michael Mazur
UNTITLED (RAIN), 2009
Oil on canvas, 38 × 40 in.

Michael Mazur
GAIL’S ISLAND I, 2008
Etching and woodcut, 28 3/8 × 25 in.

Michael Mazur
WAKEBY DAY (detail), 1983
Monoprint on paper, with pastel and other hand additions, 30 × 61 in.

Michael Mazur made prints, drawings, and paintings for over fifty years. His work has been shown in over 150 solo and group exhibitions, and is included in most major public and private collections throughout the United States.

Michael Mazur, c. 1995
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Photo: Bill Greene

His work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as other museums in the United States and internationally. His work can be found in collections in Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, and abroad, in museums in Canada, England, Italy, Germany, Columbia, South America, South Korea, and Australia. A retrospective of his prints opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2000, traveling to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, among others. Hudson Hills Press published The Prints of Michael Mazur, including a catalogue raisonné. His Inferno of Dante, a suite of forty-one etchings, with a translation by Robert Pinsky, has won critical praise. It was first exhibited at Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, and the American Academy in Rome with a catalogue by Electa Editions. It toured the United States in 2005–2007, organized by CATE, Pasadena, California. His writing has appeared in The Painterly Print, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in ARTnews, The Print Collector’s News letter, Art on Paper, New York Times and M/E/A/N/I/N/G, as well as many other arts publications. He won awards from the Tiffany Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Distinguished Career award from the Southern Graphics Council. He was a faculty member at RISD and Brandeis University, and a visiting artist for many years at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. His work is represented in New York by the Ryan Lee Gallery, in Boston by the Barbara Krakow Gallery, and in Provincetown at Albert Merola Gallery.

The work featured here spans time and techniques, offering a glimpse into the breadth of his work. Although well known for his bodies of work complementing literature, such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Dante’s Inferno, here we have featured works centering around visceral interpretations of water. Ever drawn to the fluidity of the natural world and its capacity for self-renewal, Mazur found systems and structure in nature that he translated into art. Over time, his water imagery transformed from linear, realistic depictions to more colorful and complex, from his Wakeby landscapes, to the multilayered Pond Edge abstractions.

All images courtesy of the Estate of Michael Mazur and Ryan Lee Gallery.

Michael Mazur
From Les Fleurs du mal, 1981
Photo engraving, 9 × 5.5 in.