“Alfred H. Maurer:
Aestheticism to Modernism”
at Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.
November 30, 1999–January 22, 2000

Today the painter Alfred H. Maurer (1868–1932) is known mainly to aficionados of early American modernism, a circumstance that begs the question: which Maurer do they know? He was a painter with many stylistic incarnations, never content to settle into a single manner. Hollis Taggart Galleries’ remarkable and large exhibition follows the artist’s course from its academic beginning to his unexplained suicide in 1932.

A lifelong innovator, Maurer was trained, ironically enough, as a commercial artist. His father, Louis Maurer, worked as a painter and lithographer for Currier and Ives. Only one work on view in this show hearkens back to Alfred’s years as a graphic artist: Figure Study (1896), a slick, almost kitschy illustration, in watercolor and gouache, of a young woma ...

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