Art: Uneasy Pioneer

In 1931 two artists named Maurer had shows in Manhattan. One was a 99-year-old curiosity, spruce and sprightly Louis Maurer, the last living Currier & Ives illustrator, whose traditional sporting prints and genre scenes had sold like hotcakes in the mid-19th Century. The other was slender, sad-eyed Alfred, his 62-year-old bachelor son, who painted hard-to-sell pictures of elongated, wistful shop girls and abstractions of heads and still lifes that were anything but traditional. Papa Maurer’s show was a huge success to which son Alfy’s was little more than a half-noticed footnote.

Last week the tables were turned. Peppery Louis Maurer’s works were safely tucked away in brochures of Americana or relegated to den and study walls, but Alfred’s paintings were drawing crowds to a big, impressive Maurer show at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center.

Dangerous Company. Gallerygoers inspecting the 81 paintings could plot Alfred Maurer’s uneasy and significant course through the first stormy years of this century. Starting as a cigar and soap-label designer in the ’90s, Alfy decided by the age of 30 that art was more important than a good living; he lit out for Paris. Soon he was painting competent, easy-to-take hybrids of Sargent and Whistler, and with them winning prizes and acclaim. With An Arrangement, a low-keyed study of a girl in shirtwaist and skirt kneeling on an oriental carpet, he pulled down the fattest plum the U.S. had to offer an artist, $1,500 and a gold medal for the best painting in the 1901 Carnegie International. Collectors began buying his conventional canvases, museums began displaying them.

Then Alfred Maurer fell into revolutionary company. At Gertrude and Leo Stein’s famous Saturday evenings, he met some of the pioneers of modern French painting. Around Paris he caught glimpses of the work of les fauves, the “wild beasts”—Matisse, Rouault, Dufy, Derain —whose daring compositions and brilliant colors were setting French art on its ear. His own academic interiors and portraits looked drab and uninspired by comparison. In 1904, renouncing his old formal ways, he flirted with impressionism and became the first U.S. artist to follow up the experiments of les fauves.

Attenuated Women. When Alfred came home in 1914, his father was horrified by his son’s radical ideas and strangely colored landscapes, exiled him to a tiny back bedroom in the family’s Manhattan brownstone. There, earnest, hard-working Alfred Maurer painted the attenuated young women with bedroom eyes, the wraiths of young shop girls and waitresses whom he met on inexpensive summer vacations up the Hudson. There, above the Victorian opulence of his father’s rooms, he brooded over the composition of abstractions such as George Washington (see cut).

By the mid-’30s the abstractions had brought him general recognition as a pioneer in modern U.S. art. But for Alfred Maurer himself, the recognition came too late. In 1932, after he was past 100, Louis Maurer died and Alfred moved down from his crowded back room to his father’s large, airy quarters. In two weeks, apparently overwhelmed by a sense of failure and loneliness, he went back to his hall bedroom and hanged himself.