Michael Burton Mazur (1935 – August 18, 2009) was an American artist who was described by William Grimes of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' as "a restlessly inventive printmaker, painter, and sculptor." Born and raised in New York City, Mazur attended the

Horace Mann School , motto_translation = Great is the truth and it prevails , address = 231 West 246th Street , city = The Bronx , state = New York , zipcode = 10471 , countr ...

. He received a bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1958, then studied art at

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

. Mazur first gained notice for his series of lithographs and etchings of inmates in a mental asylum, which resulted in two publications, "Closed Ward" and "Locked Ward." Over the years, he worked in printmaking and painting. His series of large-scale prints for Dante's Inferno won critical acclaim, and were the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by the University of Iowa in 1994. Later he concentrated on creating large, lyrical paintings which make use of his free, gestural brushwork and a varied palette. Some of these paintings were seen in an exhibition of 2002 at Boston University, "Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, and Pat Steir." See also Susan Danly's "Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur." The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has acquired a definitive collection of Mazur's prints. Trudy V. Hansen authored a catalogue raisonne of Mazur's prints in 2000. Mazur's work is owned by museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum,

The Fogg Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

, the Philadelphia Museum,

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

, Yale Art Gallery, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. He was long active as a teacher and supporter at the

Fine Arts Work Center The Fine Arts Work Center is a non-profit enterprise devoted to encouraging the growth and development of emerging visual artists and writers through residency programs, to the propagation of aesthetic values and experience, and to the restoratio ...

, Provincetown, Massachusetts. He died of congestive heart failure.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mazur, Michael 1935 births 2009 deaths Horace Mann School alumni Amherst College alumni Yale School of Art alumni 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters 21st-century American male artists 20th-century American sculptors 20th-century American male artists American male sculptors 20th-century American printmakers Boston expressionism