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Richard Maury, Realist
| Article
# : |
19514 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,420 Words |
| Author
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James F. Cooper
James F. Cooper is editor of American Arts Quarterly and art
critic for the New York City Tribune. |
To get to the home and studio of American artist Richard Maury one has to cross Florence's oldest bridge, the ninth-century Ponte Vecchio, spanning the Arno. Maury lives half-way up the Costa San Giorgio in a spacious twelfth-century converted convent, overlooking the Pitti Palace and the Ufizzi. Here, where the Renaissance was born, are found the greatest of Italian masterpieces: Michelangelo's tondo of the Holy Family, Leonardo's unfinished Adoration of the Magi, Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch, and Titian's magnificent Venus and Cupid.
The large nine-room apartment is now occupied by Richard, his wife, Anne, and the youngest two of their five children. Elena, twenty-one, is a professional violinist. Giulia, nineteen, is an art student. The apartment serves as studio to both Richard and Anne--who is herself an accomplished watercolorist.
Maury met Anne, a school teacher, soon after leaving New York City and coming to Europe in 1960. He had spent three years studying at the Arts Student League under such teachers as Robert Brackman and the brilliant German George Grosz. By 1959, however, Abstract Expressionism had entered the mainstream of American art, and Maury no longer felt at ease with what was happening in the New York art world. The aesthetic values that had first attracted him to painting were being trampled by artists caught up in the fever of the avant-garde.
Maury does not reject abstraction. "All great realists are abstractionists," he explains. "But in order to understand abstract painting, I needed to learn it from nature, not abstraction." One of his heroes as a young art student was Edward Hopper, who had studied modernism in Europe after World War I before becoming one of America's preeminent postwar realists. But, with the exception of Andrew Wyeth, he found no other successful artists working in the realist tradition.
Maury, today a serious, youthful-looking man of fifty-five acknowledges he probably would have left New York anyway. "I could never have survived there as an artist." The economic pressure of earning a living in New York would have necessitated compromises of his art. Even when faced with the responsibility of raising a family when his work wasn't selling, Maury refused offers to teach.
Richard Maury was born in 1935, in Washington, D.C. his father, an aspiring poet, was a West Point graduate who died in the Philippines during World War II. Raised by his mother, a chemist and cancer
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