The Museum is delighted to present the “Love Letters” of painter and art collector Markus Mizne (1908-1994) – calligraphic paintings hastily sketched in magic, colorful abundance – as a joint celebration of the centenary of his birth and the centenary of Tel Aviv.
Markus Mizne, Love Letter no. 9, undated, ink and watercolor, collection of the artist’s family
The paintings touch upon the vision of major artists active in his lifetime, among them Miró, Pollock, de Kooning and Twombly. He knew their work well, and acquired many of their important paintings. A kind of automatic writing in which the planar surface invites the touch of the artist’s hand, activated by the internal force of a private, intimate memory, these sketches seem vague and indecipherable, like rustles devoid of end and purpose but they are charged with the tension created between the sublime and the trivial. Apparently made inadvertently, they convey a sense of emotional turmoil and accumulate to a kind of personal diary. Most paintings remain a mystery, a secret of primeval layers, ranging from the melancholy to hedonism. Mizne seems to be focused around the investigation of some fact, gesture, or movement, and each painting is the product of opening horizons into a new pictorial-photographic space.
Markus Mizne was born in Kiev, in 1908, to a family with artistic and musical leanings. In the early 1920s, his family escaped the pogroms to Warsaw, and sent Markus to boarding school in Germany, where he became acquainted with modern art during visits to Bauhaus workshops and lectures; he began painting aged 15. In 1935, aged 27, he arrived in Paris where he continued painting, and befriended many artists, including Foujita, van Dongen, Braque, Larionov, Goncharova, Pevsner and Fautrier. In 1939, with the rise of the Nazi terror, he escaped Europe to Brazil. In 1962 the Mizne family returned to Europe, living in Paris, Milan, Rome and London. In 1991 Markus Mizne moved with his daughter to New York, where he passed away in 1994.
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