Ekphrastic Poems and Alfred Maurer

Today Amy and I toured a group from Portland State through the galleries of the Portland Art Museum. The members of the group were part of a graduate poetry class. Their aim in coming to the museum was to see art that they perhaps could write about in the future – ephrasis or ekprhastic poetry. We did look at Maurer's George Washington because this painting is the museum's best example of cubist art, a type of art they were intertested in seeing.

Since today is our last day with Alfred Maurer, I decided to seek out some happier moments in his life. Alfy, as he was known in Europe, was a very happy dapper man, well thought of and considered by many to be a great artist. He loved the night life and painted this scene (Le Bal Bullier), one which he must have loved because he submitted it to many shows. Alfy was well known by Gertrude Stein; she remembered last seeing him in Europe with his "girl" just before he left Europe at the start of World War I. He feared she would fall into enemy hands but felt forced to leave because his father had cut off his money in an effort to have him return to New York. That is the last mention I've found of a time when Maurer smiled and enjoyed himself.

In keeping with the poetic theme of the tour Amy and I gave at the museum today I did find an example of an ekphrastic poem written about one of Maurer's paintings. Since I wasn't able to find the exact painting it was dedicated to, we'll all have to imagine it.
“Suspended Sea” (from What the Blood Knows by Peggy Miller)
I imagine in this boundless sea
hunger is so large it seeps into the salt,
as if hunger invented life and will consume it.
As if hunger will persist when all else goes

Maurer Suicide, Looking to Poet Dick Lourie

Alfred Maurer (1868-1932) – Self-portrait with a Hat (1927)

Here we see Alfred Maurer as he saw himself in 1927, five years before his death. He looks out at us with a rather stoic look in sepia tones, quite different from the colors he used in his other paintings of that period. The bow tie hangs limply from the collar of his wrinkled white shirt. His hat provides a bit of decorum from earlier in the day. His pursed lips and blank stare seem to indicate he has little to say at this point. What happened to the gay, happy Alfy who once roamed the streets of Paris? When he painted this, he had already lived twelve years with his father after returning from Europe because of the outbreak of WWI. What happened in that house between Alfred and his father Louis?

Amy's post about Alfred Maurer and his father reminds me of some of my friends who are still seeking the acceptance and love of their fathers. Looking at Maurer's last painting (our featured artwork of the week) in honor of both George Washington and his own father's 100th birthday, I'm reminded of the emptiness that these men, including Alfred, must have felt and some still feel. None of us knows what happened between Alfred and his father Louis on a daily basis. There are reports that Louis watched his son paint while standing on a stool looking through Alfred's bedroom transom window. Whether Louis did or not we do know that during the seventeen years they lived together before their deaths, Louis never accepted Alfred's painting style. Alfred never returned to Europe after World War I as he had originally thought he would. It seems the wound between the two men opened more and more each year. What a terrible way to live. And Maurer's choice in death was just as terrible, hanging himself in the doorway of his father's bedroom. Suicide leaves the lives of those left behind in such disarray. In this case, his brother Charles and his sister Eugenia Furstsenberg were left to handle not only Maurer's paintings but also to deal with the emotions suicide leaves with those still living. My heart aches for them all.

Native American poet Dick Lourie wrote this poem about fathers and sons...

"How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream?
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often?
Or forever, when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?
Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers?
or for divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning, or shutting doors?
for speaking thru walls, or never speaking, or never being silent?
Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs?
Or in their deaths, saying it to them, or not saying it.
If we forgive our fathers, what is left?"

Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo: Pride for Fathers

Cubic George, More Like Trianglic George

A black rectangle an inch thick cuts through the canvas at a slant, going right to left. It begins an inch from the top and ends an inch from the bottom of the canvas. It pierces through and atop his left eye. His right eye is cut through the middle by a solid black line which makes a triangle with two other lines below the maroon triangle of the right side of his head. The nose is nothing but a line from the tear duct of his right eye to the middle of the face where it takes a hard left, becoming a backward L.
The mouth is less severe in line, a blotchy and open shape, a cubified triangle, but severity is made up for in the lack of lips. George speaks words not meant for children. Well, not my children.
His pupils are large black round pools. His flesh is flat compared to the bulkiness of the charcoal paint on the right of the canvas.
His right ear is a dense purple triangle that slashes into the dead white flesh of his face. All around him are compartmentalized grimy colors who have been stripped of their purity.

Alfred Maurer Died Without Approval from His Father or the Artistic World

Here is Alfred Maurer's father, Louis Maurer (1832-1932). Maurer had immigrated from Germany in 1851 with his family and immediately went to work in the arts continuing until his ultimate retirement in 1884. At that time he dedicated himself to his hobbies. Not surprisingly that included painting but it also involved riding horses and shooting. He was a crack shot and at the age of ninety was the only one to receive a perfect score at a match.

He died on July 19, 1932. The biographies of both him and his son Alfred tell of his disapproval of his son's adopting the new modern painting styles from Europe. After Alfred's return to the United States in 1914 Alfred continued to paint in all of the new styles and still live with his father, dependent but not accepted, a dynamic that left Alfred at the point of suicide shortly after his father's death. What turmoil his life must have been like for more than fifteen years, living with a disapproving father yet knowing he needed to be true to his artistic soul. And what soul it was. Here is a series of his paintings (chronologically from 1903 through 1930's) showing those many styles. Who was his muse? It seems we'll never know. Even today after many retrospectives, Alfred's work is under appreciated and fading into our country's past.

Ekphrastic Writing

for poets it is generous, the artist
steps away from the inspiration
but leaves something there
for the poet to find in moments
of quiet, by looking.

And later, the poet steps away
in generosity to the reader, so she
can find something of the inspiration
in her attempt to understand
the words, by feeling.

Art like God, is not right or wrong,
but indefinable in language,
requiring itself to become emotion
To enter us like sun on the skin
in immeasureable ways.


The more I study the more I realize how fleeting is a muse, how artists have to move from one thing to the next and cannot live within any moment longer than the moment lives. It is a tragedy the ability to create a world in a world in a world. Because one is always hunting for the core but all the life is in the layers.

Alfred Maurer if only he had known Frida Kahlo and Kiki Smith

Today, Alfred Maurer looped in and out of my mind as I wandered the streets of San Francisco. Years ago, my office window looked down on a parking lot that is now SFMOMA. For old times sake, I took Maurer there and spent the better part of an afternoon. It's just taken awhile to get to a point where I could write.

Looking at what Maurer did in his life, you can certainly see that he channeled both Cubism (George from yesterday) and Matisse in Fauve Landscape (shown here). Maurer had traveled to France and had realized upon his arrival that he needed to expand his artistic horizons. He spoke these words about the journey to change his art:

“The transition from the old school to the new is not an easy one.… When I decided to make the change, I had to lay aside my brushes for almost a month and think nothing but Impressionism. Then I went at it slowly and timidly, feeling my way. I am still in transition, I know. I can’t tell what tomorrow will bring about.”

Who knows what Maurer would have painted if he had lived in the 1950 or 60's. He and I talked a bit about that as we went through the galleries at SFMOMA. Maurer recognized Matisse but hadn't seen any Frida Kahlo. We talked a bit about how Frida Kahlo's portrayal of Diego Rivera looked as if Diego were related to Al Gore. Of course, I had to show him a photo of Gore. We almost got sidetracked on politics. Fortunately, the Dali and Magritte pieces made him smile. At Rothko's No. 14, Maurer insisted on sitting and looking. When we left there he seemed to take on a different aura, almost floating. He especially enjoyed the vitality of the Kiki Smith bronze and glass sculpture as well as the Neri standing so near the Diebenkorn. It was a good day for us both.

Maurer, where would you like to go tomorrow? We have all day in San Francisco.

George, by Alfred Maurer

George Washington is Alfred Maurer's final painting. After he painted this, his father died at one hundred, and then Alfred hung himself. His relationship with his father was a glitch in his life. I wonder if Maurer's painting of George Washington, the father of his country, harkens to what one father of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, wrote in the beginning of his Social Contract.

Chapter two, Rousseau, The Social Contract:

"The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention. This common liberty results from the nature of man.

The family then may be called the first model of political societies. The ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of love which the chief cannot have for the people under him."

The role of the father is one I will never play, being born female, but I'm thinking now of the many fathers I am to go on stage with in this life. The obvious one, dad, but also the father of the organization where I work, the father of invention, and of course, the father of my country. How would I paint the president today?

Portland is lucky to have this piece. Most of Maurer's work is privately owned, and of course, there is only one last painting.