Alfred H. Maurer
Nationality / Dates: 1868-1932
Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932) was born in New York, the son of German-born Louis Maurer, a celebrated painter and lithographer employed for a time by Currier and Ives. At age sixteen, Maurer was taken out of school to work, as his father had done at that age, in his father's lithographic firm. He worked there for about thirteen years, designing cigar and soap labels. However, this did not satisfy the largely self-taught artist. In 1897, after limited study with the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and painter William Merritt Chase, Maurer had saved enough money to go to Paris. He remained there for four years, inspired by the Parisian art world and a circle of American and French artists. His work, in the style of James McNeill Whistler, earned recognition with prestigious prizes, such as First Prize at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition--the most important exhibition in the world at that time--and similar recognition at major exhibitions in this country and Europe.
In 1904, Maurer met Leo and Gertrude Stein and was introduced into the circle of artists who met regularly at their home in Paris. At the Steins' salon he met Henri Matisse who was at that time painting in the Fauve manner. Maurer instantly understood the art of Matisse and his own art was transformed as he worked with ". . . a newfound freedom of color and design. . . . A selection of Maurer's work was shown at Alfred Stieglitz's '291' gallery in 1909, along with pictures by John Marin. It was one of the first introductions to modern art for American gallerygoers."1
At age thirty-six, stimulated by Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, and not satisfied with continuing to paint "acceptable" or "fashionable" work, Maurer diligently sought his own method of expression. His revolt, and resulting break with representationalism, caused his international reputation to dissipate almost overnight. Maurer left Paris just prior to World War I, leaving much of his work behind. Regretfully, he returned to his father's house where he found no parental support or understanding. The elder Maurer, satisfied with his own career, rejected not only his son's modernist work, but also his son. For the next seventeen years Maurer worked in a garret in his father's house with neither financial success nor critical acclaim. He continued to work and experiment, though he sold his work infrequently and at low prices.
Having celebrated his 100th birthday in 1932, Maurer's father died that same year, leaving his son financially secure and finally free of his father's domination. Tragically, Alfred Maurer--"gentle, introspective, rejected Alfy"--took his own life several weeks after his father's death. Some sources indicate he was in ill health and filled with remorse at not having reconciled with his father before his death. Others state that he could not exist without an object for the hatred that had sustained him for so long.
Hans Hofmann, the influential and respected teacher and painter wrote in 1950:
Four names already excel in the great drama of modern art in America: Alfred Maurer, John Flannagan, Arthur Carles [also in this exhibition], Arshile Gorky. All of them have been guided by the same artistic awareness that no expression can become coherent without being plastically and aesthetically conceived.
Maurer is a painter of enormous stature. His vision of the reality of painting drove him to leave behind the success that accompanied his earlier work. This is the tragedy and glory of every great man; he must follow an inner urge of deeper purpose which may destroy him in order that the work may live. It is the continuation of such essential creativity into another generation that creates tradition.
Maurer, Flannagan, Carles, Gorky, Ryder are the forerunners of a true and great American tradition that is being carried on by the vanguard of advanced modern artists.
References:
1. Wayne Craven, American Art, History and Culture (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 446.
Related Pages:
Woman with Blue Background (Permanent Collection)
Other Works:
Father and Son, c. 1930, oil on canvasboard
The Artist:
Alfred Maurer represents, in the facts of his biography and more particularly in the development of his work, the crisis within American art as it adjusted itself to the revolution of Modernism in the years before World War I.
Out of a family background of patriotic traditionalism, he identified with the conservative Modernism of Whistler. On this basis he achieved the distinction of the Carnegie Prize in 1901. Both Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins were members of the jury that awarded Maurer the prize. Although fortified by this success, his contacts in Paris, chiefly with Leo Stein and Gertrude Stein, brought him face to face with artistic developments that were to remake entirely his way of seeing and working. His is the example of an extraordinary talent all but overcome by the impact of ideas and methods which, for the artist as an American, were antithetical to everything he had known.
He moved from Whistlerian elegance to Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism within the space of a few years, making a normal assimilation of any of these concepts nearly impossible. In addition, by his renunciation of the success already won at home he assumed a great burden of responsibility, which in turn produced an intense psychological alienation that continued until his suicide in 1932.
The Sheldon Gallery's collection of works by Alfred Maurer represents him in all the phases of his career. Among these paintings, one of the most outstanding is Woman with Blue Background wherein is displayed a boldness of color and breadth of drawing comparable to the Fauve works of Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, and André Derain. This simple subject has been transformed into an experience of form and color almost totally free of an identifying individualism. The next conceptual step is the nonobjective image.
In the work of his final period, in Maurer's effort to resolve the contending claims of Cubist form and Expressionist color, we can sense the intensity of a conflict that remained essentially unresolved in the end. Yet there are, throughout his career, moments of successful expression, spontaneous and uncomplicated, which place him among the eminent painters of his generation.
Related Pages:
Woman with Blue Background ("The Stieglitz Circle" exhibition)
Other Works:
Still Life With Bowl, c. 1908, oil on canvas mounted on masonite
Father and Son, c. 1930, oil on canvasboard
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