A prominent member of the art associations of his native York, Pennsylvania, and his long-time home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he exhibited frequently in these and other nonprofit organizations.

He attended high school in York and subsequently took classes from Hugh Breckenridge and others at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

It held regular exhibitions and declared itself to be a "band of independent workers and students, who in the absence of a teacher, desire to cultivate individuality in their work".

[12][13][14] In November of that year, he married a York artist, Florence Brillinger, who was also a member of the association and designer at the Rudy firm.

[15] At about this time he showed in the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo where his pastel, "Suburbs of Marseilles," was purchased by a member of the jury.

[18][19] Pfeiffer and Brillinger moved to Massillon, Ohio, early in the 1920s and, after a lengthy trip to Europe, relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1925.

[13] In the 1920s, Pfeiffer and Brillinger had begun spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where his brother Henry (also known as Heinrich) was firmly entrenched in the local art community.

[31] In 1932, Pfeiffer and Brillinger spent the winter in Spain, and in 1935 he showed watercolor sketches made at this time in his first major solo exhibition, at the Ehrich-Newhouse Gallery in Manhattan.

[32] Reviewing the show, Howard Devree of the New York Times wrote that Pfeiffer's Spanish watercolors were "cleverly done" and were "light and fresh with detail well-realized and not impeding the fluency of the medium.

"[33] A critic for the New York Post said the paintings were "sustained by delightful cool pure notes of color" and had a "concentration upon essentials and a simplicity of direct statement" that freed them "from the lushness and extravagance that one associates with Spanish themes.

[note 3] During this period, Pfeiffer held solo exhibitions in Ypsilanti, Michigan; Buffalo; Detroit; Niagara Falls; and Hyannis, Massachusetts.

"[53] Twenty-four years later, a reviewer saw "something almost fourth dimensional" in a painting that gave an exterior view from inside Pfeiffer's studio.

… Any shape, line or color when opposed to or shown in conjunction with another creates a movement or sensation which sets up a responsive action in the observer.

[31] In 1940, an unsympathetic critic saw in them "a series of crisscrossing geometric patterns, with occasional splashes of color, and a straight line here and a curve there.

[31] Although the geometry of circle and square furnishes the basis for most of his forms, each canvas is arranged to give a sense of elemental forces at work, the dramatic clash of sea and rock or the crackle of an electric storm.

Adept at creating compositions which are both charged with movement and harmoniously balanced, Pfeiffer is able through the contrast of sharp opaque shapes with areas of nuance and transparency, to infuse an ordinarily static mode of painting with liveliness and a certain flashy vigor.

A watercolor called "Danse Cubiste" of 1914, shown above, image number 1, shows his early handling of color and commitment to a degree of abstraction.

Another watercolor, a self-portrait from 1922, shown above image number 2, suggests his technique for modeling figure subjects and his manner of handling light as well as his use of color for expressive purposes.

Shown above image number 3, it comes from a group that one critic called watercolor "sketches" and described as having a "concentration upon essentials and a simplicity of direct statement".

A few years later, Pfeiffer's supervisor in the Federal Art Project prepared a review of his work in which she wrote that he painted "unusual and fairly distinguished oil landscapes which seem to please conservative folks in spite of their rather modern quality.

In 1915, he attended a socialist luncheon in York and in the late 1930s was a member of a Communist front organization called the American Artists' Congress.

In 1916, she married a man who was a strike leader, socialist speaker, and editor of a newspaper called York Labor News .