Alfred Henry Maurer
Still Life with Pear, 1928–32
Oil on board
18 x 22 inches
Maurer is often acknowledged as the first American modernist painter. His aesthetic trajectory began with traditional training before moving through a number of dramatic stylistic phases: aestheticism, Ashcan School, tonalism, fauvism, and cubism.
In the 1920s Maurer became an important artistic pioneer, delving into the world of cubism, a development that eventually crystallized in the works he produced between 1927 and 1932. These works are acknowledged as his most innovative, with some of the most remarkable being still lifes. The principal forces that guided Maurer’s still lifes were the works of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Maurer’s relentless pursuit of an authentic expression led renowned critic Clement Greenberg to regard Maurer as “perhaps the only authentic Cubist artist America has produced.” Still Life with Pear is a striking example of Maurer’s late cubist still-life compositions, using his own modernist pictorial language.