Acclaimed Art Historian and Critic Martica Sawin

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine today. It is my great pleasure to have in the studio with me Martica Sawin. Nice to have you here today.

Martica Sawin: Well, it's a pleasure to be here in this place that I knew nothing about, even though I had spent years in Yarmouth.

Lisa Belisle: Oh. What were you doing in Yarmouth?

Martica Sawin: Well, my parents back in the 1940s bought a farm in Yarmouth on Greely Road. Beautiful old brick house, still there, but as they did in those days, the house was built too close to the road. So eventually my parents moved elsewhere, but my father was with another old Maine institution, the Bates Manufacturing Company in Lewiston. He could commute to Lewiston from Yarmouth. I didn't spend that much time there, because I was already almost grown up when they acquired the farm. But my children have loved that place all these years. I don't know who it belongs to now, but it's a wonderful place. My youngest daughter was actually married in that church on Meeting House Road. I think it's called Hillside Avenue. It runs away from Greely Road, and there's a little old frame meeting house, and that's where my youngest daughter was married.

Lisa Belisle: It's a lovely church. I used to live very close to that, actually. Just down the hill. So you're connected to Yarmouth. Tell me about your greater Maine connection. You've been in Maine for quite a while, I think.

Martica Sawin: Yeah. Well, it seems like always.

Lisa Belisle: Okay. Basically.

Martica Sawin: Although I was born in New York, my father grew up in New York on the Upper West Side, commuted by subway to a school in Brooklyn. He was an only child, and so his parents sent him to a camp in Maine, White Mountain camp on Sebago Lake. It was paradise for him, and he never forgot it. It was always a part of his childhood dream. So when he and my mother were married, he insisted that they go on their honeymoon to Maine. It happened to be January. They went and stayed at the mansion house over in Poland Springs, the big huge resort inn in Poland Springs that was not open in the winter. But they said there was another, and they hitchhiked over to Lake Sebago. Of course my mother had heard all about this paradise, and there was nothing but a dreary expanse of ice and snow when they got there. Anyway, we always came to Maine when he had vacations. We would come in the summer, go to places like Migis 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.

Lisa Belisle: But you're here now.

Martica Sawin: Yes. Well, my children loved Maine, and so we would come on vacations. I promised them, when I was able to, we would. They were very sad when my parents sold their farm. So as soon as I was able to, I bought a farm over in New Gloucester. You know where that is?

Lisa Belisle: Yes. I have a sister who lives out there. I have a sister who lives in New Gloucester.

Martica Sawin: Oh, really? Do you know the road she lives on?

Lisa Belisle: Doughty Road, they call it.

Martica Sawin: Yes. Doughty Road.

Lisa Belisle: Doughty Road.

Martica Sawin: Yeah. My farm was, in fact one of my daughters still owns it and lives there, on Cobbs Bridge Road. It was a road that was first settled when the people moved from Gloucester, Massachusetts and founded New Gloucester. They were given a land grant from the King of England. 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 that road, Cobbs Bridge Road, has houses on it that were built 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. It's a beautiful spot in New Gloucester, and amazingly they're located just between Portland and Lewiston. But that particular area has not been built up. Right now it's still beautifully veiled between the two townships, still pristine, but I don't know for how long.

Lisa Belisle: It is a beautiful part of the world. Yes. I'm very interested in the work that you've done over the years with art. Would you consider yourself an art critic, an art historian? What would you describe yourself to be?

Martica Sawin: Basically I usually say an art critic and historian. I have a graduate degree in art history. But I came to it by chance. My first husband was an artist. We met in Paris, where he was studying with Fernand Léger. I was also studying art history there in Paris. We came back to the United States and went directly to Iowa. Iowa had an interesting place for art at that time. It was where Grant Wood lived and where Grant Wood had a kind of school. The University of Iowa, which was quite a wonderful place, was one of the first places, because of Grant Wood, to give a graduate degree in painting. At that time, say mid 1940s, the MFA did not exist. You couldn't get a graduate degree in painting, of all things. Well, Iowa was very smart, like other universities, and saw potential in the GI Bill, because all the veterans from the Second World War had a year or more of college education for every year they'd been in the service. So how could the universities get into that ladder, so to speak? They could give a graduate degree in painting, unheard of at the time. 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 college degree where you pay your living expenses and your art materials and everything, the GI Bill was really what put a kind of platform under art in America.

I mean, all of a sudden, there were all these newly hatched artists, and it was a very interesting time, because these were, I actually finished my senior year of college there, going to school with these veterans. It was very stimulating and interesting. You were not just like a normal undergraduate. These were serious grownup people. So I was at Iowa, and there was a very good art historian there that I studied with. We came back to New York after I finished my just one year getting my degree. New York, 1946, 1947, was flooded with veterans going to school. You may have known, the artist Hans Hofmann had a well-known school in New York. There was the 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. It was a very interesting development of a whole new kind of society of artists there in New York City. In fact many living on a very slow stipend from the Veterans Administration, living in lofts and tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. So I needed to get a job. I was familiar with the Museum of Modern Art, which started in the 1930s. It had just built a new, very modern looking building on 53rd Street, on property that had belonged to the Rockefeller family, who were the real engine behind the Museum of Modern Art.

Anyway, we had 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 and dialing the Museum of Modern Art, asking to speak to the personnel department. They connected me and I told them that I had graduated from the University of Iowa in their well-known art department and art history, and I said I can type 40 words a minute. And she said, come and see me tomorrow. And I did. I was given a really wonderful job at the museum. I was the executive secretary for their junior council, which was made up of future trustees, sort of a training ground for trustees. The trustees considered mainly people from New York's rich and famous families. They had to give them something to do. They had all these people sitting around being the junior council, so one of the projects was to start an art lending service. 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 own a painting. So you could rent a painting and see if you liked it, and if you wanted to live with it, then the rental fee was deductible from the purchase price.

So people actually bought paintings that way. I don't know if you've ever gotten into anything like that in your gallery, but it worked quite well. I had this little mini museum. The works were not from the museum's collection. They couldn't rent out donated paintings. 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 were still quite a few viable galleries, around 1950. I was in charge of taking these works from the galleries. At that time, the museum had just built its annex. So our top floor gallery space had its own private elevator. I remember one day that elevator door opened and out stepped Frank Lloyd Wright. He had come to visit Edgar Kaufmann, who was the son of the Kaufmann family who built Fallingwater, the well-known Frank Lloyd Wright building. Wright had come to see Edgar Kaufmann, but Wright did not like art very much. Here I had this space with small sculpture standing around and paintings on the wall. He shook his walking staff and said, what is all this stuff? With his distaste for artworks, which interfered with the pure look of the architecture. He had a lot of other distinguished visitors coming through, but Wright was the most obnoxious of them. Anyhow, I would show people the artworks and pack them in very nicely designed packing cases, and off they would go.

The junior council was also asked to sponsor a series of events in the museum auditorium, which was down in the basement of the museum, where they showed mostly old movies. The subway was right underneath, so it was always interrupted. But we had some really interesting events. One of the lectures was a symposium called What Abstract Art Means to Me. People were just becoming familiar with abstraction in New York, having abstract art even shown in some of the galleries. So we had, who was on that, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, and who else, I can't remember the up and coming abstract expressionist painters. Pollock was there, but he didn't speak at that thing. I did spend an evening with Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, just the two of them, and the woman who invited us. Pollock didn't say anything all evening. It was one of his sober moments. He just leaned against, I still can't remember if it was a bookshelf or a mantelpiece, just leaning against it and saying nothing. Lee Krasner sat in the middle of the floor and talked very animatedly. She usually had to be the spokesman representing Pollock. But things like that were some of the things that happened when I worked at the museum. However, it didn't last too long, because I began having a family, and in those days you didn't get paid enough for the kind of work I was doing to be able to afford full-time child care. So I continued, because I had all this knowledge of the galleries and who was showing in the contemporary art scene, I started writing for art magazines. That's what I did for quite a while.

Lisa Belisle: So how did you get interested in Surrealism in Exile, the book that you wrote? How did you get interested in that subject?

Martica Sawin: Well, it wasn't to start with one of my major interests, but it was getting attention at that time because of the surrealist refugees who were then living in New York. There were a number of pre-war gallery people from Europe who came to New York and reopened, particularly some very good German dealers who opened galleries, and artists were drawn to that whole gallery scene, some of the refugee artists and so on. But what actually happened was, again, some of the best things happened by chance. My husband at the time had been a student of Meyer Schapiro, and had become very close to Meyer. Meyer Schapiro suggested that I might be helpful to one of the refugee artists whose name was Kurt Seligmann. He was a Swiss surrealist. Meyer wanted to be sure that Seligmann's papers were being taken care of. Seligmann had died. He'd actually committed suicide, up in Orange County, New York, where they had settled in a little farm. So he wanted me to go and look. I called the widow of Seligmann, a little tiny French woman. Neither she nor Kurt Seligmann were more than five feet tall, I think. She was actually a Wildenstein from the art dealing family in Paris, which then established a New York gallery. Tell me if you want me to stop, I'm talking too much.

Lisa Belisle: No, keep going.

Martica Sawin: So I called Arlette, and she was wary of people coming to look at what they had there. He had had 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 lived in Nyack, New York at that time, which was not that far from Sugar Loaf, New York, which is about 50 miles beyond New York City. So she said I could come and see her and talk with her. I drove up there. It was a little remote, kind of a hamlet, Sugar Loaf was. I met Arlette, who was quite old then. She was somewhat crippled, living there in isolation, with no heat in her house, although she did have a big wood stove to cook on. She could have had anything. The Wildensteins were a very prosperous art dealing family for several generations in Europe. But anyway, it's just the way she lived. She was showing me around. What she really liked were, she had some sheep and goats on the place. She was much more interested in them than the paintings or anything else that was there. We went in the old barn, which had a stone foundation, and then there was a big barn building on top. I went down in the stone foundation. It had a dirt floor, and it was quite damp, and there were boxes of papers. I said, oh, Arlette, look at this. These are all papers from Europe. What are you going to do with them? She wasn't interested. She was not interested in most things. So she said, take them.

So I put these soggy cardboard boxes of papers in my car, and she said someone else in Brooklyn had taken one or two boxes. So I got that person's name, and that person was no longer interested. So I went out to Brooklyn and picked those up. 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 then it went on, as they came to know some of the American artists. Motherwell was one of the people that studied with Seligmann, took art lessons with Seligmann. He hadn't known anything about art before. As I 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 also that wasn't given, and how American artists came to know them. That is the basis of that book. I didn't know in the beginning it was going to be a book, but it led me to wonderful acquaintances and friendships with some of those refugee artists. One of them was an artist named André Masson, who I think was one of the really most outstanding of the surrealists. The stone wall of the barn where I found these papers, Marcel Duchamp, one day visiting the Seligmanns for some reason, had taken a gun and shot five bullet holes into the stone wall of the barn.

So they made some kind of mark, an indentation. I just took out my camera and photographed it. That became quite famous, because when the surrealists had the first big exhibition they had in New York, it was called First Papers of Surrealism. The cover of the catalog, you may have seen it sometime, had a photograph with five holes punched in it, which were where Marcel Duchamp had fired his five bullets. It's now been plastered over, but the people who live around there said people came all the time to see that Duchamp wall. So that's the kind of thing that I would run into. Fortunately I had the prior knowledge to see that these things were worth saving and preserving. Someone else might have just thrown them out. Arlette herself would probably have thrown them out. So that's how it came to be, and that was the basis. You'll see, I think in there, there is a photograph. I really chose this Max for the cover, because it is a sort of surrealist portrayal of what happened. This sort of represents surrealism, with its paintbrush coming from the brain or the guts or whatever of the artist and making marks on the canvas. But what comes out is an abstract painting. So it really is a kind of graphic illustration of what was taking place.

Lisa Belisle: So you came to it by chance, it sounds like.

Martica Sawin: Pardon?

Lisa Belisle: You came to it by chance.

Martica Sawin: Yes. The whole thing.

Lisa Belisle: What about Monhegan? What is your connection to Monhegan?

Martica Sawin: Well, that's earlier.

Lisa Belisle: Well, we can skip back if you don't mind.

Martica Sawin: That's earlier. As I said, I was writing for art magazines, and I was asked, probably by Reuben's dealer, who was a very good dealer at the time, Charles Alan, who worked with one of New York's early art dealers, a woman. You would know the name, I think. Anyhow, they asked me if I would write an article for the magazine on Reuben Tam. Now, Reuben had come from Hawaii. When Reuben was in high school in Hawaii, he had a copy of Moby Dick, one of the Modern Library editions of Moby Dick, with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. Those were illustrations dealing with whaling and the whaling industry out of New England. So Reuben, seeing these wonderful woodcut illustrations, determined that 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 lived and worked in Maine and identified partly with Maine. Reuben was determined, he had to go to the place where Rockwell Kent lived and did the illustrations. Monhegan was not a year-round community at the time Rockwell Kent lived there, which would have been in the early 20th century. He dug wells for a living. There had been a few artists, probably like N.C. Wyeth and a couple of others, who came and worked on Monhegan in the later part of the 19th century, or passed through there. You wouldn't really settle there year round.

It was a very small year round community, mostly of fishermen. So it developed more and more as a place that artists would go. They'd leave New York in summer and go to Monhegan, where there were other artists, a congenial place, and a beautiful area. Monhegan is the furthest point of land toward Europe that's inhabited by Americans. I'm not saying that right, but if you wanted to, you were nearly leaving the United States. Monhegan is 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 you come to a rocky island on which there isn't that much vegetation and no cars, except there is one sort of van or truck that will carry people's stuff from the dock. Only one side of Monhegan is inhabited. There are little cottage kind of houses there, and there were a couple of inns, one called the Trailing Yew. There was a general store, but not much else, and no electricity, although eventually they had a generator that made a lot of noise that provided electricity. The cottages were all clustered together on one side of the island. On the other side, you could follow trails across to the side of the island facing Europe. There were big basalt cliffs, black basalt cliffs, and the waves crashing on the cliffs below, a very dramatic landscape. The side where you land was more sheltered and protected. But it was a great terrain for artists who wanted to be immersed in the landscape and paint in it. It was a rugged and wild place, and yet you could still manage to live there.

There was an artist who really hasn't had the recognition he should have had, named Alan Gussow, who became a friend and learned from Reuben Tam the secrets of how to live off the bare land. Alan and his wife were great proselytizers for vegetarianism, and she became quite well known as a healthy food expert. Alan painted this landscape, wonderful paintings. There is a very small museum on Monhegan that has artworks, and the Portland Museum has a couple of good Gussow paintings. Unfortunately, Alan died of pancreatic cancer when he was less than 60, I think. His widow was involved with her own nutrition reputation, and she never did much about his work. He did have a gallery in New York that showed it, but his work hasn't been seen enough. The Portland Museum has very good examples of it. He was a good painter of the landscape, but he was also a great proselytizer for conservation. There was a time, we're now north of New York in the Hudson Valley, up the river a little bit, when a power company wanted to build a big power plant at a place called Storm King, up the Hudson, which would have destroyed this wonderful landscape. Alan Gussow, who was a real activist, got Bobby Kennedy, who was then the Senator from New York, to come and walk along the Hudson Highlands with him, and look at this place and begin advocating to have it made a national preserve and not destroyed by the power plant. That's why it still looks very good up there. As I say, his work isn't well enough known. I did a big book on him after he died. They commissioned me to do a book, but it hasn't circulated enough, and it's too big and heavy. His brother was a theater critic for the New York Times, Mel Gussow, no longer alive. I guess Alan's two sons are still alive, but nobody's really done very much. You, being in the business, you know, unless you have a devoted artist's widow, the estate doesn't go very far. Milton Avery's widow was one of the most aggressive that I remember in promoting Milton's reputation. Anyhow, is there anything else you'd like to talk about?

Lisa Belisle: 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.

Martica Sawin: It's been fun. I tell you, I have stacks of journals that I kept when I visited artist studios, because in those days, early on, we would sometimes go to see the work before the show was hanging on the gallery walls, so that the review would come out the same time the show was up. It tended to come out later, as they do these days, often very late, after the show has been taken down. But in those days I would go to the studio and look at the works with the artists or with the dealer, and we'd talk, and I'd make a lot of notes. I have all those notebooks. I started to do a catalog of my own modest collection with quotes from the artists to go with each. But I haven't gotten that far. I still think, you're probably familiar with the Archives of American Art. They have done a wonderful job of collecting studio journals and notes, and they're accessible. You 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, or they have photocopies of notebooks. It's a wonderful resource, but I haven't been able to organize my material well enough. The Archives wants to come and look at it, but my papers are, I left New York after the pandemic without really organizing my departure very well. Things were a jumble, and it's hard for me to face it.

Lisa Belisle: 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.

Martica Sawin: Well, I want to thank you for asking me, because not everybody wants to know all these things.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I could sit here all day with you, but I appreciate this amount of time that you've been able to spend with me today. I've really learned a lot, so thank you.

Martica Sawin: Well, I love teaching and being able to communicate some of this, at least to my students. 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 there still is a Parsons in Paris. And I must say, that was a lot of fun also.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with Martica Sawin, who is an art historian and critic with many wonderful books and articles and published pieces, and also teachings 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.

Martica Sawin: Well, I thank you for the opportunity. Everybody wants to talk about their memories as they get older and looks for a receptive audience.

Lisa Belisle: Well, we are a receptive audience, and I know that it was a lot of work for you to get here, so I acknowledge that, and I appreciate everybody who made that possible.

Martica Sawin: Yeah.