Acclaimed Art Historian and Critic Martica Sawin

It is my great pleasure to have in the studio with me. Marika. Saan. Nice to have you here today. Well, it's a pleasure to be here in this place that I knew nothing about even though I had spent years in Yarmouth . Oh. What were you doing in Yarmouth? Well, my parents back in the 1940s bought a farm in Yarmouth on Greeley Road. Beautiful old brick house still there, but it's as, as, as they did in those days. The house was built too close to the road, . And, and so eventually my parents moved elsewhere, but he was with the another old main institution, the Bates Manufacturing Company in Lewiston. And so he could commute to Lewiston from, from Yarmouth. Anyway, so I, I was actually, I didn't spend that much time there because I was already almost grown up when they, when they acquired the farm. But my children have loved that place all, all these years. And I don't know who it belongs to now, but it's a wonderful place. And my youngest daughter was actually married in that church on meeting House Road, it's called still, I think it's called Hillside Avenue. It runs from away from Greeley Road, and there's a little old frame meeting house, and that's where my youngest daughter was married. It's a lovely church. I used to live very close to that, actually. Oh, really? Yes, just down the hill. Mm-hmm. . Yes. So you, you're connected to Yarmouth. Tell me about your greater Maine connection. How, how you, you've been in Maine for quite a while, I think. yeah. well, it seems like always . Okay. Basically, Although I was born in New York and my and my father grew up in New York on the Upper West Side commuted by Subway to a school in Brooklyn, and he was an only child. And so his parents sent him to a camp in Maine, white Mountain camp on Sebago Lake. And it was paradise for him. And he never, never forgot. It was always a part of his, you know, his childhood dream. So when, when he and my mother were married, he insisted that they go on their honeymoon to Maine. It happened to be January and . They went, they stayed in the, at the Man Mansion house over in Poland Springs, the, the big huge, and iCal Resort Inn in Poland Springs had was not open in the winter, but they said there was another there anyway, and they hitch hitchhiked over to Lake Sebago. And of course, my mother had heard all about this paradise, and there was something, but a dreary, expansive ice and snow when they got there. Anyway, so they but we always came to Maine when he had vacations. We would come there in the summer, go to places like Magus Lodge on Lake Sebago or up to Moosehead Lake and so on. But I don't know, that doesn't explain how I got here. I'm not sure. But you're here now, ? Yes. Yeah. Well, I, I my, my children, you know, loved Maine, and, and so we would come on vacations, and then I promised them when I was able to, I would we would af they were very sad when my parents sold their farm. So when, as soon as I was able to, I bought a farm over in new Gloucester over, you know where, where that is? Yes. I Have a sister who lives out there. Pardon? I have a sister who lives in New Gloucester. Oh, really? Yes. Do you know the road she lives on? Doherty Road, maybe Dowdy Road, they call it. Yes. Dowdy Yeah. It I, my farm was on in fact, my, one of my daughters still owns it and lives there on Cobbs Bridge Road. And it was a road that was first settled when the, when the people moved from Gloucester, Massachusetts and founded New Gloucester. They were given a land grant from the King of England, and, and they could eat. The requirement was they each had to have tilled two acres and build a house and a church in the first, I think about five years that they lived there. So, so that road Cobbs Ridge Road has houses that were on it, that were built in the 18, no, no, excuse me. Right around 1700 1800. I'm sorry, I'm getting dates and years mixed up. But they were colonial era houses, and they're still there. so it's a, it's a beautiful spot in New Gloucester, and amazingly they're dislocated about just between Portland and Lewiston. But that particular area has not been, been up. And it's right now it's still beautifully veiled between the the two townships is, is is still pristine, but I don't know for how long. It is a beautiful part of the world. Mm-hmm. . Yes. I'm, I'm very interested in the work that you've done over the years with art and being an art. Would you consider yourself an art critic, an art historian? What would you describe yourself to be? basically I usually say an art critic and historian. I have a degree in a graduate degree in art history. but I, I came to it by chance. My first husband was a, an artist. And we met in Paris where he was studying with Fenal Leer. And I, I was also taking studying art, art, art history there in Paris. And we, we came back to the United States and went directly to Iowa. And Iowa has an interesting place for art at that time. It was the where Grant Wood lived and where Grant Wood had a a kind of school, school there. And the University of Iowa, which was quite a wonderful place was one of the first places to, because of Grantwood, to give a graduate degree in, in painting the you know, an M f A at that time, this is, say mid 1940s, the M F A did not exist as a, you couldn't get a graduate degree in painting of all things. Well, I, Iowa was very smart, like other universities and saw potential in the GI Bill because all the people who had been, who were veterans from the Second World War had a year or more of, of college education for every year they'd been in the service. And so how could the universities get into that you know, LA ladder, so to speak? And they could give a graduate degree in painting unheard of at the time you'd went to an, if you wanted to be an artist, you might just go and be apprenticed to an artist, or you'd go to an art school, but to get a go, to get a college degree, would you pay your living expenses and your art materials and everything. you know, the, the GI Bill was really what put a kind of platform under art in I mean, it really, all of a sudden, there were all these newly hatched artists, and it was a very interesting time. 'cause these were I actually finished my senior year of college there and going to school with these veterans. It was really, you know, very stimulating and interesting, and, and you were not, you know, just like a you own nor normal undergraduate. These were serious grownup people. And so anyhow, so I was at Iowa, and there was a very good art historian there that I studied with. And we came back to, to New York after I f finished my just one year getting my degree and did New York, 19 46, 7 you know, was flooded with ex with veterans. And going to the school, and you may have known the artist, Hans Hoffman had a well-known school in There were other, there was a, you know, bunch art students league in one place. So a lot of young artists in New York looking to form cooperative galleries or just looking for a way to tap into their GI Bill allotments. And it was a very, in very interesting development of a whole new kind of society of artists there in New York City. And in fact many you know, living on a very slow stipend from the, from the Veterans Administration and living in lofts and, and tenements and so on, on the lower East side of Manhattan. So I needed to get a job. And so I, I remember standing, and I was familiar with the, with the Museum of Modern Art, which was so I started in the thirties the 1930s. and it had a new building just just built a new, very modern looking building on 53rd Street in property that had belonged to the Rockefeller family was a, the real engine behind the Museum of Anyway, they so I remember we had gotten, found a loft to live in, but we had no telephone. So I remember standing on a street corner there on the Lower East Side around V 10 events and calling dialing the Museum of Modern Art and say asking to speak to the personnel department. And so they connected me and I told them that you know, whether it was, I had graduated from the University of Iowa in their well-known art department and, and art history, and I, and I said and I can, I can type 40 words a minute, . And she said, come and see me tomorrow. And I did. And I was given them a really wonderful job at the museum. And running their was the, I was the executive secretary for their junior council, which was made up of future trustees, sort of a training ground for trustees. And the trustees considered mainly people from New York's rich and famous families. And so they, they had to give them something to do. They had this junior, all these people sitting around being the junior council, but they had to have some, so they one of the projects was to start an art lending service. And I was the executive secretary for the junior council, and I was in charge of setting up the museum's art lending service, which is something nobody was doing in those days. The idea that you could, they wanted to encourage people to buy paintings and to think they could own a painting. And so that you could rent a painting and see if you liked it. And if you liked it and wanted to live with it, then you, the, the rental fee were deductible from the purchase price. So people actually bought paintings that way. I don't know if you ever gotten into anything like that when you're a gallery, but it, it worked, it worked quite well. And I had this little mini museum. The works were not from the museum's collection. they couldn't, you know, rent out donated paintings. So but they were on consignment from galleries. So in that way I got to, in a short time, be quite familiar with New York's galleries, which at that time was not a huge amount, but there was still quite a few viable galleries, then around 1950. And so I was in charge of taking these works from the galleries. And, and, and, and then at that time, the museum just built its annex. And so it had our top floor gallery space had its own private elevator . I remember one day that elevator door opened and out stop outs stepped Frank Lloyd Wright. and he had come to visit Edgar Kaufman, who was the son of the Kaufman family who built Falling Water well, well-known Fra Frank Lloyd Wright building. And he, he Wright had come to see Edgar Kaufman, but he, he Wright did not like art very much . And he here I had this space with small sculpture standing around and paintings on the wall. And he, he shook his, his walking staff that he had his, what is all this stuff? He said, and, and with his, you know, distaste for artworks, which interfered with the, with the pure look of the architecture. and other, you know, he had a lot of other distinguished visitors coming through, but Wright was the most obnoxious of them anyhow, so I would, I would, you know, show people the artworks and pack them in very nicely designed packing cases and off they would go. So that, and then also the other part of that, the junior council was also asked to sponsor a series of events in the Museum auditorium, which was down in the, in the basement of the museum, the auditorium where they showed mostly, where they showed old movies. And the subway was right underneath, so it was always interrupted. But we had some really interesting events. one of a series of one of the lectures, or was, was a symposium called What Abstract Art Means to Me. People were just becoming, you know, familiar with abstraction in New York, and having abstract art even shown in some of the galleries and so on. So we had, who was on that Windham de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, and who else? I can't remember the before of the up and coming abstract Expressionist pagers. Pollock was there, but he doesn't, he didn't speak at that thing. I did spend actually an evening with, with Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, just, just the two of them. And, and the woman who who invited us and it was Pollock, didn't say anything all evening. It was what of his sober mo moments, he just leaned against. I still can't remember if it was a bookshelf or a mantle piece that he was just leading against and, and saying nothing. And Lee Krasner sat in the middle of the floor and talked very animatedly. so she usually had to be the spokesman rep polling. But things like that were some of the things that happened when I, when I worked at the museum. However, it didn't last too long because I began having a family and, and in those days, it was you didn't get paid enough for the kind of work I was doing to have a be able to afford full-time child childcare. So I, I, but I continued what I then, because I had all this knowledge of the galleries and, and the contemporary who was showing, you know, in the contemporary art scene I started writing for art magazines. And that's what I did for quite a while. So how did you get interested in the Surrealism, in Exile, the book that you wrote about? How did you get interested in that subject? Well, it wasn't to start with one of my major interests but it, it was getting attention at that time because of the, the surrealist refugees who were then in, were living in New York, showing in, in, there were a number of pre-war gallery people from Europe who came to New York and reopened particularly there was some very good German dealers who, who were in New York who opened galleries and, and artists were drawn to that whole gallery, , some of the refugee artists and so on. But what actually happened was, again, some the best things happened by chance. my husband at the time had been a, a student of, of, of Meyer Shapiro, and had become very close to, to Meyer. And Meyer Shapiro suggested that I might be helpful to one of the refugee artists whose name was He was a Swiss surrealist. and that Meyer wanted to be sure that that seligman's papers and whatever were being taken care of. And his Seligman had had died. He'd actually committed suicide shot himself there in a, up in Orange County, New York, and they had settled in a little farm there. Anyway, so he wanted me to go and look. So I called the widow, or Seligman, little tiny French woman. Neither she nor quart Seligman were more than five feet tall, , I think. and anyway and she was actually a, a wildenstein from the art dealing family in, in Paris, then established a New York gallery. tell me if you want me to stop, I'm talking too much or too long. No, keep going. And anyways, so I called Arla, and, and she was wary of people coming to look at, at, at what they had there. They, he had had a quite a good collection of artworks, and she was afraid people were coming and wanting to get hold of those artworks. Anyhow she said, all right, you can come. I, I lived in, in Nyack New York at that time, which was not that far from Sugarloaf, New York which is about 50 miles beyond New York City. And so she said, I could come and see her and, and talk with her. So I drove up there and it was a little remote, kinda Hamlet Sugarloaf was and I met Arla, who was very I forget when she was born, but she was quite old then. And, and, and, and somewhat crippled living there in isolation although no heat in her house, and, and no, she did have a big wood stove to cook on. She could've had anything. The wilden scenes were a very prosperous art dealing family for several generations in, in Europe. but anyway, it's just way she lived. so we were, she was showing around what she really liked were, were, she had some sheep and goats on the place. She was more, much more interested in them than the paintings or anything else that was there. Anyway, so we went in the old barn, which had a stone foundation, and then there was a big barn building on top. And I went down in the Stone Foundation and had a dirt floor, and it was quite damp, and there were boxes of papers. And I said, oh, arlet, look at, look at this. These are all papers from, you know, from from Europe, and what, what are you gonna do with them? And she, she didn't, wasn't interested. She was not interested in most things. so she said, take them. And so I put these soggy, you know, soggy boxes of pa cardboard boxes of papers in my car, and she said someone else in Brooklyn had taken one or two boxes. And so I got that person's name, and that person was no longer interested. So I went out to Brooklyn and picked those up. And as I dried them out and began to look at them, these were letters written mostly during the war from people trying to get out of Europe, or some of the artists who'd already gotten to the United States, trying to help people get out. And and then went on to, after what went on as they came to know some of the American artists. And Motherwell was one of the people that studied with, with Sigman, took art lessons with hadn't known anything about art before. Anyhow, so as I, you know, unfolded these letters, I realized that something had to be done with them. There was this story that had to be told, this exodus, the help that was given from the United States and the, and also that wasn't given and oh, how they sort of, how American artists came to know them. And anyhow, so that is the basis of, of that book. I didn't know in the beginning it was going to be a, a book, but it, what it led, it led me to wonderful acquaintances and friendships with some of those refugee artists. One of them was an artist named Andre Masal, who I think is one of the, was one of the really most outstanding of the surrealists oh, the, the, the door, the wall, stone wall of the barn where I found these papers had Marcel Duson one day visiting the Sigmans for some reason had taken a gun and shot five bullet holes into the stone wall of the barn. So they, they made it some kind of mark an indentation. So I just took out my camera and photographed it. And that became quite famous, because that was a, the, the surrealists, when they had an exhibition in the first exhibit, big exhibition they had in New York, it was called First Papers of Surrealism. And the cover of the catalog, you may have seen it sometime, had a, a photograph with five holes punched in it, which were, where Marcel Delle had, had you know, fired his, his five bullets. And it's now been plastered over, but the people who live around there said, people came all the time to see that, that duch wall. And so that's the kind of thing that I would, you know, run into. And, and fortunately you know, and had the prior knowledge to see the new, these things were worth saving and preserving, someone else might have just thrown them out or let herself would probably have thrown them out. So that's how it came to be, and that was the, the basis You'll see, I think in, in there, there is a photograph of the, and I really chose this max For the cover. and the, because it is a sort of surrealist portrayal of what happened here. Come this sort of represents surrealism with its paintbrush coming from the brain or the guts or whatever of, of the artist and making marks on the canvas. But what comes out is an abstract painting. And so it really is a kind of graphic Illustration of what was taking place. So you came to it by chance, it sounds like. Pardon? You came to it by chance. Yes. The whole thing. The whole thing. What about Monhegan? What is your connection to Mongan? Well, that's, that's earlier. Well, we can, we can skip back if you, if you Don't mind. That's earlier. I was as I said that I was assigned because I was writing for art magazines and so on. and I was asked to probably by, by Reuben's dealer, who was very good dealer at the time, Charles Allen who worked with one of the, one of the New York's early art dealers, a woman, it was her name. Well, you would know the name, I think. Anyhow, they asked me if I would write an article for the magazine on Ruben Tam. Now, Reuben had come from Hawaii after, when he, when Ruben was in high school in Hawaii, he had a copy of Moby Dick one of the modern, modern library editions of, of Moby Dick, which with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. And those are, were illustrations dealing with wailing and the whaling industry out of New England and, and so on. And so Ruben seeing these wonderful woodcut illustrations determined that he, he would have to get to Monhegan, where Rockwell Kent, who was really one of Maine's outstanding artists, actually was from New York. But he lived and worked in Maine and identified partly, at least with Maine. Anyway so, so Ruben was determined. He had to go to the place where Rockwell can lived. He did the illustrations. Monte Monhegan was not a year-round community at the time. Rockwell Kent lived there, and it would've been in the early 20th century. And he dug wells for a living. and there had been a few artists probably like N C Y F and a couple of others who came and, and, and worked on Monhegan in the later part of the, of the 19th century or, or passed through there. You wouldn't really settle there year round. It was a very small year round community of mostly of fishermen. so it, it developed more and more as a place that artists would go. They'd leave New York and summer and go to Monhegan, and where there were other artists in the congenial place and, and where the, it was a beautiful area in which Japan monhegan is, it's the old, it's the fir furthest point of land toward Europe that inhabited by Americans. I'm not saying that right, but, and anyway, and a, if you wanted to you weren't nearly leaving in the United States, that Monhegan is part, it's actually part of the National seashore. But it's 10 miles out to sea. If you take the boat, it goes now daily to Monhegan. you'll see whales and porpoises and so on, and you come to a rocky island and which on which there isn't that much vegetation and no cars, except there is one, one sort of van or truck that will carry people's stuff from the dock to, to only one side of monhegan is inhabited. And there little cottage kind of houses there. and there were a couple of inns, one called the trailing U. And it was a general store, but not much, not much else, and no electricity although they had eventually a generator that made a lot of noise that provided electricity. The cottages were all clustered together on one on one side of the island. And the other side, you could follow trails across to the other side of the island, which was facing Europe. and they were big basalt cliffs, black basalt cliffs and the waves crashing on the, on the cliffs below. And we're a very dramatic landscape where the, the side where you land in was more sheltered and protected. but it was a great terrain for artists who wanted to be immersed in the landscape and, and, and paint in it. And, and it was just a, you know, a ideal place rugged and wild. And yet you could still manage to live there. it was an artist really hasn't had the recognition, recognition he should have had named Alan Guso who became a, a friend and learned from Reuben Tam, the secret Secrets of having how to live all this bare, live off the bare land. And Alan became he and, and his wife were great proselytizers for vegetarianism, and she became quite well known as a food healthy food expert. and, but Alan you know, painted this landscape, wonderful paintings. There is a small, very small museum on Monhegan that has artworks, and Portland Museum has a couple of good Gusto paintings. And unfortunately, Alan died of pancreatic cancer when he was less than 60, I think. And, and his widow was involved with her own nutrition, science reputation and so on. And she never did much about his work. He did have a, a, a gallery in New York that showed it, but his work hasn't been seen enough. Portland Museum has got full of very good examples of it. He was good, good painter of the landscape, but he also was a, a great proselytizer for conservation. And he, there was a time, this is, we're now north of New York, New York in the Hudson Valley, up the river a little bit. there was a, a power company wanted to build a big power plant, a place called Storm King on the, on the Hudson Ways, up the Hudson, which would've destroyed this wonderful landscape. And Alan, who was a real activist, Alan Guso got Bobby Kennedy, who was then the Senator from New York to come and walk along the Hudson Highlands with him, and look at, look at this place and, and begin advocating to have it made a national preserve and not destroyed by the power plant. And that's why it still looks very good up there. So and as I say, his, his work isn't, isn't well enough known. I did a big book on him after he died. They, they commissioned me to do a book, and it's, it's but it hasn't circulated enough. And, and, and it's too big and heavy. his, his brother was a theater critic for the New York Times. Mel Guso was no longer alive. In fact, I guess Alan's two sons are still alive, but nobody's really done very much, you know, you being in the business, you know, unless you have a devoted artist's widow, the estate doesn't go very far. And you know, they artist widows are Milton, Milton Avery's widows, one of the most aggressive that I remember, and in promoting Milton's reputation. Anyhow, so anything else you'd like, like to talk about? No, I, I'm very happy that you've been willing to come in and talk to me about just even a small portion of all of the work that you've done over the course of your career. It's very impressive. It's been fun. And I tell you, it's, it's, you know, I have stacks of journals that I kept when I visited artist studios, because in those days, early on, we, we would sometimes review, go to see a work before the show was hanging on the gallery walls so that the review would come out the same time the show was up. 'cause it tended to be come out later, as they do these days often are, they're very late into, you know, after the show has been taken down. but in those days, so I would go to the studio and I would look at the works with the artists or with the, with the dealer or whoever, and we'd talk, and I'd make a lot of notes on these things. And I have all those notebooks. And I wish I knew one . I started to do a a, a, a catalog of, of my own modest collection with quotes from the artists on, you know, to go with each. But I haven't gotten that far though. and I still think, you know, at least somehow you're probably familiar with the Archives of American Art. They have done a wonderful job of collecting studio journals and notes and so forth, and they're accessible and make an appointment and go there either to the headquarters in Washington, or they have an office in New York, and you can read them on you know, these alternative things or they have photocopies of notebooks. It's a wonderful resource, but I haven't been able to organize my material well enough. The, the archives wants to come and look at it, but I, my papers are, I left New York after the pandemic without really organizing my departure very well. And things were a jumble and it's hard for me to face it. Well, I appreciate your coming here today to talk to me, and you clearly have so much more to talk about. I hope that at some point you get things organized, and Well wanna thank you for asking me, because not everybody wants to know all these things. Well, if we, I would, I could sit here all day with you, but I appreciate this, this amount of time that you've been able to spend with me today. I've really, I've really learned a lot, so thank you. Well, I, I love teaching and being able to communicate some of this, at least to my students. And I did start a summer school for arts and design students in Paris and could use a lot of material in connection with that. It's still going, actually. I don't have anything to do with it now, but it's still, there still is a Parsons in Paris. And I must say, I must say that was a lot of fun. Also, I've been speaking with Marika Saan, who is an art historian and critic with many, many wonderful books and articles, published pieces, and also teachings to her, to her name. I hope someday we will be able to actually see this in the archives. It will all get organized. But in the meantime, I appreciate you coming in and talking with me today. Well, I thank you for the opportunity. you know, everybody wants to talk about their memories as they get older and looks for a receptive audience. . Well, we are a receptive audience, and, and I know that it was a lot of work for you to get here, so I acknowledge that, that that was a thing, and I appreciate everybody who made that possible. Yeah,