ALFRED HENRY MAURER (American, 1868-1932). Abstract Portrait, circa 1930. Gouache on paper. 21 x 17 inches (53.3 x 43.2 ...

Description

ALFRED HENRY MAURER (American, 1868-1932)
Abstract Portrait, circa 1930
Gouache on paper
21 x 17 inches (53.3 x 43.2 cm)
Signed lower left: A.H. Maurer

PROVENANCE:
Estate of the artist, 1932-1941;
Mrs. Eugenia Maurer Fuerstenberg, (the artist's sister), and Alfred H. Maurer, (the artist's nephew);
Hudson D. Walker, New York, 1941;
Sylvan Cole;
Babcock Galleries, New York;
Private collection, New York.

In search of the refinements awarded by Parisian training, the precocious painter Alfred Maurer travelled to France in 1897, where he shifted his artistic direction from moody fin-de-siècle style portraits and genre scenes of café life to an avant-garde Cubist and Fauvist aesthetic. The speed by which he mastered in startling succession academic portraiture, Impressionistic urban subjects rendered with virtuoso brushwork and a high-keyed palette, Cézannesque and Fauvist still lifes and landscapes, and eventually Cubist portrait heads, caught the attention of art critics on both sides of the Atlantic. His work was included in major shows of contemporary painting of the period, including the 1907 Salon d'Automne, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery "291" and "An American Place" in 1909 and 1910, the Armory Show of 1913, and the 1916 Forum Exhibition at Anderson Galleries.

By the 1920s, Maurer devoted most of his time to developing Cubist still lifes and portraits. In 1928, he moved to a new studio and began working from a live model. Using the figure as both a focal and inspiration point, he created a series of paintings and drawings of "Cubist heads," of which this work is a fine, monumental example. Abstract Portrait uses lines to break apart the face and the upper torso of the subject into provocative shards or fanciful multicolored planes. The results had a wide spectrum of moods and, doubtless, meanings. The insightful poet and art critic Gerrit Henry, on viewing Maurer's works from this period, remarked that "here was an artist who knew just what he was undoing..." A champion of figurative painting at a time when conceptualism and art theory kept all painting on the defensive, Henry was keenly attuned to the work of painters, like Maurer, who shifted to abstraction only after having mastered representation at a very high level. Gerrit Henry regarded their abstraction as if it were representation in another mode, which it arguably was.




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