A Sparseness That Reverberates With Restraint

An airy exhibition charts Herman Maril’s insistence

By Abraham Storer, The Provincetown Independent, November 19, 2025

Herman Maril’s current exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum is a rare opportunity to see paintings by one of Provincetown’s treasured artists, who worked here from 1948 until his death in 1986. Maril never won the recognition that his Provincetown friends Milton Avery and Mark Rothko received. But like those artists, his work is marked by a distinctive, consistent style.

“Style” can be a problematic word to describe artwork. At its worst, the term can convey superficiality, a sort of personal brand casually adopted and regurgitated in an attempt to distinguish oneself. In Maril’s case, the pursuit of style was much more earnest, recalling Susan Sontag’s definition of it as “a means of insisting on something.”

The PAAM show, which features works from 1929 to 1985 recently donated to the museum by the Herman Maril Foundation, shows Maril insisting on his lifelong interest in the “abstract, stark structure” of paintings. Maril admired those qualities in the work of Cezanne and the modern masters but also in the geometrically complex pictures of much earlier artists like Giotto and Piero della Francesca. “There is a continuous weave between modern art and art history,” said Maril in an interview published in a 1977 exhibition catalog.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is two large paintings hanging alongside each other: Santa Barbara Vista and Languid Cat. Painted in 1975 and 1976, respectively, these works best embody Maril’s ideas. A sparseness reverberates through the whole exhibition — a quality that, like an elusive lover or well-tailored T-shirt, conveys a nonchalant confidence. The appeal of these paintings is in their restraint.

Both paintings depict spartan rooms with distant landscapes beckoning: in Santa Barbara Vista, the viewer sees a geometric, Cezanne-like mountain-scape through a window; in Languid Cat, there’s a painting of towering canyon walls within the painting. The black cat — elegant, unbothered, and stretched out atop a radiator — acts like a muse hovering over the exhibition.

Despite Maril’s interest in abstraction, his love of the landscape always tethered him to representation. The severe geometry of the flat walls in these two paintings emphasizes the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, but this severity is tempered by the inclusion of more organic forms — the landscape, a vase of flowers, or a bookcase.

“I’m a person who greatly enjoys nature and what I observe in my daily experience,” said Maril in the 1977 interview. “I didn’t want to let go of that entirely and become solely analytic in my work.”

Maril’s interest in representational paintings that emphasize the flatness of the picture plane emerged early in his career. Two paintings from 1929, created shortly his graduation from the Maryland Institute College of Art, show him working in the then-fashionable Cubist style. Maril spoke of his paintings having “an organic oneness.” In Breakfast, the objects — sausages in a pan, a mug, a pitcher — don’t cohere easily. He’s unconcerned with conveying a seamless and realistic domestic scene. Their relationships are stilted, but a sense of oneness is achieved as each element, like an actor on a stage, serves as part of a well-considered compositional whole.

Maril continued making paintings that felt like stage sets. The Model Stand depicts a chair and umbrella in front of a yellow room divider. The artist doesn’t give us a model, just the props and hints of a scene, leaving the viewer yearning for more. Nonetheless, the shadow (such a gorgeous, unnamable color) on the room divider provides a sense of presence and particularity.

The way Maril paints walls, layering thin washes of paint to achieve a surface that’s both flat and luminous, further undercuts their geometric severity and recalls Rothko’s abstractions. We see it in The Model Stand and in Languid Cat, where the beige wall, boldly taking up most of the composition, flickers with touches of purple and yellow.

Also stage-like, Old Lumber is one of a series of bucolic paintings Maril made in the 1930s. A forlorn man stands in a field punctuated by a dead tree and pieces of lumber strewn about, possibly the remains of a destroyed building. The sharp geometric shapes contribute to a feeling of distress, echoing the experience of so many during the Great Depression. Maril used emptiness, or absence, to great emotional effect.

During the 1930s Maril worked for the Public Works of Art Project and the Works Progress Administration, both New Deal initiatives. It kept him afloat and able to afford art materials. In 1934, he visited Cape Cod for the first time, staying in Chatham where collector Duncan Phillips took an interest in his work.

Maril, a lifelong Baltimore resident, returned to Cape Cod in 1948, spending his honeymoon in Provincetown with his wife, Esta Cook. He would maintain a connection to Provincetown throughout his life, spending summers here when he was not teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1958, he purchased a house on Bradford Street, originally the Long Point Post Office, where his son, David Maril, maintains his father’s studio as Herman left it when he died in 1986.

Many of the paintings in the exhibition show Maril’s fascination with the Provincetown landscape and its fishing community. In Truro Weirs, Maril, who painted in his studio from notes and memory, depicts a scene of a bygone era when weir nets were used to catch fish on the Outer Cape. In the painting, poles lean like limbs draped with black nets. The sky hints at a spatial plane while also functioning as a surface for free-spirited mark-making. In Angry Waters, Maril describes the sea with similar gusto. About two-thirds of the painting is made with fast, slapdash marks — representative of the looser style he adopted later in his career. A horizon line and boathouse in the distance concisely rein in the abandon in these gestures, locating the viewer in a specific place.

The exhibition shows us Maril blossoming, and the museum plans to continue preserving his legacy through a long-term project creating a digital catalog of his work. It also raises questions about his place in art history. It’s hard to look at Maril’s work and not think of Avery. Maril’s work is often softer, something he achieves with a dry brush, but the two regularly exchanged studio visits, were engaged in similar pursuits, and had similar styles.

Art history doesn’t have space for many, and Avery is the artist who is remembered more widely, perhaps because he took the ideas they shared and pushed them further than Maril did. Maril’s work hearkened back to the past while engaging with modern masters and artists of his time, including Avery, but also Rothko and the American modernists working at the intersection of abstraction and landscape painting, like Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe. This show helps to make some space for him.

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