If you’re a discerning disciple of American art history of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, fascinated by how the academic gave way to self-expression, then Alfred Maurer’s name likely rings forth like El Dorado does to a fervent explorer.
In his lifetime, Maurer went from having a highly promising future in the realist vein of his mentors, sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and painter William Merritt Chase, to a zealous convert devoted to European modernism, discovered and embraced wholeheartedly while living in Paris between 1897 and 1901, and 1902 and 1914.
After his death at the age of 64 in 1932, Maurer’s legacy languished. His work was extremely difficult to categorise because of the wide array of styles he employed that were now out of fashion, and by the fact that his work was rarely dated. As a result, Maurer was relegated to an enigmatic misfit and all but forgotten.
Very slowly this began to change with the publication of two major studies on Maurer. The first was Elizabeth McCausland’s ‘A. H. Maurer: A Biography of America's First Modern Painter’, in 1951, then Sheldon Reich’s ‘Alfred H. Maurer 1868-1932’ published in 1973.
In recent years, Maurer’s life and work have continued to come under significant reevaluation in a way that, as James D. Balestrieri observes, ‘shifts Alfred Maurer from man to artist, from martyr to visionary.’ Both publications have since been discredited. The former as being too speculative and overreaching, and the latter as being too lightweight.
Today, Maurer is finally being seen more widely as a rarefied progenitor of American modernism, albeit still as an artist’s artist. Yet key aspects of his life and details about his artistic motivations remain shrouded in mystery. To such an extent that Stacey B. Epstein, a noted Maurer scholar, opened her lecture on the occasion of the 2015 exhibition she co-curated with Susan C. Faxon, 'Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard of Modernism’ at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, with the following revision:
‘For many years, most of the people in this room and most of those who follow American Modernism have been calling him Alfred Mow-er, and recently we have been corrected. So, the right way, according to family members, to pronounce his name, is Alfred Mor-er.’
But what is known or can reasonably be discerned about Maurer’s life and art offers a fascinating window into the inner machinations and reception of European and American modernism during a pivotal period in world history, that very few, if any other artist, can deliver with such range and individuality.
Maurer first gained critical attention in 1901 when he won first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition, in Pittsburgh, for his painting ‘An Arrangement’ (1901). By this point in his life, Maurer had already been living in Paris for four years and was painting in a realist mode indebted to James McNeill Whistler, perfectly encapsulated in the moody and sublimely painterly ‘Girl in White’ (c.1901), in the collection of the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. Here, Maurer seductively plays with dissolving background and foreground, allowing large areas of the background to read abstractly only for a confident flick of his wrist to give the merest suggestion of an architectural feature, resituating the composition within a narrative framework.
In ‘An Arrangement’, our eye is immediately drawn to the rich nuances of velvety blacks Maurer uses to depict light accenting the folds of the woman's skirt as she stoops down. Here, Maurer’s brushwork dances along the line separating artistic flair and visual accuracy. He sways between the sides in a way that situates him comfortably in a lineage established by Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, who was famed for his ability to richly manipulate the colour black and for the dexterity of his brushwork.
We see Maurer pushing the envelope of this dance in ‘At the Shore’ (1901), employing broken brushwork akin to that of Édouard Manet to create a sketch-like impression of the scene unfolding before him. However, what is most prominent is the way in which Maurer alludes to the sandy beach that dominates the lower left half of the composition. He does this with a lightly loaded brush allowing the canvas to show through at times, giving the illusion of a sand-like texture. In areas towards the bottom, he scrapes the paint across the canvas utilising the raised, uneven surface this creates to maximum effect. This wide expanse of muddied white is audacious in how it showcases Maurer’s skill to be irreverently modern. It boldly anticipates the works of Robert Ryman and Pierre Soulages, while just remaining in the pocket of the narrative. It demonstrates to us, with the benefit of hindsight, that Maurer was already readily seeking out opportunities to evolve his artistic sensibilities far beyond the foundations he had mastered from his mentors and peers.
International accolades continued for Maurer and in 1905 he won the third-place medal at the Liège International Exposition in Belgium, and a gold medal at the International Exposition in Munich, Germany.
In late 1906 and early 1907, Maurer began in earnest to adopt the techniques and artistic direction of the Fauvists who were making a name for themselves in France as being at the very forefront of new artistic thinking. Recalling their origins in the teachings of symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, Henri Matisse said, ‘He did not set us on the right roads, but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency.’ On the surface, this quote appears to capture Maurer’s Road to Damascus moment experienced here, but as previously illustrated, a seemingly radical development such as this was inevitable for Maurer.
In one of Maurer’s finest Fauve works, ‘Landscape with House’ (c.1909-12), Maurer’s creative fervour that characterised the aforementioned works from 1901, is seen exploding forth, unfettered and utterly beguiling. Maurer poetically captures the interplay between light and shadow seen in a country landscape in a symphony of energetic bursts of dark, seductive colours through short, stabbing brushwork.
In the undated ‘French Village Scene’, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, we see Maurer taking pause, pulling back slightly as he synthesises the moody, dark colour palette common in his early realist works with this new way of image making. The work pulses with all of the energy of his resolutely fauvist works but slyly announces something new entirely, showing a faint influence of Paul Cézanne. Unusually, Maurer’s brushwork is sparser, more descriptive. Areas such as the lawn in front of the house and where tree branches overlap the roof of house look poised to erupt into abstraction, ultimately only threatening to. Maurer demonstrates an advanced understanding of colour harmony, the pale, morning dawn yellow that he uses to underpin the painting, is eye-catchingly accented by a dark, forest green towards the centre to describe a tree’s shadow and an Oxford blue used to outline the shadow as well as a roof.
Maurer’s fauvist works in particular, began to garner him attention as a serious modern artist both in France and soon thereafter in America, where the conditions for modernist art were more unforgiving. As appetite and appreciation began to grow in America, Maurer was exhibited alongside watercolourist John Marin in a two-person exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. In 1913, four of his paintings were included in the Armory Show in New York, a lightning rod that ushered European and American modernism into the national consciousness.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Maurer continued to work, experimenting incessantly. Other known works estimated to be from the late 1900s showcase Maurer incorporating cubist-inspired image fracturing and pushing beyond this into abstraction; modes that would preoccupy him from the 1910s through to his death. Interestingly, by 1912, Maurer along with his friend, the painter William Glackens, was also acting as a European agent for chemist Dr. Albert Barnes, buying significant works of modern art for what would become the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which today owns at least 18 of Maurer’s works.
With the onset of the First World War in 1914, Maurer was hastily forced to return to New York, leaving behind a studio full of work.
It is with Maurer’s return to New York that a point of contention rears itself within his biography: the renewed impact of his father’s judgement on his embracement of modernism. This is tellingly chronicled in artist Jerome Myers’ autobiography ‘Artist In Manhattan’ (1940), where he recalls meeting Maurer’s father, Louis, and describes his disposition as: ‘so proud of what his son had done, but so grieved at what he was then doing.’
Louis was a German-born lithographer and painter, who by all accounts was a domineering man who expected his son to follow in his artistic footsteps. Louis achieved notable success through his employment with Currier and Ives, a famous New York lithographic company and staunchly saw art in narrow terms. He was incredulous about the influence modernism was having over the direction of art, believing that there was a well-established artistic tradition that must be upheld from generation to generation. Testament to all of which took place when Maurer was 16 when Louis took him out of school so that he could learn the trade at his own lithography company Maurer and Heppenheimer, just as he had done at 16.
In the years after Maurer’s return, he lived and worked in the garret of his father’s house. Maurer continued to toil away at his work, failing to find critical or financial success. A reprieve came in 1924, when Erhard Weyhe of Weyhe Gallery, New York, bought all of the works in Maurer's studio and began representing him, giving him almost yearly solo exhibitions until his death eight years later.
Work attributed to the period marking Maurer’s return to America and his death in 1932, range widely in terms of how successful they are, but nonetheless illustrate his voracious appetite for creating and fashioning new ways of seeing. This includes, but is in no way limited to, evocative, biomorphic abstractions like ‘Abstraction: Fishing’ (c.1919-20), Modigliani-like portraits, often of two girls or young women, such as ‘The Florentines’ (c.1919), impressionistic botanical studies with densely worked over surfaces like ‘Flowers in White Pitcher’ (c.1925-30), and boldly coloured, impastoed still-lifes like ‘Cubist Fruit Still Life’ (c.1930), where Maurer’s urgent, gestural brushwork and colour palette of yellows, pinks and black outlines, draws a surprising likeness to Willem De Kooning’s ‘Women’ series.
In ‘The Yellow Screen’ (c.1927-28), we see a fauvist rendering of an interior uniquely offset by the back of a nude woman seen sitting on a stool reading a paper in the centre of the composition. Her supple flesh is rendered exquisitely life-like, but altogether the painting is unsuccessful. It is too forced. The two modes of image making are at odds with one another and the sum is less than the parts individually. It illustrates, it can be reasoned, the opposing forces of Maurer’s life that were amplified by his forced return to New York. The artistic trappings inextricably tied into his father’s approval and the agency and artistic freedom he had found in France that was now lost forever.
In 1932, at the age of 100, Louis was the subject of a critically lauded exhibition, in what became a final swansong. He died shortly thereafter.
Three weeks after his death, on 4 August 1932, Maurer took his own life in his father’s house.
While it would be disingenuous to ignore Maurer’s complex relationship with his father completely, its true effect can never be known for sure as Maurer left behind no known letters or diaries detailing his thoughts on his father. Speculation as to its psychological effect on Maurer and his art, as McCausland had been preoccupied with in her book, steals focus away from where it needs to be, which Epstein’s persuasive reassessment of Maurer argues for, too: his work, shifting man to artist, and martyr to visionary.
