Michael Mazur

Michael Mazur (1935-August 18, 2009) was an American artist. He was described by William Grimes of The New York Times as "a restlessly inventive printmaker, painter, and sculptor."

Born and raised in New York City, Mazur attended the Horace Mann School. He received a bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1958, then studied art at Yale.

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 moved easily between printmaking and painting, and between the figure and abstraction. 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. In recent years, 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, "Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur," 1997).

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 widely owned by museums including the Chicago Art Institute, the British Museum, The Fogg Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, Whitney Museum, Yale Art Gallery, and many others. He was long active as a teacher and supporter at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts.

He died of congestive heart failure.