Tag: cubist

Fig. 1. Still Life with Doily by Alfred Henry Maurer (1868– 1932), c. 1930. Oil on hardboard, 17 7/8 by 21 1/2 inches. Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Alfred Maurer’s cubist still lifes Alfred Maurer was at the forefront of aesthetic developments throughout his prodigious thirty-five-year career. He came to international renown in the late 1890s as an artist of ambitious Whistlerian and realist paintings, but after the turn of the century he embraced the more progressive movements upending the art world. By 1906 Maurer was creating and exhibiting radical canvases on both sides of the Atlantic. He experimented with different modernist subjects and styles over the years, yet the most sophisticated and creative are arguably the cubist compositions he produced in the late 1920s and early ’30s. These paintings masterfully juggle artifice and reality and negotiate the space between intuition and imagination. They usher the viewer out of the realm of reason into a place where all seems possible.  Fig. 2. Alfred Henry Maurer by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), 1915 (printed later). Gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 by 7 5/8 inches. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The first half of Maurer’s mature career was spent living and working in and around Paris from 1897 to 1914. He ascended in the ranks of the avant-garde and emerged as an early and important advocate for modernism back in America. Described by contemporary critics as having “played the historic role of the first American artist to go fauve,”1 Maurer showed his new compositions in 1909 at 291, Alfred Stieglitz’s legendary New York gallery. Noted writer Paul Rosenfeld reflected on the impact of this exhibition in 1932, stating that the Maurer show “fell like a meteorite into