More than any other American artist returning from Paris in the first decade
of the 20th century, Max Weber (1881-1961), an avid student of art history,
was best able to incorporate the new directions of French modern art into
his work. Weber absorbed the primitivism of his good friend, Henri
Rousseau, the early Cubism of Braque and Picasso and the Fauvism of
Matisse and Émile Othon Frieze (lot 129).
Born in Poland and emigrating to Brooklyn at the age of ten, Weber studied
at the Pratt Institute under pioneering modernist teacher, Arthur Wesley
Dow, who was an important influence on Weber as an accomplished
printmaker and painter himself. In the early 1920s, Weber traveled to Paris
just in time to view a major Cézanne retrospective, as well as visit Gertrude
Stein’s artistic salon and take classes at Matisse’s private academy. Weber
was also later responsible for Rousseau’s first exhibition in the United States
in 1942.
Upon his return to New York in 1909, Weber was an early pioneer of
modernism. He embarked on a decade of creative activity that established
him as America’s foremost Cubist painter. He also became an important
defender of the modern European works in the Armory Show.
Critical responses to his earlier, 1911 Cubist show at the 291 Gallery, run by
Alfred Steiglitz, were scathing, with reviews “of an almost hysterical violence,”
aptly foreshadowing the reaction to the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso,
Duchamp and others that were to hang on the walls of the 69th Regiment
Armory building in just less than 2 years and only several blocks east of the
291 Gallery’s Madison Square Park location. Weber was also the subject of
the first modernist museum exhibition in America at the Newark Museum,
New Jersey, in 1913.
Of a notably prickly personality, Weber ultimately was not represented in the
Armory Show. At the last moment he withdrew his selected paintings after a
falling out with his friend Arthur B. Davies, the president and main organizer
of the Armory Show, when Davies allotted Weber space for only two works
and Weber insisted on exhibiting at least eight to ten paintings. Nonetheless,
Weber still went ahead with his loan of seven works by Henri Rousseau.
Perhaps his career might have fared differently had he exhibited at the
Armory Show in 1913; as it was, he only gained recognition for his Cubist work
(which he had abandoned in the 1920s) much later in the century.
