"Lyrical Rhythm"
Herman Maril lived and painted in Provincetown summers from 1934 until his death in 1986. Christine McCarthy, Executive Director of the Provincetown Art Museum, curated a major retrospective last year at PAAM in celebration of the Centennial of Maril’s birth. The exhibition recently opened at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where Maril was born. The Museum describes Maril as “widely recognized as the quintessential Maryland painter of the midtwentieth century.”

An American Modernist, Christine McCarthy describes Maril as “an extraordinary artist,” and writes in the accompanying exhibition catalog, Maril’s work is “reserved, simple, essential, subtle, distinct, pictorial and elemental...the overall effect is one that allows the viewer to experience details that have been extracted, to see space and form become one, to achieve pleasure, as color attains a lyrical rhythm.” His simplified subjects and abstracted environments result in visual elegance.

The landscape of Cape Cod – the dunes, flats, harbor, fishermen, weirs and boats – was a subject Maril treated in his paintings and works on paper for half a century. In an interview housed at the Smithsonian, Maril relates “I like the structure of the painting to look as if it is going to breathe on without any effort, that it really was a work of love.”

Herman Maril had an amazing career of painting and teaching, and his work is featured in numerous premiere art collections around the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Academy of Design, all in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.He is the subject of several books and catalogs.

Please see Christine McCarthy’s catalog for the exhibition “Herman Maril: An Artist’s Two Worlds”