Artwork Title: Portrait of Alfred Maurer

Portrait of Alfred Maurer, 1908

Susan Watkins

Watkins’ Portrait of Alfred Maurer (1908) is a major work, showing this American modernist painter, who lived from 1868-1932. He too had studied with William Merritt Chase in the 1890s, and went to Paris in 1897, where he seems to have spent much of his time copying in the Louvre. He returned to the US in about 1901, and seems to have gone back to Paris in about 1904. [https://eclecticlight.co/2017/10/21/brief-candles-susan-watkins-the-woman-in-white/] Like Watkins and many other American artists of her generation, the New York painter Alfred Maurer (1868-1932) spent his formative years as an expatriate, working in Paris from 1897 to 1914. But unlike Watkins, he fully embraced the tenets of the Paris avant-garde. He became friends with the writers Leo and Gertrude Stein and was influenced by the revolutionary, brilliant-hued canvases of Henri Matisse and his fellow Fauves. His embrace of the avant-garde was marked by a shift in his temperament. The formerly light-hearted painter became more serious and single-minded as he struggled to perfect his new style. Watkins' portrait captures the newly transformed Maurer. Attired in his signature felt hat, cape, gloves and cane, he seems a decidedly formal presence, a man of purpose ready to exit the doorway behind him and move on to his next appointment. Though we know almost nothing about Watkins' Parisian circle of friends, the mere fact of this portrait suggests her familiarity with at least some of the key players of the expatriate American avant-garde. [http://collection.chrysler.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/26/title-asc?t:state:flow=e8801f85-dc1e-429e-9af2-cbba603f87b7]
Uploaded on Dec 25, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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