Maurice Braun was a Hungarian-born American artist who represented the style of Impressionism. His wonderful depictions of picturesque Californian landscapes masterly transmitted the tiny nuances of light and shade.
Background
Maurice Braun was born on October 1, 1877, in Bytca, Hungary (currently on the territory of Zilina, Slovakia). He was a son of Ferdinand Braun and Charlotte Leimdorfer.
When Maurice was nearly four years, the family relocated to the United States and settled down in New York City. It was about this time when young Braun created his first drawings. He often portrayed his friends.
While in the Big Apple, Braun, passionate by art, regularly visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent hours copying the paintings of great masters.
Education
Maurice Braun began his artistic training as an apprentice of a jeweler at the age of fourteen. Soon, he realized that he was more passionate by painting, and decide to enter the National Academy of Design against the will of his family. He became a student of the Academy in 1897.
During three years Braun spent there, he was taught portraiture and still life painting by Francis Coates Jones, George Willoughby Maynard, and Edgar H. Ward.
After graduation, he took private lessons from the American artist William Merritt Chase for a year. The pupil appropriated the Impressionist technique of his teacher.
From 1902 to 1903, Braun pursued his artistic training traveling around Europe. While on the trip, he explored the art of the old master painters visiting Berlin, Vienna and Hungary.
Maurice Braun started his career on his return to the United States from a one-year European trip in 1903. The artist settled down in New York City and by 1909 positioned himself as a portraitist. A year later, Braun relocated to Point Loma community of San Diego, California where he devoted himself to landscape painting.
Seventy-five of this canvases, as well as some portraits and New England landscapes, were presented at his debut solo exhibition in 1911 at the studio he had opened in the city. The show received good reviews from critics. From then on, Braun had regular exhibitions at the National Academy of Design and at the Carnegie Institute till 1915.
He was active in the artistic life of the community and in 1912 established the San Diego Academy of Art in his studio. He headed the Academy for some time. In a couple of years, he participated at the exhibition held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The shows at the Academy, as well as at other art places around the country, became regular. The next year, Maurice Braun co-founded the San Diego Art Guild.
At the beginning of the new decade, the painter came to the east. He opened a studio in Silvermine, Connecticut and worked there till his return to San Diego in 1924. Braun maintained both studios, in the east and in the West coasts the following period.
Five years later, Braun co-founded other art association in San Diego, the Contemporary Artists of San Diego. Despite the outbreak of the Great Depression, the artist continued to earn his living by painting. He came back to portraiture and created many still lifes in which he used the elements borrowed from the oriental art.
In the 1930s, the artist attended the peak of his career. His canvases were featured in various publications related to art, including California Southland, Literary Digest, National Motorist and Touring Topics.
Maurice Braun painted actively till the end of his life in 1941. To find inspiration for new sketches and paintings, the last years of his life, the artist did some automobile trips around such American states, as Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington.
Maurice Braun was an accomplished artist who disclosed the beauty of California not only to the citizens from other American states but to people living around the world.
He contributed to the development of the artistic life in San Diego founding and co-founding many art associations, including the San Diego Academy of Art, the San Diego Art Guild and the Contemporary Artists of San Diego.
During his lifetime, his talent was marked by many prestigious awards, including Gold Medals at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the Panama-California Exposition, the Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design and others.
Nowadays, Braun’s heritage is acquired in many public collections around the United States, such as the San Diego Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Laguna Museum of Art in Laguna Beach, Wichita Art Association in Kansas, the San Antonio Art League and others.
In 2013, a painting by Maurice Braun, ‘California splendor’, was purchased at Bonhams Auction House in Los Angeles for $188,500.
Maurice Braun believed in Theosophical statement that the art and doctrines of ancient civilizations influenced a lot the modern world.
He was also an adherent of transcendentalism.
Membership
Salmagundi Club
,
United States
Laguna Beach Art Association
,
United States
California Art Club
,
United States
San Diego Art Guild
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United States
Personality
Maurice Braun was a person with an independent spirit.
He never considered himself as an impressionist. However, he was fascinated by the canvases made by the representatives of the style. In particular, he liked the use of color by Claude Monet to change light on his paintings.
Quotes from others about the person
"Maurice Braun's serenity before the vexations of life and the complexities of nature impressed all who knew him. He was an artist of deep philosophical conviction for whom all expressions of life were divine. So it is natural that in the look and feel of his work you should find pastoral peace. This peace is born of his sense of wholeness. Through an interplay of religious respect and esthetic resolve he found equilibrium and this was for him, as it can be for us, the secret of life itself." John F. Kienitz, art historian
Connections
Maurice Braun married Zoa Hazel Boyer on January 30, 1919. The family produced two children, a daughter named Charlotte Leclère and a son Ernest Boyer.
Second nature: Four early San Diego landscape painters
The book on Charles A. Fries, Maurice Brown, Alfred R. Mitchell and Charles Reiffel includes a charming foreword, four well-researched and concise essays on the life and output of each artist and nearly 100 handsome color plates
