About Alfred Henry Maurer
Maurer killed himself weeks after his father died at the age of one hundred. The suicide has been the subject of speculation ever since: whether it was grief, or release from decades of paternal disapproval, or the final consequence of a career that the art world had refused to acknowledge. He hanged himself in the family home in 1932. He was sixty-four.
He was born in New York in 1868, the son of Louis Maurer, a German-born lithographer. At sixteen his father pulled him out of school to work in the family firm. He hated it. After thirteen years he left for Paris, where he painted representational works that won prizes across Europe: a Salmagundi Club prize in 1900, medals at Buffalo, Liege and Munich.
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Alfred Henry Maurer
Maurer killed himself weeks after his father died at the age of one hundred. The suicide has been the subject of speculation ever since: whether it was grief, or release from decades of paternal disapproval, or the final consequence of a career that the art world had refused to acknowledge. He hanged himself in the family home in 1932. He was sixty-four. He was born in New York in 1868, the son of Louis Maurer, a German-born lithographer. At sixteen his father pulled him out of school to work in the family firm. He hated it. After thirteen years he left for Paris, where he painted representational works that won prizes across Europe: a Salmagundi Club prize in 1900, medals at Buffalo, Liege and Munich. Then, at thirty-six, he abandoned representation entirely. Exposure to the collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein, and to the paintings of Matisse and the Fauves, converted him to modernism. The shift cost him everything: his international reputation, his commercial viability, and any remaining paternal respect. Stieglitz exhibited him at 291 alongside O'Keeffe, Dove and Hartley, but the American market had little interest in bold experiment. In 1914, the war forced him back to New York, leaving roughly 250 paintings in his Paris studio. His father refused to pay shipping costs. In 1925, his French landlord sold the entire collection for back rent. Art historian Sheldon Reich later observed that had Maurer remained in Europe, he would be discussed alongside Vlaminck and Derain. Instead he became part of what Reich called "that tragic fraternity of artists who during their lifetimes have suffered the tortures of neglect".
