Exhibition Celebrating the Centennial of Baltimore Artist Herman Maril’s Birth Opens at The Walters Art Museum June 28

Enjoy works by a local painter with national reputation influenced by Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko and Milton Avery

Baltimore—Herman Maril is widely recognized as the quintessential Maryland painter of the mid-twentieth century. To commemorate his 100th birthday, the Walters is honoring Maril’s contributions to the arts of Maryland with the exhibition Herman Maril: An American Modernist. On view June 28 through August 30, this exhibition will include 26 seascapes, landscapes and still-life works, which he painted in Baltimore, Cape Cod, across the country and abroad. A native of Baltimore, Maril (1908–1986) attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and taught countless students over his distinguished 40 years at the University of Maryland’s Department of Art. He also lent artwork in 1982 to the very first Artscape—the largest free public art festival in America. Artscape will be held this year from July 17-19.

“We are very pleased to participate in a tour of Maril’s works during this celebratory year,” said museum Director Gary Vikan. “It is an especially appropriate exhibition for the Walters since Maril mentioned in his personal writing that visits to the museum during his youth contributed to shaping his sensibilities as an artist.”

“Although Maril was an abstract painter, his works were thoroughly founded on his perceptions of his environment, whether it was the buildings of Baltimore or the expansive skies of Cape Cod,” said Senior Curator at Large, Director of the Walters Archives and exhibition curator William Johnston. “Although parallels have been drawn between his work and that of Matisse, Avery and Karl Knaths, Maril developed his own very distinctive painting style.”

Maril’s paintings have also appeared over the past year at The Provincetown Art Association and Museum on Cape Cod, at the New York gallery of David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, the Ward Museum in Salisbury, Maryland and the University of Maryland, Adelphi, Maryland. Last year, the University of Maryland established the Herman Maril Gallery in his memory.

This exhibition has been generously sponsored by the law firm of Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger & Hollander, LLC.

Press Preview: Tuesday, June  23, 10 a.m. – noon

Artist Background

Maril was born in Baltimore in 1908 and began painting as a teenager. He was active in New York as a young man in the 1930s, participating in the New York avant-garde scene. After World War II, Maril painted primarily in Baltimore and Cape Cod. The year 1934 was pivotal for Maril—that summer he visited Cape Cod and was entranced by the sand dunes, expansive skies and quaint fishing boats. In time, he and his wife purchased a derelict post office in Provincetown where they would spend summers. Every autumn, Maril returned to Baltimore.

Throughout his life, Maril was a prominent member of the Maryland regional art community, serving on the Board of Trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art and working as an instructor of painting, drawing and watercolor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1946 until his death in 1986. He had an amazing 60-year 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.

About the Exhibition

Maril’s work addresses universal themes in both style and subject. A contemplative artist balancing intellect with intuition, he recreated on canvas what he saw, eliminating all but the barest essentials. During much of his career, he used dark tones, even blacks, applied in blotches or single strokes, to define forms and create patterns on his otherwise colorful canvases. In many of his mature works, his compositions at first glance seem to have been reduced to fields of juxtaposed colors. He preferred an extremely limited palette and relied on the interactions of colors to convey his intentions. He also listened to classical music while painting in his studio.

In one of his early works, Self-Portrait (1929), the 21-year old artist portrays himself in a landscape holding a staff. In its somber, muted colors and its naturalistic approach, this painting typifies social realism, a style coinciding with the Great Depression that began in 1929 and lasted throughout the 1930s. The low-key portrait captures a prevailing sense of anxiety and an awareness of deprivation.

In 1969, Maril was among 40 artists employed by the United States’ Bureau of Reclamation to portray transformation of “the arid west” through water management. Maril chose a site in New Mexico where the Chama River flows through a canyon enclosed by towering 1,500 feet high sandstone cliffs. The artist emphasized the grandeur of the scene with a six-foot canvas. The painting typifies Maril’s late style where he reduced composition to patterns of color applied in subtle, modulated tones, with some of the ground left blank. In 1974, the year the Walters’ Centre Street building opened, Mr. and Mrs. Jules Horelick presented to the museum this painting entitled Near Chama No. 2, New Mexico (1970).

Publication

A small, 40-page full-color publication, Herman Maril: An Artist’s Two Worlds, complements the Walters’ exhibition Herman Maril: An American Modernist. The book is published by the Providencetown Art Association and Museum and is available in softcover for $15.

Admission and Hours

Admission to Herman Maril is free. Museum hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The Walters Art Museum

The Walters Art Museum is located in Baltimore’s historic Mount Vernon Cultural District at North Charles and Centre streets and is one of only a few museums worldwide to present a comprehensive history of art from the third millennium B.C. to the early 20th century. Among its thousands of treasures, the Walters holds the finest collection of ivories, jewelry, enamels and bronzes in America and a spectacular reserve of illuminated manuscripts and rare books. The Walters’ Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Byzantine, Ethiopian and western medieval art collections are among the best in the nation, as are the museum’s holdings of Renaissance and Asian art. Every major trend in French painting during the 19th century is represented by one or more works in the Walters’ collection.

Peabody Court is the official hotel of the Walters Art Museum. This historic property is just around the corner from the museum and features George’s, a full-service restaurant. For hotel reservations, call 1-800-292-5500 and ask for the special Walters discounted rate.