Landscape - Summer Light, Alfred Henry Maurer

Archive Label 2009:
From 1897 to the outbreak of World War I, Alfred Maurer lived in Paris where he became one of the first American artists to confront the vanguard European movements of fauvism and cubism. Maurer was a regular guest at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, the site of the famous Saturday night soirees of Leo and Gertrude Stein. It was here that the painter first became acquainted with the art of Cezanne and Matisse. Under their influence, Maurer’s style was transformed from the naturalism of William Merritt Chase and compositional devices of James McNeill Whistler to a powerful interpretation of fauvism.

In 1909 Maurer’s new paintings were exhibited in New York at Alfred Stieglitz’ Gallery 291 along with works by John Marin. The Stieglitz Gallery provided the milieu in the United States most sympathetic with Maurer’s modernist aims. However, the critical response to Maurer’s work in the 1909 show, another 291 exhibit in 1910 and finally the 1913 Armory Show was mostly unfavorable. Maurer was forced by the war to return to New York in 1914. He was never to return to Europe.

Maurer’s landscapes in particular demonstrate the expressive vitality which the artist discovered in the fauve palette of Matisse. Though still dependent on the visual world, Maurer abstracted the landscape motif with a high pitch of color, vigorous brushstrokes and cubist spatial constructions. He wanted to express the “emotional significance of the scene” without the intrusion of black paint which he felt had a “deadening effect” on color. Maurer found it impossible to present an exact transcription of the real world, for he insisted that art should be an “intensification of nature.” Landscape - Summer Light exemplifies the artist’s opinion that painting was primarily “the beautiful arrangement of color values - that is, harmonized masses of pigment, more of less pure.”

Maurer’s life was wrought with tragedy. He lived under the shadow of a domineering father, a successful commercial artist, who supported Alfred financially buy consistently refused to recognize his son’s artist accomplishments. In 1932, just two weeks after his father’s death, Alfred Maurer committed suicide at the age of sixty-four.