Paintings by Maurice Grosser

Born on October 23, 1903 in Huntsville, Alabama, Maurice Grosser was an American writer, art critic, and painter. He attended Harvard University and graduated with a degree in Mathematics with honors in 1924. While at Harvard, Grosser received painting instruction from painter and professor Denman Ross, a trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. Grosser also studied both life drawing and painting at Boston’s Architectural School and South Boston’s Art School,

Awarded Harvard’s Sheldon Fellowship for a two year period, Grosser was able to study painting in both France and Italy. In 1925 in Paris, he met for the second time and began a relationship with American composer and critic Virgil Thomson, who became his life partner and frequent collaborator. After meeting Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1926, they returned to the United States and took up residence at New York’s Hotel Chelsea, where they presided over a salon which attracted leading figures in the arts, such as writer and poet Frank O’Hara, composer Leonard Bernstein, author Tennessee Williams, and avant-garde composer John Cage

Maurice Grosser first began his collaborative work with Virgil Thomson around 1928, when he assisted in the production of Thomson’s new opera “Four Saints in Three Acts”. The libretto for the opera was prepared by Gertrude Stein, the music was composed by Thomson, and the scenario was developed by Grosser. This opera was noted for its musical content, its form, and its portrayal of the European saints by a cast of black performers, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director. 

Grosser next worked with Thomson on his provocative 1947 opera “The Mother of Us All”, based on the life of social reformer Susan B.  Anthony. The libretto for this opera was written by Gertrude Stein, who sent the finished work to Thomson in March of 1946, just a few months before her death in July. The two-act opera premiered in May of 1947 with soprano Dorothy Dow as Susan B. Anthony. The work was a 1956 Off-Broadway production, part of the Santa Fe Opera’s 1976 season, and staged at the New York City Opera in 2000 and the San Francisco Opera in 2003. 

A third collaboration between Maurice Grosser and Thomson was the 1985 “18 Portraits”. For many years, they had made portraits, some dating from the 1920s, of mutual friends in both music and paint forms. The portraits of each sitter were presented in eighteen separate bi-folios, with a single sheet insert consisting of two pages of music and an original lithograph of a  pencil and charcoal portrait.

A writer as well as a painter, Maurice Grosser lived among a circle of avant-garde authors, artists, and musicians. He spent long periods living and working abroad, first in Paris and later in Morocco, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Nigeria, Canada, and Brazil. As an artist, Grosser painted in a conservative realist style, in which he depicted structured landscapes in New England, and in the southern and western states. He was also a portraitist whose more famous subjects were  his companion, composer Virgil Thomson, Scottish operatic soprano Mary Garden, writer and playwright Jane Bowles, and British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead.

Between 1956 and 1967, Maurice Grosser served as art critic for “The Nation” magazine. As an author, he wrote four books on painting and art criticism, including “Painting in Public / Painting in Our Time” in 1948 and republished in 1964; “The Painter’s Eye” in 1951; the 1962 “Critic’s Eye”; and “Painter’s Progress” in 1971. Grosser’s memoir entitled “Visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas” was published posthumously in 2006 by New York Review Books. 

Maurice Grosser died on December 22, 1986, at the age of eighty-three. His ashes are interred at Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville, Alabama. Virgil Thomson died on September 30, 1989, in his suite at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan at age ninety-two. 

Note: Maurice and Virgil first met in 1920 while both were attending meetings of The Liberal Club at Harvard; but the intimate relationship between the two would not fully evolve until they met by chance in 1925 at the Parisian cafe “Deux Magots”.

Top Insert Image: Maurice Grosser, “Self Portrait”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, Location Unknown

Middle Insert Image: Maurice Grosser, “Self-Portrait”, 1985, Lithograph, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Maurice Grosser”, 1935, Silver Gelatin Print, Library of Congress