Alfred H. Maurer

Alfred H. Maurer (1868-1932) was one of the pioneering American modernists whose long career carried him from academic realism to the leading edge of European avant-garde practice and back to the United States, where he continued to work as one of the most independent and adventurous American painters of his generation. Maurer's paint handling and free approach to his subjects forecast the work of a whole generation of Abstract Expressionists, including Hans Hofmann and many of his students, who, like Maurer, depicted subjects with complete and total freedom.

Maurer trained initially in New York and then spent nearly two decades in Paris, where he immersed himself in the great transformations reshaping European art in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. His early academic work gave way to a passionate engagement with Cézanne, Fauvism, and Cubism, and he was among the very first American painters to fully absorb these European innovations. After his return to the United States, he continued to work in a modernist idiom that placed him well ahead of most American painters of his generation.

During Maurer's latter period, he made regular painting excursions in the Hudson River Valley region of Marlboro, a hamlet in the small town of Marlborough, New York. He rendered many of his paintings from the 1920s in bravura fashion, allowing color and form to dissolve into abstract passages and patterns. Maurer generally visited Marlboro each year from April or May until November, and he occasionally made special trips to this region during select winter months. During his extended Marlboro stays, which began around 1916 and lasted until the time of his death in 1932, he resided at the Shady Brook farm. While staying at this family-run boardinghouse, Maurer devoted a great deal of time to painting landscapes.

Maurer exhibited his compositions back in New York City at the Weyhe Gallery, which began representing the artist in 1924. Beginning in 1917, he also displayed them in numerous non-juried exhibitions such as those sponsored by the Society of Independent Artists. His paintings are held today in the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection, and other major American collections, where they remain among the defining images of early American modernism.