Alfred Henry Maurer (April 21, 1868 – August 4, 1932) was an American modernist painter. He exhibited his work in avant-garde circles internationally and in New York City during the early 20th century.
Biography
Maurer was born in New York City. He was the son of German-born Louis Maurer, a lithographer. At age sixteen, Maurer quit school to work at his father's lithographic firm. In 1897, after studying with the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and painter William Merritt Chase, Maurer left for Paris where he stayed the next four years, joining a circle of American and French artists. At the time, Maurer's style was realist.
His painting An Arrangement, received first prize at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition. Other awards received by Maurer included the Inness Jr. prize of the Salmagundi Club in 1900 and a bronze medal at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York in 1901. In 1905 he won the third medal at the Liege (Belgium) Exposition and a gold medal at the International Exposition in Munich.
Briefly returning to New York, determined to show his skeptical father that he could paint, Maurer painted what arguably is his most famous painting "An Arrangement," using a woman next door as a model and completing the work (on a borrowed piece of cardboard) in a matter of mere hours.
At age thirty-six, in Paris, deviating from what everyone (including himself) called "acceptable" painting styles, Maurer changed his methods sharply and from that point on painted only in the cubist and fauvist manner, subsequently risking his international reputation. An important early American avant-garde painter in 1909 he had a two-man exhibition with John Marin in New York City at the 291 gallery. Four of his paintings were included in the Armory Show of 1913.
Leaving Paris shortly before World War I, he returned to his father's house only to be denied support. For the next seventeen years Maurer painted in a garret in his father's house and was able to gain no critical acclaim. An American modernist he was friends with many important avant-garde American artists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and others during the early 20th century and until his death in 1932. He participated in important exhibitions held at the Anderson Galleries and others. He also exhibited regularly at the New York based Society of Independent Artists and was elected their director in 1919. In 1924 the New York dealer Erhard Weyhe bought the contents of Maurer's studio and represented the artist for the remainder of his career.
The artist Jerome Myers speaks of him in his autobiography "Artist In Manhattan" (Chapter XXVII: Among My Contemporaries) (1940)[1] "Alfred Maurer, whom I knew casually, had a pleasant personality. After his early talent had brought him a prize at the Carnegie Institute, he went to Paris, where he stayed for years. Through mutual friends, I had often heard of him, and when subsequently I came to Paris, we spent some time together.
There was no doubt that he was happy in his Parisian atmosphere. Like many other young Americans there, he was attracted by the life of the boulevards, the cares, the daily affinity with brother artists with whom he was then studying the problem of color. I found him experimenting with his close friend Eugene Ullman, who had adopted Paris with the same enthusiasm. In his appearance, Alfred Maurer was romantic, gay and debonnaire, the typical artist seemingly beyond all drab necessity.
His father, Louis Maurer, was an old-time artist, who had worked on the Currier & Ives lithographs. When I met him at an exhibition of the Independents at the Grand Central Palace, he was a quiet-mannered man, whom I took to be about seventy-five years old. Later I learned that he was then already ninety-five. He told me how surprised he was at the value and vogue attained by the Currier & Ives lithographs, which in his time had been merely ordinary subjects for simple homes, like the vast number of engravings of that period. Speaking of his son, Alfred, he evidently could not sympathize with—or, as he said, understand—the ultra-violets and ultra-blues of that phase of Alfred's work. He seemed so proud of what his son had done, but so grieved at what he was then doing.
For some reason, Alfred was subsequently forced to return to New York, leaving behind in Paris his beloved boulevards and the friends of his heart. The idea and the style of his work seemed to change; he turned to the painting of elongated women, after the pattern of Modigliani. Then Louis Maurer, seemingly outraged by his son's work, did an extraordinary thing. He gave an exhibition of his own paintings at the age of one hundred years, a record for all time. Between this unique rejuvenescence of his remarkable father, with the implied reproof against his own art, and the suffering due to ill health, the pit yawned and the unhappy Alfred Maurer left the scene of his sorrows a suicide, his gallant heart broken."
It is extremely difficult to run across any of Maurer’s paintings as most of his work is still privately owned.
Maurer took his own life by hanging several weeks after his father's death. At the time of his death, examples of his works were included in the Memorial Hall Museum in Philadelphia, PA, the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, DC. the Barnes Collection in Merion, PA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
References
1. ^ Jerome Myers, Artist in Manhattan, New York: American Artists Group, Inc. 1940.
§ "A.H. Maurer, Artist, Suicide by Hanging". New York Times. August 5, 1932.
§ Epstein, Stacey (1999). Alfred H. Maurer, Aestheticism to Modernism : 30 November 1999 through 15 January 2000, Hollis Taggart Galleries , New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries. ASIN B0006RBPVA.
