Young Woman in Kimono marks a significant moment in the evolution of Alfred Maurer’s bold, modern style. Settling in Paris after briefly studying at the Académie Julian in 1897, Maurer quickly shed his renditions of breezy women in the manner of fellow American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (American, 1867 - 1944) and began to explore the subjects that had gained currency in the French capital—refined interiors of women amid decorative objects and genre scenes of cafés, dance halls, and other urban venues. Bolstered by this initial period of experimentation with vastly different pictorial languages, for the rest of his career Maurer created a diverse body of work, all inflected with a decidedly European quality, ranging from colorful, thrashing landscapes made after seeing the fauves in the 1905 Salon d’Automne to expressionist portraits of the mid-1920s and synthetic cubist still lifes in the later part of his oeuvre [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Alfred H. Maurer, Abstract Heads, c. 1931, unidentified media on fabric mounted on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund), 2014.136.136. Young Woman in Kimono, along with the other paintings he made around the turn of the century, reveals an increasingly confident Maurer, an American artist who was beginning to embrace European modernism.
Here Maurer features an elegant woman shown in profile and swathed in a sumptuous kimono, one hand resting on the back of a wooden chair, the other holding a partially opened fan, the folds of which visually echo and thereby link her long red neckband and the textile draped on the table next to her. One of the most striking aspects of the painting is Maurer’s use of bright red—in the trim of the gown and the tablecloth’s border—which glows against the dark palette used throughout the rest of the canvas. The vivid color also unifies the disparate elements of the painting both visually and thematically. The same red used to lead our eye around the figure and tablecloth is carried into the Japanese print above the table with its dab of crimson by the wrestler’s leg. With this move, Maurer announced that Japanese prints provided the visual precedent and inspiration for his painting.
Indeed, with its shallow space, decorative patterning, and display of Japanese objects, Young Woman in Kimono evinces Maurer’s fascination with japonisme, the interest in all things Japanese. Japonisme became the fashion in Europe following the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris and peaked in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s at such venues as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During this period, American collectors, spurred by connoisseurs such as Ernest Fenollosa, were eagerly amassing their own holdings of Japanese decorative objects and art. At the same time, Japanese prints were being widely circulated in European and American markets, and their availability allowed many artists to emulate the compositional techniques of Japanese printmakers. Maurer, too, was inspired and painted several other works imbued with Japanese influences in addition to the Corcoran painting: his breakthrough picture, An Arrangement (1901, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), which won the coveted first prize in the Sixth Annual Carnegie International competition, and The Peacock (Portrait of a Woman) (c. 1903, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which shows a woman in a kimono seated on the floor next to pieces of pottery.
Throughout his career, Maurer was more interested in exploring formal problems of color and composition than in creating compelling narratives, and this is readily seen in Young Woman in Kimono. Instead of adding anecdotal details and creating a persona for the model, Maurer emphasized the purely visual, aesthetic aspects of the painting—the use of diagonals, asymmetry, and contrasting colors. This emphasis on beauty and decoration over subject matter suggests Maurer’s interest in aestheticism, an artistic movement encapsulated by the mantra “art for art’s sake” and most famously advocated by the American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834 - 1903). Most notably in the full-length pose and pensive mood of the model, Young Woman in Kimono owes much to Whistler and aestheticism.
Before his career as a painter, Maurer trained as a lithographer in New Jersey and took a few classes at the National Academy of Design. Maurer’s father, Louis Maurer (American, born Germany, 1832 - 1932)—a pupil of William Merritt Chase (American, 1849 - 1916)—was a well-known printmaker for Currier & Ives. Yet after a few years working as a commercial artist, Maurer left New York for Paris to learn the academic method. Often seen walking the streets with paintbrush and palette in hand, Maurer quickly became enmeshed in the artistic community in Paris, becoming friends with Leo and Gertrude Stein and participating in their salon of artists, writers, and other intellectuals. With the exception of a few visits to New York, he lived there for the next seventeen years. The political turmoil leading up to World War I caused Maurer to return to the United States in 1914. Thus, for a significant portion of his artistic career, Maurer was an expatriate. Despite later successes, including exhibiting at such landmark venues of modernism as Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and the 1913 Armory Show in New York, Maurer’s life ended tragically; he took his own life in New York in 1932, just two weeks after his father’s death. Over a decade later, in 1949, the Whitney Museum of American Art honored the late artist with a retrospective exhibition.
Asma Naeem
July 24, 2024
