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Alfred Henry Maurer

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Alfred Henry MaurerAmerican, 1868 - 1932

Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932): An Early American Modernist

Alfred H. Maurer, a painter of the same generation as the Ashcan School artists William Glackens, Robert Henri, George B. Luks, and John Sloan, was one of the earliest American artists to embrace avant-garde art, playing a critical role in the early cross-fertilization of modernist aesthetics between Northern America and Europe. Maurer began painting in the manner of John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase, who both owed a debt to French Impressionism. However, while living in Paris between 1897 and 1914, Maurer came to be influenced by the work of the American expatriate artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, one of the great champions of the Aesthetic Movement which first posited the concept of "art for art's sake." Maurer later came into contact with the work of early European modernist artists, such as the Fauves and the Cubists, which influenced his artistic style dramatically. While the more traditional paintings of his successful early career, such as Woman in Interior (right), earned him high regard, the Fauvist landscapes as well as Cubist-inspired still-lifes of his later career, among them Red Table-Top Still Life (center right), were only appreciated by a small circle of artists and connoisseurs. In his portraits of women painted during the 1920s, Maurer moved progressively away from naturalism towards abstraction. The mannered qualities of his stylized female portraits, among them the small oil panel Head (far right), have frequently been compared to the work of Sandro Botticelli and Amedeo Modigliani, earning Maurer the title of Modern Byzantine. The three paintings by Maurer on view here demonstrate the artist's versatility and his transition from late nineteenth-century aestheticism to early twentieth-century modernism.

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Head
Alfred Henry Maurer
1926
Object number: 2000.8
Landscape
Alfred Henry Maurer
ca. 1916
Object number: 2000.2b
Red Table Top Still Life
Alfred Henry Maurer
ca. 1919
Object number: 2000.2a
Woman in Interior
Alfred Henry Maurer
1901
Object number: 83.8.33