Maurer first exhibited his heads of women in 1921 and continued to paint them for the rest of his life. Most are undated and have been grouped together on the basis of similarity of style and facial expression. Sometime between 1926 and 1928 Maurer developed a more abstract vocabulary as he simplified and distorted the facial features in a manner reminiscent of African masks and the early cubist works of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).
The faces and necks of the late heads are elongated, the mouths tiny, the eyes exceptionally large. As Elizabeth McCausland wrote, "The eyes of Alfred Maurer’s women never close. Wide open windows in the pale, rosy stucco of their physiognomies, these eyes successfully draw one’s attention ... from the disturbing sensitiveness of the unreal proportions and the fine essential line. Terrible is the dead straightness of their stare" (McCausland, Maurer, p. 206). The heads became increasingly somber and introspective, and their sad eyes took on an obsessive intensity, which many historians have related to Maurer’s own increasingly distraught psyche. This painting probably dates from about 1928 or shortly before, for around 1928 Maurer increased the distortion to the point of disintegrating natural shapes.
Head is largely gray in color, the background painted thinly with broad strokes and the figure described with somewhat thicker brushwork. Much of the picture has been overpainted, probably the work of the artist rather than of a restorer. Maurer often reworked his paintings and was very experimental in the materials he used; the ground of Head, for example, is a white dental plaster. As a result, the pigment surfaces of many of his paintings made after 1914 have suffered from flaking, as has this example.
