Alfred Maurer
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TARDY RECOGNITION is all too common, but Alfred Maurer's story is of a birthright missed. One of the earliest converts to the modern movement, he sacrificed to his conversion a success already established, and it was never recaptured.
He was born in New York in 1868, the son of a lithographer for Currier and Ives, Louis Maurer, who put him into the lithographic business at sixteen. Young Maurer gradually drifted toward a painting career, and set sail for Paris at twenty-nine. Here he developed rapidly. Within four years his tasteful Whistlerian style won him a first prize at the Carnegie Institute, and for three more years he repeated this success in exhibitions in America and abroad. But in 1904 he celebrated his birthday by breaking with academic painting, and took his place in the vanguard among the Fauves.
Stieglitz showed him in New York in 1909 along with John Marin, and the next year grouped him with Hartley, Weber and Dove; but Maurer's vivid notations were ill received and he continued to live in France until the first World War forced his return.
Poverty now obliged Maurer to come back into the family home. Louis Maurer, who had been able to retire at fifty, strongly disapproved of his son's newfangled painting, and some inescapable tension developed between him and his son--the aging father on a stepladder watching through a transom as his middleaged son struggled to paint in his back bedroom on the third floor. Alfred Maurer took an active part in the Independents, and Louis Maurer sent to it too. In 1925 the dealer E. Weyhe made history by buying up all of Maurer's paintings and holding several successful exhibitions, but this was apparently only a palliative and could not cure the morbid thraldom in which Maurer was held.
There was some basic split in Maurer's life, whether the division lay between conservative and modern, between Europe and America, between freedom and a strange psychological captivity. Maurer was a man who had the courage to take a stand but not the strength to win a battle, and his impasse became reflected in his work. About 1919 he began to paint an obsessive series of two girls' heads. These "sisters" are impossibly close, too close for distinct bodies. At times the heads fuse and join, at times recollections of Cubism break them into fragments. They carry a heavy load of self-portraiture and it is hard not to see them as the projected image of the painter's own divided and feminine personality. The transition to the magnificent and accusing SelfPortrait with Hat of 1927 is not too great, as though the artist's vision had momentarily cleared, and he had faced himself squarely.
What with the new interest in Americana in the thirties, Louis Maurer was given a one man show at the age of ninety-nine--his age was a news item in itself. He lived on through his hundredth birthday, which fell within a day of Washington's two-hundredth anniversary and was sufficient occasion for a further showing of Louis Maurer prints. Alfred Maurer responded to this apotheosis with a portrait of Washington, his last painting as it proved. It is a masterwork of latterday cubism--to allow for the necessary violence--with a black bar across the face of Washington as though it were a cancelled postage stamp.
Louis Maurer died soon after these events in the summer of 1932, and sixteen days later his ailing son hanged himself. Independence was apparently beyond Maurer's strength, but his real independence had gone into his work.
Maurer: 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. Nature, as we all know, is not consciously composed; and therefore it cannot give us a pure aesthetic emotion.
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