Alfred Henry Maurer

Background

Alfred Henry Maurer was born on April 21, 1868, in New York City.

Education

In 1897, after studying with the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and painter William Merritt Chase, Maurer left for Paris, where he stayed the next four years, joining a circle of American and French artists. Finding the instruction at the Academie Julian too limited, he spent most of his time copying in the Louvre.

Career

He worked in the family lithographic business and studied art at the National Academy of Design. In 1897 he went to Paris and four years later won the $1, 500 first prize and gold medal at the international exhibit of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa. , for his Whistlerian Arrangement (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

A friend of the author Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, about 1907 Maurer became one of the first Americans to embrace fauvism, and he introduced the American abstractionist Arthur G. Dove to this style. In 1909 Maurer held his first one-man exhibition at the Photo-Secession Gallery, New York City, under the aegis of the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. After the exhibition Maurer returned to Paris, but in 1914 the outbreak of World War I forced him to return to the United States, which he never left again, although he always hoped to go back to Paris.

Maurer's aesthetic evolution was a violent reaction against the academicism of his Currier-and-Ives artist father, Louis Maurer. Back in the United States, Maurer led an almost hermit-like existence in the family residence headed by his father, who died at the age of 100, just two weeks before his son's suicide in New York, on August 4, 1932.

Achievements

• Maurer's early works reveal the influence of such European art movements as fauvism and cubism. Toward the end of his life he created a personal expressionism in his depiction of elongated and distorted faces.

Connections

Father:

Louis Maurer