On August 5, 1932, The New York Times reported that on the previous day the artist A. H. Maurer had died. A suicide by hanging, it went on in gruesome detail, from a door-casing on the third floor in his home at 404 West Forty-third Street. It was another episode of an all-too-familiar American story—suicide: Patrick Henry Bruce in 1936, Pollock in 1956, Rothko in 1970; early deaths: Morton Schamberg and Arthur Frost, Jr. in 1918; forced cessation of work: Gerald Murphy by 1930. All were losses that modern American art could ill afford. Little wonder that modernism here could not develop any real depth.
Alfred Maurer played a major role in the development of modern art in America, and in the last four years of his life he created a body of Cubist still lifes that were a high point of world art. The obituary made no such observation, praising at length his prize-winning early paintings, but allotting only eight lines to the output of his last twenty-five years. The pattern was set: wonderful early on, working in the blacks and grays of Chase and Sargent, but thereafter hardly worth more than a brief mention.
One hoped that the recent monumental exhibition Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard of Modernism, organized by the noted Maurer scholar Stacey Epstein with Susan Faxon, the Associate Director and Curator of Art Before 1950 for the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy Andover (now on view at
William C. Agee (1936–2022) was Professor of Art History at Hunter College.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 34 Number 4, on page 58
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