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regard Maurer's still lifes as the "most fully realized expression" of his
last period. I am afraid that I am one of those. His figures and heads
strike me as invariably unsuccessful because too expressionistic, with
their drawing and design too crudely simplified for the sake of expres–
siveness. It is an iII-digested, almost arty expressionism. The opposite is
true of his Cubist still lifes, which fail, whenever they do-which is
not often-because their design is excessively complicated in an effort
to combine modulated natural local tones with an analytical investigation
of the planes composing space. (Picasso and Braque knew from the first
that the latter had to exclude the former, otherwise it was impossible
to preserve the picture's unity.) Why Maurer's approach changed so
radically whencver he went from the still life to the figure has not been
explained; however, towards the end of his life he did indeed begin
to look at the figure and head with the same eyes as he did the still
life: his heads became more Cubistic, and it appearcd as though he
were on the way to some sort of synthesis that would go beyond Paris
Cubism. In his last two or three years he came closer and closer to the
abstract, and, certainly, he would not have been content to follow
analytical Cubism so faithfully had he lived longer.
But even so, Maurer's Cubism is personal enough, and hc is one of
the handful of painters who stayed close to the original conception of
Cubism promulgated by Picasso and Braque without mechanically
duplicating it or sacrificing their personalities. In terms of world art
Maurer may not be an important painter: in his own terms he may not
even be a fulfilled one; but he remains one of the few original contri–
butions American painting made before its present phase. (A small
Maurer show at the Schaefer Gallery in December gave a much bettcr
idea of the high quality of his latcr still lifes than did the Whitney
exhibition. Judgcd from these alone, Maurer bccomes more than a very
good painter.)
Clement Greenberg