Page 53 - Studio International - March 1968

of Miss Sterne's paintings, all awash with pale maladroit painter. ness in Hartley's performance, but because they
yellows and greens, are as tender as Bonnard, as The Hartley exhibition at KNOEDLER'S was seem to issue directly from a deep emotional
ambiguous as Monet, and yes, I would say as limited to work of the Twenties and Thirties, response.
feminine as Morisot. The range of her feelings is eliminating the extremely interesting experiments Alfred Maurer is presented by the BABCOCK
very broad, and she is capable of presenting power- he had undertaken just after the First World War, GALLERIES in a totally new light. He, too, had
ful metaphors, but the power is always kept in an while he was still influenced by the Paris-Munich made the encounter with the European avant-
extremely delicate language that can be called avant-garde. These paintings in which he played garde, and he too had been disorientated in the
feminine in the best sense. with insignia motifs, driving them to the point of process. But out of his disorientation came a
total abstraction, are still among his highest nervous and highly original synthesis. One can
There are signs in New York that the early years achievements. read Matisse, Bonnard, Modigliani and Picasso in
of American painting are up for re-examination. Hartley's other important paintings are the many of his small works, but something unique to
That goes for the 19th century, which is suddenly gloomy expressionist views of Maine done at the Maurer is always there.
becoming a fashionable area for collectors, as well as very end of his life, and represented here very It is there, particularly in the undated oil sketches
for the early decades of the 20th century. Many sparsely. that verge on total abstraction. But the stubborn
assumptions will have to be re-argued, as the more That left the exhibition with only the very uneven American tradition, realistic to its core, persists in
complete exposure of individual artists comes about. and notably confused paintings of Hartley's longish Maurer's abstractions so that the memory of real
Two galleries recently delved into the past of middle period. He seemed to have been undecided things is never totally obscured. They are things in
modern art in America, presenting exhibitions of about cubism, while yet availing himself of its motion; things that swing free from cubist angu-
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and Alfred Maurer superficial attributes. At times he struck out in a larity into an airy, lyrical idiom.
(1868-1932), both of whom were among the first realist vein—a study of mushrooms for instance—in Maurer falters, in my opinion, when he deals
exhibitors in Alfred Stieglitz's famous Gallery 291. which Cubism gives way to Expressionism, but an with the figure. His portraits of women, strangely
The results were perplexing. Maurer, who had Expressionism tinged with magazine-illustration caricatured, are stiff and stylized. He was a
always seemed to me a rather pathetic primitive, simplifications. His best work is in dense, lowering neurotic man, and his neuroses are too painfully
emerged as a curiously imaginative and prophetic views of Northern landscapes, whether they be the obvious in these portraits. q
artist. On the other hand, Hartley, who has long Bavarian Alps or Mount Katandin in Maine. And
been celebrated as one of our few distinctive artists these are good not so much because they are well
of the period, emerges as a confused and often painted, since there was always a certain clumsi-