Alfred Henry Maurer

One of the first Americans to embrace the modernist visions of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Alfred Maurer (1868–1932) produced landscapes, still lifes, and figure studies that shocked the public and critics. In an essay published to accompany a 1916 exhibition, Maurer explained his artistic philosophy: “It is necessary for art to differ from nature, or we would at once lose the raison d’être of painting. Perhaps art should be the intensification of nature; at least, it should express an inherent feeling which cannot be obtained from nature except through a process of association. … The artist must be free to paint his effects. Nature must not bind him, or he would have to be more interested in the subject-matter before him than in the thing he feels need [sic] expression.” [1] This philosophy helps to explain Maurer’s break with naturalism in the opening years of the twentieth century.

The artist came from a family of German immigrants who settled in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. His father, Louis, worked as a lithographer, and was employed for a time by the famed firm, Currier and Ives. His style, firmly grounded in a traditional vein of realism and genre art, later brought him into conflict with his son when the latter embraced modernism.

Alfred Maurer began his career at the age of sixteen as a lithographer and commercial artist, producing cards, calendars, product labels, and the like. He took some classes at the National Academy of Design but did not study in a formal way. It was not until the age of twenty-nine that Maurer took a decisive step toward embracing fine art by leaving New York for Paris. The work that he produced during his first few years in France clearly demonstrates the influence of James Whistler: full-length figure studies, often entitled “arrangements,” of fashionable women painted in dark palettes with contrasting stark whites. One, An Arrangement from 1901, won the Carnegie Prize awarded by the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, bringing Maurer his first success, positive critical attention, and a cash prize of fifteen hundred dollars.

The money from the Carnegie Prize enabled Maurer to rent better accommodations in Paris. He spent his time sketching around the city, painting girls in cafés, and people in parks. He appreciated the work of Claude Monet and Edgar Degas and wrote to his father that he was painting in a very “impressionistic” mode, although his most significant work might better be described as “post-Impressionist.” [2] He developed a friendship with Leo Stein and became a frequent participant in the salons that Gertrude Stein hosted in her apartment. [3]

It was through the Steins that Maurer first encountered paintings by Matisse. The work of Matisse and the Fauves, who sought to convey a heightened sense of emotion through the use of bright and unexpected colors, changed Maurer’s approach to painting. The dark palette of the earlier Whistlerian figural work gave way to high-toned landscapes and still lifes, painted in a brushy and disjointed style that emphasized the flatness of the picture plane. He debuted his Fauvist-inspired work at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907. [4]

Maurer came to the attention of the American gallerist Alfred Stieglitz through Edward Steichen, Stieglitz’s business partner, who hosted his own salon of sorts in his Paris studio. Steichen’s group included other such Americans as Max Weber and John Marin. In 1909, Stieglitz mounted the first one-man show of Maurer’s work on American soil at his gallery 291. Although the noted critic Charles H. Caffin was supportive, most critical reaction ranged from incredulity to outrage. When Maurer’s conservative father visited the exhibition, he “stood a long time, gazing and shaking his head. ‘Who will buy this stuff?’ he demanded. … Later he would say that he had ‘buried’ his son.” [5]

Subsequent exhibitions included the Younger American Painters show at 291 in 1910, where Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Marin, Steichen, Weber, and others exhibited, as well as a presentation at the Folsom Galleries in New York in 1913 and inclusion in the Armory Show and the Paris Salon in 1913. All drew mixed reactions, but fortunately Maurer did attract the attention of noted Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes, who purchased several pieces and who contracted the artist to serve as his agent in Europe. [6]

With the onset of World War I in 1914, Maurer was forced to flee Paris. Although he did not know it at the time, he would never return. The blow was especially hard because he left all of his paintings in his studio, and the contents were later sold without his permission. He never recovered the large body of work that encompassed his first experiments in avant-garde modernism.

The next twenty years of the artist’s life were marked by periods of instability, depression, and destitution, temporarily relieved at times by an exhibition or the sale of a painting. Maurer drifted from place to place, at times living in his father’s home in New York City, sometimes with artist-friends such as Dove in Connecticut, and sometimes at a boarding house in upstate New York. He continued to exhibit, most notably in an annual exhibition hosted by the Society of Independent Artists, for which he served as director for a time.

Around 1920, Maurer began experimenting with a new Cubist-inspired style, producing painting after painting each simply called Head. In 1924, the new work attracted the attention of the New York bookseller Erhard Weyhe, who purchased the contents of Maurer’s studio and placed the paintings on exhibit. A reviewer in The New York Times called his figures Byzantine: “stiff, stereotyped pattern of elongated forms… dignified and vital in design and extraordinarily beautiful in texture.” [7]

The Weyhe sale and exhibition marked a high point during this troubled time in the artist’s life. Just eight years later, Maurer committed suicide. His biographer Elizabeth McCausland suggests that his difficult relationship with his father might have been the cause for this drastic step. The elder Maurer lived to the age of one hundred, and, in his later years, attracted the kind of positive attention in the press that his son had long sought. Alfred Maurer died just two weeks after his father at their home in New York. Today, the younger Maurer is hailed as a rare American prophet of modernism, but recognition during his own lifetime was sadly limited.

Notes:

[1] Maurer, quoted in Elizabeth McCausland, A.H. Maurer (New York: A.A. Wyn, Inc., for the Walker Art Center, 1951), 139.

[2] Maurer, quoted in McCausland, A.H. Maurer, 93.

[3] McCausland, A.H. Maurer, 88.

[4] Stacey Epstein, “Alfred H. Maurer Reconsidered,” American Art Review 16, no. 1 (January–February 2004), 126–127.

[5] Louis Maurer, quoted in McCausland, A.H. Maurer, 107.

[6] Epstein, “Alfred H. Maurer Reconsidered,” 127.

[7] McCausland, A.H. Maurer, 155.