ALFRED MAURER and Guy Pene du Bois were both at work during the early years of American Modernism. Yet the two are seldom mentioned in the same critical breath and not, it seems, because they were a generation apart in age. Now they are sharing the same space at Nardin Fine Arts, in Yellow Monkey Village in Cross River, and the contrast is instructive.
Maurer (1868-1932) was one of the first Americans to pursue Modernism in Paris. An alumnus of the National Academy of Design in Manhattan, he started his career in the late 1890's, painting in a Whistlerian style and exhibiting at the Paris Salon as well as in those of the Carnegie Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago and other academies. The Post-Impressionism he saw in Paris began taking effect around 1904 and, in 1909, he had his first show as a fauve at Stieglitz's 291 Gallery.
All this was accomplished in the face of furious opposition from his father, Louis, who was a prosperous commerical artist and on whom he depended for money. Even so, things might have gone well for the younger Maurer had the outbreak of World War I not forced him to return from Paris to Manhattan and live with his father. Presumably, there was more to the day-in, day-out antagonism than has yet met the eye, for, three weeks after Louis's death at the age of 100, Alfred hanged himself.
An artist of a later generation might have made such an incubus his subject, but Maurer reveals nothing, unless it is in the heads of women that he began painting obsessively in the 1920's. There is a kind of craziness in the endless repetition of this motif or, rather, idiogram, and when the artist emphasizes the neck the effect is either phallic or reminiscent of Modigliani portraits. Such associations are fleeting, however, because there are always the eyes, getting larger and more mournful as time goes by. That the pictures are surrogate self-portraits is not an impossibility.
Still, "Woman in Green Dress," illustrated here, is one of the artist's more restrained efforts and "Woman in Blue Dress" is a striking exercise in emotional color -- ruddy skin, ultra-marine clothing and a background of peacock green. "Girl in Yellow Dress," on the other hand, could be a real likeness, for it lacks the mannerisms and is beautifully drawn, as are the Cubist heads that pass for buildings. In these, Maurer seems to pull back from the emotional abyss.
Altogether, there is much melancholy in the post-Paris paintings. Maurer may never again have achieved the rhythm and color of the circa 1912 still life in which two Breton pitchers face each other on a floor or tablecloth. Nevertheless, in this selection he attains a somber maturity, notably in the olive-green and indigo still life with metallic-gray eggs that seem concave instead of convex and in the lovely scumbled image of flowers drooping out of a squat vase. Both hint that Maurer the artist was returning to life just as Maurer the man had decided to end it.
Although Pene du Bois seems very much the extrovert by contrast, his best canvas here is the monochromatic portrait of Patrick Henry Bruce, another Modernist suicide. Both men were ex-Henri students and both had gone to Paris, Bruce to work with Matisse and, later, Delaunay; du Bois to study with Steinlen at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. Dated 1916, the painting shows Bruce, the Synchromist, seated in gray-green space, wearing a black suit; the only light is that hitting his forehead and pinkish-white shirt.
While Bruce went on to paint geometric still lifes, du Bois focused mainly on women with tubular limbs wearing cloche hats. His finest work, though, may be the Whitney Museum's "Opera Box," in which a woman stands tall, pink and pneumatic in blackness, resting her hands on the edge of the box. The other exceptional images here are a couple of pearly nudes, "Nine O'Clock" and "Seated Blonde Nude With Flowered Robe," and the head of his daughter, Yvonne, which is illustrated here.
But there are also formulaic images like that of a young woman posed with a rake in a Grant Wood-style landscape. Although Regionalist fantasy may be a form of Surrealism, in du Bois's case it seems to have been a byproduct of a life spent partly as a pedagogue and critic. Apropos, he wrote, in 1910, that Stuart Davis was "bad or good" but "never mediocre" and, calling him "an incoherent and inexplicable man," faulted him for being "tied down to no defined rhetoric, to no rhetoric at all."
If du Bois has not had the attention that he so often deserves, it may be because he himself ultimately settled for rhetoric, and it is a pity. The show at Nardin Fine Arts (763-8451) remains on view through Feb. 23.
On to rhetoric and fantasy of another kind, at Katonah's new Station Gallery (43 Katonah Avenue; 232-7529).
Reuben Nakian (1897-1986) never visited the land of his parents, Armenia, much less the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where the Hellenic civilization first took shape. And though he began as apprentice to Paul Manship, the young sculptor may have felt temperamentally closer to Manship's assistant, Gaston Lachaise.
Just as Lachaise was preoccupied with monstrously bosomed nudes (inspired by his wife), Nakian took as his ideal the classical nude, modified by American notions of beauty -- the legs of his female figures are long, impossibly so in later efforts like the small bronze "Leda" in this selection. It is a perplexing work because of the goat's head on the nymph and the swan's neck that lies across the torso like an extra leg.
Nakian had an abstract period during the 1950's and 60's and it may have enabled him to take liberties upon returning to figuration. The show includes three more bronzes, "Flagellation," "Minerva" and "Denial of St. Peter" along with nine large drawings that are combinations of ink, watercolor and charcoal. All are charged with a zest, especially the watercolor and charcoal "Nymph With Dolphins" in which the dolphins butt the nymph much as the killer whales at Sea World toss their keepers.
The gallery, opposite the train station, is tucked into an enclave of wood buildings that looks like the old Hollywood's idea of artists studios in Paris. The show closes Saturday.
Photos: "Europa and the Bull" by Reuben Nakian, in Katonah; "Woman in Green Dress" by Alfred Maurer, at Nardin; "Portrait of Yvonne" by Guy Pene du Bois, also at Nardin. (Charles E. Manley)