A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of April
Weathered Log
April 21, 1868 was the birthdate of Alfred Henry Maurer, the American modernist painter.
Maurer’s 1901 oil painting “An Arrangement”, which was compared to the work of Whistler in its color sense and fluid handling of paint, made his reputation in the American art world. The painting received first prize at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition, whose jurors included Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. In 1905, he won the third medal at the Liege Exposition in Belgium and a gold medal at the International Exposition in Munich.
At age thirty-six, in Paris, deviating from what everyone called “acceptable” painting styles, Alfred Maurer changed his methods sharply and from that point on painted only in a cubist or fauvist manner. His break from realism and new commitment to modernism, fostered by exposure to the art collected by his friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, subsequently cost him his international reputation. Four of his paintings from this period were included in the legendary Armory Show of 1913. He acquired esteem in avant-garde circles. He did not, however, find the popular following he needed to make a living and his father denied him any support.
For the next seventeen, increasingly depressed years, Maurer painted in a garret in his father’s house on the West Side of Manhattan and gained only limited critical acclaim. He participated in prestigious exhibitions, such as “The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters” in 1916, a New York show which featured seventeen of the most significant native modernists of the time. 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 death of his mother in 1917, however, intensified his gradual withdrawal from the world.
In 1932, Alfred Maurer took his own life by hanging, several weeks after his father’s death. As the art historian Sheldon Reich observed, had Maurer been a European or remained in Europe in 1914, he would probably be discussed today in the same terms applied to Vlaminck or Derain, both principle members of the Fauvist Movement in Europe. Instead, he became a citizen of a country with very limited interest in bold artistic experimentation and took his place as part of that “tragic fraternity of artists who during their lifetimes have suffered the tortures of neglect.”
Maurer’s works are included today in the many museum collections: Carnegie Museum of Art, Chicago Art Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, among others.