Herman Maril (1908–1986) was an artist and emeritus professor of painting at the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

Biography

Maril was born in

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland. With a population of 585,708 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census and estimated at 568,271 in 2024, it is the List of United States ...

in 1908 and studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts. He had 40 one-man exhibitions in his career with his first in 1935 at the Howard University Gallery of Art, and taught at the

for more than 31 years. Examples of his work are in the collections of the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

as well as

National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to: * National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra * National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred *National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C. *National Portrait Gallery, London ...

and

The Phillips Collection The Phillips Collection is an art museum founded by Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Phillips was the grandson of James H. Laughli ...

, all in Washington D.C., as well as numerous national and international museums including

The Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

and

The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the third-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million v ...

in New York. A major retrospective of his paintings was mounted at

The Baltimore Museum of Art The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, ...

in the mid-1960s. Marking the centennial of Maril's birth, the

Provincetown Art Association and Museum Provincetown () is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in the United States. A small coastal resort town with a year-round population of 3,664 as of the 2020 United States census, Pro ...

and

Walters Art Museum The Walters Art Museum is a public art museum located in the Mount Vernon, Baltimore, Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. Founded and opened in 1934, it holds collections from the mid-19th century that were amassed substantially ...

in Baltimore exhibited a major retrospective of his work in 2008. In 1983, the

Wichita Art Museum The Wichita Art Museum is an art museum located in Wichita, Kansas, United States. The museum was established in 1915, when Louise Caldwell Murdock’s Will which created a trust to start the Roland P. Murdock Collection of art in memory of he ...

also showed a retrospective. Maril, who died in 1986, has had continuous major gallery representation in New York since the 1930s. His artwork is currently shown at Debra Force Fine Art in New York City and the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.

Style

Maril was a

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

painter whose style reduced figures and objects to their essence. Subjects ranged from urban landscapes to coastal seascapes. Maril's art demonstrated a consistent development: it was based in nature, abstractly organized, and simplified in form and content. The noted artist and critic

Olin Dows Stephen Olin Dows (August 14, 1904 – June 6, 1981) was a United States Army artist who served in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. Early life Dows was born in 1904, at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. He was the only s ...

, wrote about the then 26-year-old artist, "Herman Maril's painting is reserved, and, like most good painting, it is simple. He is interested in the essentials. Each picture has its core; each is beautifully conceived and organized. It is clothed in a certain poetry."

References

''Herman Maril Is Dead at 77; Landscape Artist and Teacher''
New York Times (1986-09-12).

The Official Website of Herman Maril
An exhibition a
The Walters Art Museum
Baltimore, MD was scheduled for June 28 - August 30, 2009

External links

Works by Herman Maril at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
20th-century American painters American male painters 1908 births 1986 deaths Artists from Baltimore Painters from Maryland University of Maryland, College Park faculty People from Provincetown, Massachusetts Section of Painting and Sculpture artists American muralists 20th-century American male artists {{US-painter-1900s-stub