ABSTRACT
During the 1920s, when many artists accommodated their modernism to a revived realism, Maurer continued to paint both Fauvist and Cubist landscapes and Cubist interior scenes. The painters who matured during the early years of the twentieth century belonged to the first generation of radical American artists. Their radicalism lay in their attitudes toward art rather than in politics, because they unequivocally felt a greater responsibility to their art and to themselves than to the recording of their country's customs and concerns. One of many American artists living abroad at the turn of the century—he had arrived in Paris in 1897—Maurer was initially influenced by William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent, as well as by Hals and Velazquez. Unlike other Americans who taught themselves modern art by imitating the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Maurer began painting Fauve landscapes almost immediately; he was perhaps the first American to work in the latest style of the time.
