Maine attractions

Art Review

Exhibits show influence of the rocky coast on some of modernism’s best

July 15, 2011|By Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

The rising mid-July sun reflected off the boats and water as a clam digger… (ROBERT F. BUKATY/ASSOCIATED…)

JOHN MARIN: Modernism at Midcentury

Through Oct. 10.

MAINE MODERNS: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940

Through Sept. 11.

At: Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, 207-775-6148. www.portlandmuseum.org

PORTLAND, Maine - Visit any or all of the seven museums on the wonderful Maine Art Museum Trail, and you can’t help but notice that the same names keep reappearing.

Not just local plodders and washed-up second-raters, either - I’m talking about some of the preeminent artists and photographers of American modernism: people like Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand, Gaston Lachaise, Max Weber, Clarence H. White, Marguerite and William Zorach, and John Marin.

Marin, whom in 1942 the critic Clement Greenberg called possibly the greatest living American painter, is the exclusive subject of a vibrant show at the Portland Museum of Art. Called “John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury,’’ it focuses on the artist’s watercolors, drawings, and oils from the two decades he spent working in Maine toward the end of his long career.

The same museum is also hosting a jewel of an exhibition called “Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940.’’ It includes several Marins, a superb suite of paintings by Hartley, and fine selections of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs by the artists mentioned above.

All these artists, and a few more, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, turn up repeatedly in the permanent collections of nearby museums - the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art - as well as in temporary shows such as Bates’s selection of Hartley drawings and Bowdoin’s “Modernism at Bowdoin: American paintings from 1900 to 1940.’’

So although the two Portland shows are specifically under review here, I advise anyone with a bit of free time and an interest in the points of intersection between Maine and American modernism to consider taking in these other venues as well.

Born in New Jersey in 1870, Marin had been spending his summers in Maine since around 1920. He first visited Phippsburg Peninsula there as early as 1914, and in 1915, with funds from Alfred Stieglitz, his dealer, he purchased a small island in Small Point Harbor. Finally, in 1934, he bought a seaside home at Cape Split.

Among avant-gardists, Marin was uncommonly lucky: There was a consensus that his work merited serious attention almost from the get-go. Already by the 1920s, he had become well known for his fractured and hectic views of Manhattan.

READER COMMENTS »

View reader comments » Comment on this story »