I’ve loved Alfred Maurer’s work and been quietly obsessed by his story for so long that I could have sworn I’d devoted a post or two to his work—but a scan through the back catalogue suggests it isn’t so! This week, a quick gloss on his career — and next week, the ever-more interesting story of his sad and strange life.
Alfred Maurer Self Portrait (detail), oil on canvas, 1897.
If you were a promising young painter in America at the turn of the 19th century, you were a realist with Impressionist flourishes, and you had your eye on Whistler, Eakins, and Homer. And if you were promising enough—that is, passably similar in general panache to any of these three Titans—you went to Europe to refine your craft. Alfred Maurer was just such a promising young painter in the 1890s, and after decamping to Paris at the age of 29, his abundantly Whistler-esque scenes1 won the support of Eakins and Homer at the 1901 Carnegie International. Maurer collected prizes in Manhattan, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Belgium in the early years of the century, “the white hope of the mauve decade . . . along with [William Merritt] Chase.”
Then one day, “he met Matisse . . . and what happened to him was nobody’s business except the bomb squad’s.”2 That is, the work exploded in a riot of expressive brushstroke and radiant color. His visit to the epochal 1905 Salon d’Automne is the earliest we can date Maurer’s conversion to Fauvism, but when it happened, it was overwhelming. Within a few years, his “piquant, Whistler-like poses” had been entirely replaced by the art of the Wild Beasts.3
This is where Maurer stops being like any other promising young artist of the late 19th century. Those early canvases—brilliantly composed, elegantly observed, freshly painted—have so little to do with the Fauvist paintings that followed. There’s no transitional work (that I know of): it’s as if he saw the idea one day, understood it immediately, and moved directly there. That’s not the arc of any other American modernist—it’s not even the arc of Matisse’s career.
But even more singular is that Maurer was one of only a very few Americans that were practicing at the cutting edge of modernism in Europe as it happened. There were plenty of Americans there, but they didn’t all know quite what to do with themselves. Patrick Henry Bruce4 spent a decade finding his own voice, and Edward Hopper seems to have just bumbled through. Maurer wasted no time, and the severity of his Fauvist transition is impressive in contrast to his American peers. He joined a fresh-faced John Marin for a joint exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 in 1909, “by 1912 Maurer was acting— with his friend the painter William Glackens—as a European agent for [Albert] Barnes, rounding up the work of significant contemporaries. (He turned an extra penny by selling Argyrol, the eye antiseptic patented by Dr. Barnes, to doctors and druggists throughout France.)”5
Maurer was represented by four paintings in the groundbreaking Armory Show of 1913, and soon thereafter, he was forced to flee the widening European war for New York. When he left, Maurer abandoned a trove of paintings in his Paris studio. Maurer was a dynamic painter and must have surmised that he’d paint more in a hurry—and anyway, he thought he’d be back. New York was warming to modern art, but Paris was still the eye of the storm. The next decade he did indeed produce a great many paintings, but none of them in Paris—Maurer never returned to the city that nurtured his modernist epiphany.
While his Fauvist canvases continued to roll off the easel for several years, “by 1916, probably influenced by his friend Arthur Dove, Maurer was working toward abstraction.” He ultimately left his Fauvist mode behind. The critic Henry McBride described his next phase:
“The idea and the style of his work seemed to change; he turned to the painting of elongated women, after the pattern of Modigliani.”6
That was the state of his work—interesting cubist experiments and eery, Modigliani-esque women—when Maurer “acquired a permanent dealer, the supportive and accommodating Erhard Weyhe, who in 1924 bought the entire contents of Maurer's studio, some 255 works, for $2,000, and thereafter showed him consistently.” Most of the work of Maurer’s final years passed through Weyhe: his studies of heads of women; his cubist and abstract works; and a body of post-Fauvist landscapes.
II. Rediscovery.
But there is a second significant corpus of Maurer’s work that survived his tragic death in 1932—the Parisian material of 1906–1914 that crossed the pond for neither the Armory Show, nor Stieglitz, nor Barnes. These paintings passed from the painter’s landlord to a collector in 1925—the sale covered back rent when it became clear that Maurer was never returning to Europe. These works stunned critics when Danenberg Galleries showed them in 1973. Hilton Kramer gushed:
“They are so fine, so perfect in their characteristic Fauvist color and touch, that they seem almost too good to be true. What strikes one most forcefully in most of the Maurers one knows is a certain dryness in the artist’s paint quality, a certain matte quality even where the color is intended to be brilliant and jewel‐like. In the “lost” paintings that have now been recovered at Danenberg’s, the paint quality is so consistently succulent, so juicy and ‘French’ in its texture and handling, that they almost suggest another order of sensibility. These paintings are also in remarkably fine condition, which Maurer’s paintings often are not.”
The body of work is so excellent that Kramer paused in his effusion to emphasize that he believed they were authentic, as scholarship has continued to affirm. The Danenberg Galleries show ran concurrently with feuding gallery shows (at Weyhe and Babcock) and with a major retrospective at the National Gallery. The revelatory “lost” paintings at Danenberg traveled next to the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
III. A Better Craftsman.
Kramer closes the matter in his 1973 review of the material with the observation:
“Maurer, it seems, was a better craftsman in Paris than he was in New York.”7
This is, perhaps, the saddest understatement. Maurer was great in America as a young man, and great again in Paris, 1905-1910. But when he returned to New York after Paris, still in his prime, this unstoppable force hit an immoveable object: his father, Louis Maurer. The elder Maurer also an artist, and, in years past, a household name in America when almost no painters were. And if that doesn’t sound like a problem to you, join us next week when we’ll consider why Louis Maurer died in July of 1932 of old age while Alfred died two weeks later at the end of a rope.
Thanks for reading, and join us for “Maurer Father and Son” next week, right here!
Jonathan
The Whitney owns but seldom hangs a stunning, juicy one.
As quoted by Nick Madormo in “The Early Career of Alfred Maurer: Paintings of Popular Entertainments,” The American Art Journal, vol. 15, No. 1, 1983, p. 4.
Nick Madormo, “The Early Career of Alfred Maurer: Paintings of Popular Entertainments,” The American Art Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 4-34.
Our article on Bruce here.
Grace Glueck, “Art Review; Diving Into Modernism, School After School,” The New York Times, Dec. 10, 1999, Section E, p. 50.
As quoted in Jerome Myers, Artist in Manhattan, 1940, p. 107.
Hilton Kramer, “Maurer: Lost and Found,” The New York Times, 1973: “The show at Danenberg's is something else — a revelation that raises almost as many questions as it purports to answer. For this exhibition is said to bring us the “lost” Fauve paintings of Maurer's Paris period — the paintings he left behind in his studio when he was obliged to return to New York at the start of World War I which his Paris landlord is reported to have sold in 1925 for back rent.”