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.

About the Author

Stacey B. Epstein is the foremost scholar on Alfred Maurer and has curated numerous exhibitions on modernism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. Epstein holds Masters and Ph.D. degrees from the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on Alfred H. Maurer. Dr. Epstein has written extensively on Maurer, including Alfred H. Maurer: Aestheticism to Modernism 1897‑1932 (Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1999), Alfred H. Maurer: Modernist Expressions (Demuth Museum, 2004), Alfred H. Maurer: Reconsidered (American Art Review, 2004), Alfred H. Maurer: Fauve in Focus (Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2006). In addition to her work on Maurer, Dr. Epstein has curated and co‑curated a range of other American modernist exhibitions, including Concerning Expressionism: American Modernism and the German Avant‑Garde (Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1998), Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Cubism on American Art 1909‑1936 (Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2001), Pathways and Parallels: Roads to Abstract Expressionism (Hollis Taggart).

Distributed for the Addison Gallery of American Art

Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard of Modernism 

Stacey B. Epstein

$6 5.00 * ISBN: 978‑0‑300‑20780‑4 PB * 256 pages, with 176 color + 25 b/w illus.

Publication date: March 10, 2015

yalebooks.com