Large Modernist Still Life Painting Style of Max Weber

Fine Art : Paintings

 

A large Modernist Still Life Painting in a Frame that was consigned to us with the strong belief by the Consignor that this is the work of Artist Max Weber (1891-1961) and we are in agreement on this. There is no visible signature on this work but in the lower right corner is what appears to be a monogrammed star. On occasion Weber signed or monogrammed some of his artworks with the capitol letters M and W placed upside down and bottoms touching to create a sort of star like shape. We have had no known Weber authorities of his works look at this piece but many of his known works are available on line for comparison and we have provided a scanned copy of a number of his similar works to this one. Everything about this piece speaks of Weber's work from his use of colors, the angled table top visible in many of his still life works, and to the scattering of various objects about the table top. This piece is done on masonite board and we believe it was painted in acrylics. It measures 27.50 by 35.75 inches art sight size and 33.25 by 41.25 inches framed. This item can be picked up or delivered within the New England region to save on shipping. The Painting came from a New Hampshire Estate Sale. Below we have provided some personal and biographical information on Max Weber.

One of the most stylistically pioneering of the early modernists, Max Weber was a key figure in introducing avant-garde art to America. He worked in the mediums of oil, watercolor, printmaking and sculpture, and his subjects sometimes reflected the spiritualism of his religion. His styles included Fauvism, Cubism, Dynamism, Expresssionism, and Futurism and reflected the broad spectrum of revolutionary art activity in Paris at the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries.

He also created some social-realist paintings during the 1930s with depictions of factory scenes. These works reflected his left-wing political leanings, which he expressed as national chairman of the American Artists Congress, "the most powerful left-wing artists' organization of the period" (Baigell). He was a writer on topics of modern aesthetics including The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View, published in "Camera Work" in July 1910.

He was from a strong Jewish background, having been born in Bialystok, Russia, and in 1891, he settled in Brooklyn. At the Pratt Institute, he studied with Arthur Wesley Dow from whom he learned to see forms as visual relationships rather than objects. He taught public school art in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1901 to 1903, and Duluth, Minnesota from 1903 to 1905, and then studied in Paris at the Academie Julian, Academie Colarossi, and Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.

He was much influenced by Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and George Braque and then returned to New York in 1909, where he experimented with many modernist styles.

He was among the first American artists to show an interest in Indians of the American Southwest, and in 1913, his one-man exhibition at the Newark Museum was the first exhibition of an American museum for a modernist artist.

Biography from Mark Borghi Fine Art Inc - New York: Max Weber was born in 1881 in Bialystok, Russia, and came to the United States at the age of ten. Weber spent his childhood in New York, then four years studying art in Paris before permanently settling in New York in 1909. It is not a coincidence that the "Cubist decade" of 1910-1920 began with Weber's return to New York.

He was one of the first Americans to bring modernism to the United States, and the style of his work beginning in 1910 was very Cubist. Needless to say, critics did not welcome this new approach, mostly because they did not understand it. Artists, on the other hand, found the works inspirational and very intellectual.

Weber's most popular paintings were of New York. He saw New York, and the city in general, as a symbol of intellectual, cultural, and technological sophistication. It is somewhat ironic, then, given the complexities of a city and the technology that inhabits it, that Cubism broke those elements down to the spare, essential shapes and forms.

Weber tired of Cubism after 1920 and subsequently developed a more realistic style. Throughout his artistic career, Weber had many friends who were photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz. Photography influenced Weber's art, both in his Cubist stage and afterwards. Photography has the ability (or limitation) of making three-dimensional objects two-dimensional. Cubism was a movement that had dimension as a key aspect, as did realism although in a very different manner.

Weber's pioneering work in America was a result of many influences. Weber took from Henri Matisse his use of color, Paul Cezanne's use of space, and Pablo Picasso's proto-cubist style. Despite these well-known influences, Weber was able to carve out a niche for himself in the aforementioned cityscapes.

Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia: Max Weber’s artistic vision first developed at the Pratt Institute under Arthur Dow, who introduced his students to nonwestern aesthetic traditions. After leaving school, Weber began teaching, hoping to raise enough funds to travel abroad. In 1905 he was in Paris, one of the first American artists to be directly influenced by European modernism.

He studied at the Académie Julian (where he met Abraham Walkowitz), Académie Colarossi, Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, and with Henri Matisse and Jean-Paul Laurens. In his travels through Europe, he not only learned more about western art traditions but also absorbed African and Asian art. (1)

His Parisian circle of friends included Pablo Picasso, Robert Delauney, André Donoyer de Segonzac, and Henri Rousseau. Weber could not have arrived in Paris at a more opportune time. Matisse was exploring the brilliant colors of Persia; Picasso was experimenting with the planar surfaces of African masks and beginning to develop the theories of what became known as Cubism. Weber understood and appreciated these new ideas, but was most influenced by Paul Cézanne’s unique depiction of space in paintings he saw at the Salon d’Automne in 1906 and 1907. (2)

Although Weber produced a series of cubist-inspired abstract paintings from 1915 to 1918, after 1919 all of his work was representational; his subjects were still life, landscape, and genre scenes of recent immigrants and the working class.

From the 1940s on, Weber developed a more emotional, expressionist approach in his work. When he returned to the United States in 1909, his new style of painting brought hostile reactions. The next year he met Alfred Stieglitz, art dealer and photographer, who understood Weber’s modernist vocabulary. Stieglitz provided Weber with moral and financial support and exhibited his work with a handful of contemporary American modernists. (3) Weber assisted Stieglitz by organizing exhibitions.

However, the artist’s association with Stieglitz would be short-lived, for he continued to develop independent theories of modern art and soon fell out of favor with Stieglitz and his circle. Weber was invited to participate in the Armory Show in 1913, but he withdrew after learning that only two of his pictures had been accepted, whereas eight or ten images by his French counterparts would be exhibited. (4) But the slight was soon forgotten. That same year Weber had a successful solo show at the Newark Museum of Art, the first ever devoted to an American modernist artist.

He experimented with sculpture, both figurative and abstract, and wrote poetry and treatises on modernist theories. He exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Item ID: A-320

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