Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard of Modernism

American painter Alfred Maurer (1868–1932) worked within an international circle of avant-garde artists, and his friendships with key figures, including the collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein as well as Dr. Albert Barnes, positioned him at the nexus of new and changing ideas about art at the turn of the century. First recognized for his elegant fin-de-siècle figure paintings, Maurer brought his painterly skills to increasingly adventurous masterworks of modernism, championing Fauvism and the French avant-garde in America. Toward the end of his life, he created radical and daring imagery that forecast innovations in abstraction. In this important reevaluation of his work, Stacey B. Epstein shows that Maurer’s trajectory is not one of disjointed periods of distinct or contradictory styles, but rather a deliberately developed, unbroken progression of integrity and skill, with each phase further engaging color, composition, and design in innovative directions. This impressive volume, with more than 200 color and black-and-white plates, illustrates Maurer’s invaluable contributions to the trajectory of American art history, while underscoring his role in shaping the development of modernism in America.