Alfred Henry Maurer
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(b New York, 21 April 1868; d New York, 4 Aug 1932).
American painter. He studied at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1884 and briefly at the Académie Julian, Paris, during 1897. He received critical success with academic paintings of single female figures in interiors and genre scenes of café society, which reflected the influence of the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and William Merritt Chase, for example At the Café (c. 1905; St Petersburg, Hermitage). His long residence in Paris from 1897, his participation in various independent salons and his association with Leo and Gertrude Stein led to his interest in avant-garde art. He may have been one of a group of Americans who studied briefly with Henri Matisse. By 1907 he was producing vigorously painted Fauvist landscapes, such as Landscape with Red Tree (c. 1907-8; New York, Mr and Mrs John C. Marin jr priv. col., see exh. cat., p. 42), which he exhibited in New York at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, in 1909 and at the Folsom Gallery in 1913.
Maurer returned permanently to New York in 1914 and continued to paint Fauvist landscapes into the 1920s. During his last decade he also painted still-lifes that were synthetic Cubist table-top arrangements and enigmatic studies of heads that indicated his distraught emotional state, for example Two Heads (Abstraction) (1931/2; Williamstown, MA, Williams Coll. Mus. A.). The single and paired heads had large eyes and elongated faces; under the influence of analytic Cubism, Maurer sometimes fragmented them. These stylized heads became his most personal contribution to modernism. Maurer's modernist art was largely ignored until 1924, when the Weyhe Gallery in New York accorded him the first of several one-man exhibitions, which met with critical success. (Source: ILENE SUSAN FORT, "Alfred H. Maurer," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press: Accessed March 18, 2004), http://www.groveart.com)
