Art December 2015
Exhibition note
“Alfred Maurer: Art on the Edge” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
On August 5, 1932, The New York Times reported that on the previous day the artist A. H. Maurer had died. A suicide by hanging, it went on in gruesome detail, from a door-casing on the third floor in his home at 404 West Forty-third Street. It was another episode of an all-too-familiar American story—suicide: Patrick Henry Bruce in 1936, Pollock in 1956, Rothko in 1970; early deaths: Morton Schamberg and Arthur Frost, Jr. in 1918; forced cessation of work: Gerald Murphy by 1930. All were losses that modern American art could ill afford. Little wonder that modernism here could not develop any real depth.
Alfred Maurer played a major role in the development of modern art in America, and in the last four years of his life he created a body of Cubist still lifes that were a high point of world art. The obituary made no such observation, praising at length his prize-winning early paintings, but...
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