Ufer's father, a master engraver of gunstocks and a political radical, emigrated from Cologne, Germany, in 1875. The younger Ufer was also always given to strong convictions, beginning when as a child, he was sure he wanted to be an artist. Having showed much promise in his early drawings he took an offered chance to work in a lithography firm in Louisville, rather than enter high school. It proved a severe disappointment as he was employed only as an errand boy. Two significant events occurred in his life in 1893: he made his way to Chicago to see the art exhibitions of the Columbian Exposition; and an opportunity came to go to Hamburg, Germany, to become a real apprenticed lithographer, and to study at the Hamburg's Royal Applied Art School. After a year in Hamburg and another two traveling the country as a journeyman lithographer, he settled in Dresden, where he continued to support himself working as a lithographer, and took up the study of painting at the Dresden Royal Academy.
He returned home in 1898, and worked for two years on the staff of the Louisville Courier. He then went to Chicago where he worked with an engraving firm days, and studied at the J. Francis Smith School evenings. In 1904 he accepted a post teaching at the School, and married Mary Monrad Frederiksen, a fellow art student. The next year he took a job he would hold for six years in the advertising department of Armour & Company. In 1911 he had enough money saved to return to Europe, where over the ensuing two years he traveled and painted in France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and North Africa. He studied in Munich under Walter Thor.
Upon Ufer's return to Chicago in 1913, he exhibited a selection of his paintings from the European stay, and attracted the attention of Carter H. Harrison, a former mayor of Chicago, art collector, and lover of the southwest landscape. Carter was primarily responsible for encouraging a number of artists to migrate to the Southwest, and for subsidizing the expenses of the trip; in 1914, it was Ufer who arrived in Taos, New Mexico, under Carter's sponsorship. In 1917 he was invited to join the Taos Society of Artists, and he exhibited in their group shows until they disbanded in 1927. Ufer thought of himself as part of the Taos community from the time he arrived there, although his growing public considered him a Chicago artist. Until 1920 he spent part of each winter in Chicago, thereafter he was in New York a few months of each year. His first successes were awards won in Chicago exhibitions, the Cahn Prize in 1916, and Logan Prize in 1917. This was followed by his receiving the Academy's Thomas B. Clarke Prize in 1918. (He would receive Altman prizes in Academy annual exhibitions of 1921 and 1926, and an Isidor Medal in the winter exhibition of 1926).
Most of his time was spent in Taos, however, and there he abandoned the academic painting procedures he had studied so thoroughly, and began to paint directly from nature. His long classical training remained evident in his stongly formed figures and dashing paint application, but the intense light and color of his canvases was a direct response to the New Mexico scene.
Ufer was a political radical, a member of the IWW, and a follower of Trotsky. He served on the national executive committee of the American Artists Congress, wrote articles for its magazines, and regularly joined stikers's picket lines around the state of New Mexico. Unlike many of the Taos School painters, he did not represent the natives of the Southwest as picturesque elements of a colorful but timeless region. Ufer showed the Indians as individuals, and realistically as part of a contemporary world where they faced a bleak future.
Ufer was immensely successful in the 1920s, his paintings selling frequently and at high prices; he also was a prodigeous spender. The stock market crash of 1929, not only severely curtailed the market in his paintings, but wiped out much of his personal funds which were invested in securities. His final years were beset by money problems and illness related to his prolonged alchoholism.
