Max Weber
Max Weber was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Bialystok, Russia (now Poland) in 1881. When Max was ten, his family emigrated to New York and lived in Brooklyn, where his father was a tailor. Max Weber studied art at the Pratt Institute, graduating in 1900. For four years, he taught drawing and manual training at public schools in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Duluth, Minnesota. Weber had studied with the highly influential art educator Arthur Wesley Dow at Pratt, and in 1905 he travelled to Paris to continue his art studies. He lived in Montparnasse and attended classes at several studios: the Académie Julian, the Académie Colarossi, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He was heavily influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, whose retrospective he saw in 1907. With another artist, he organized a weekly Thursday morning studio art class held at the Couvent des Oiseaux under Henri Matisse. In the Matisse class of about ten students was Leo Stein, Gertrude Stein’s brother, and their brother Michael’s wife, Sarah Stein. At Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris, Weber met Pablo Picasso, George Braques, and others interested in modernist art. Weber exhibited in the Salon des Indépendents (1906, 1907) and the Salon d’Automne (1907, 1908).
When Weber returned to New York City in the spring of 1909, he organized an exhibition of his proto-cubist work at the frame shop of Julius G. Haas on Madison Avenue. He also visited Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist, at his place at 291 Fifth Avenue. He had been sent there by the photographer Edward Steichen, a colleague of Alfred Stieglitz, whom Weber had met in Paris. Steichen and Stieglitz were members of the Photo Secession group and had opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, commonly referred to as 291, in 1905. Max Weber was brought into Stieglitz’s circle for a time and exhibited his cubist-inspired paintings in the 1910 Younger American Painters exhibition at 291, and wrote for Stieglitz’s art journal Camera Work before 1911, when he broke off his relationship with Stieglitz. Max Weber had met photographer Clarence White through Stieglitz and would teach for his School of Photography (1914) and do more teaching at the Art Students League to help support himself.
Max Weber’s most important exhibitions were his one-man show at the Newark Museum in 1913, the first for a modernist artist in an American museum. His retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the year it opened in 1930 was the first solo exhibition for an American artist. In 1937 Weber became national chairman of the American Artist Congress, a leftist-oriented artists’ organization.
Weber’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture include works with fauvist, cubist, synthetic cubist, futurist and expressionist stylistic elements. By 1920, his work had moved away from abstraction towards simplified figuration and, increasingly, Jewish themes. Thereafter Weber developed a uniquely personal style, a type of linear expressionism, and eventually gained increasing recognition as a significant twentieth-century American modernist artist.
