“Alfred H. Maurer:
Aestheticism to Modernism”
at Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.
November 30, 1999–January 22, 2000
Today the painter Alfred H. Maurer (1868–1932) is known mainly to
aficionados of early American modernism, a circumstance that begs the
question: which Maurer do they know? He was a painter with many stylistic
incarnations, never content to settle into a single manner. Hollis Taggart
Galleries’ remarkable and large exhibition
follows the artist’s course from its academic beginning to his
unexplained suicide in 1932.
A lifelong innovator, Maurer was trained, ironically enough, as a
commercial artist. His father, Louis Maurer, worked as a painter and
lithographer for Currier and Ives. Only one work on view in this show
hearkens back to Alfred’s years as a graphic artist: Figure Study (1896), a
slick, almost kitschy illustration, in watercolor and gouache, of a young
woman bearing a basket of groceries down a windy street. It
hung next to another Figure Study—an oil on canvas from four years
later—which shows Maurer painting in his first mature style, one influenced
primarily by Whistler and William Merritt Chase. A mix of Chase’s
romantic realism and Whistler’s moody aestheticism, this Study is a
full-length portrait of a dark-haired woman wearing a light,
robin’s-eggshell-blue dress against a ground of pale and darker
yellows. Maurer painted it
in Paris, where he had moved in 1897 to study at the Académie Julian, and
where he continued to live until 1914, when World War I forced him to return