Alfred Henry Maurer 1868 - 1932

Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, 1901
New York, Weyhe Gallery, January 1931
Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, Entering the Twentieth Century, 1933

Alfred Maurer's early artistic training began in the late 1880s at the National Academy of Design in New York where he was predominantly under the tutelage of Edgar Melville Ward.   On Sundays Maurer also attended Ward's informal morning painting classes, held at the Tenth Street Studio Building; here he would have undoubtedly encountered another of the building's tenants -- William Merritt Chase.  While it is unclear whether Maurer trained under Chase directly, the stylistic influence of the elder artist on Maurer's early work is indisputable.  It is also not entirely surprising, given Chase's status in the world of American art at the turn of the century; not only was he the pre-eminent artist of his generation, and its most influential teacher, but he was also widely recognized as the ultimate arbiter of taste.

In 1897 Maurer sailed for Paris, where he would spend the next 17 years immersed in what was irrefutably the artistic and cultural capital of the world.  Enrolled briefly at the Académie Julian, Maurer quickly tired of the traditional curriculum dictated by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and joined fellow artists such as Frederick Carl Frieseke and Henry Ossawa Tanner at the American Art Association in Paris.   Working outside of the conservative academy had little detrimental effect on Maurer's development; by the turn of the century he was exhibiting extensively in both the United States and Europe, and to generous critical acclaim.   In addition to annual inclusion in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, his 1901 submission of An Arrangement (The Whitney Museum, 1901) to the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh earned him the organization's coveted gold medal.  As with many of his works from this period, An Arrangement was figurative, but while reminiscent of Chase's canvases, it also strongly evoked the influence of James Abbott Whistler who Maurer had come to revere for his forays into aestheticism and tonalism, his assimilation of japonisme, and his doctrine of "art for art's sake."

Painted circa 1900, The Woman in White epitomizes Maurer's early style of romantic realism. In a carefully arranged composition, he establishes the primacy of the figure by depicting his model in full length, set against an austere, reductive background formulated by two horizontal planes of muted gray hues.  The delicacy of tone, restrained palette and fluid paint handling recall Whistler's early portraits and Sargent's Venetian scenes, which in turn owed a debt to seventeenth century masters such as Velasquez and Hals. 

Meanwhile, there exists an exquisite tension within the canvas, established by the carefully rendered twist in the figure's torso. This movement begins first in the figure's head and waist as she turns back to coquettishly peer at the viewer from just under the brim of her hat.   The slight bend in her left knee suggests the viewer has caught her in mid-step, just as she grasps the voluminous skirt of her dress so as to position it behind her.  Maurer further accentuates the energy of her motion by weaving the ink-black sash circling her mid-section through the bow at her back and then again through her hand so that it falls diagonally, bisecting the white column of her garment.

In 1904 Maurer was introduced to Gertrude and Leo Stein, who would, in turn, introduce him to the most progressive modern artists in Paris.  Immediately entranced by the work of Matisse and Picasso, Maurer was a dedicated Fauvist by 1907, having permanently shed his Whistlerian and romantic realist style.  His embrace of modernism was an act of totality, and he never returned to accomplished figure paintings evident in The Woman in White which had brought him such success.