Alfred Henry Maurer (1868 -1932)

Called the first American modernist painter, Alfred Maurer began as a traditionalist and then explored many styles including impressionism, tonalism, and cubism.

He was born in New York City, the son of Louis Maurer who was a commercial artist for Currier & Ives. Young Alfred learned commercial art from working in the same business as his father. In 1884, he enrolled in the National Academy of Design and in 1897, left for Paris where he stayed until 1914 and studied briefly at the Academie Julian.

Before World War I, he was drawn to the work of Dutch painter Franz Hals and the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez and was also influenced by Americans John Singer Sargent and James Whistler. In 1901, his painting titled "An Arrangement," done in the rich, impressionist, tonal style of Whistler won first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition.

Between 1905 and 1907, Maurer, influenced by his friendship with expatriates and avant-garde focused Gertrude and Leo Stein as well as Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne, moved away from tonalism to Fauvism, and for this reason, some have called him the first modernist American painter.

He returned to New York City and circulated among most of the young modernist painters of the city and seemed to much influenced by the painting of Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. Interestingly he was not of particular interest to Alfred Stieglitz, who prided himself on sponsoring leading edge artists, but he did exhibit in Stieglitz' Photo-Secession Gallery in 1909.

He exhibited in the Armory Show of 1913, when modernist art was first widely exhibited in America, and with the Society of Independent Artists from 1917 until he died. In the 1920s, he focused on still lifes and figural pieces, many of them Cubist in style.

In 1932, he committed suicide, which some attributed to his alienation from popular acceptance and from his stressful relationship with his father who lived to be one-hundred years old.