Gaillardas
Max Weber
MAX WEBER, 1933. OIL ON LINEN.
For a time, Max Weber was the most exciting and most hated artist in America. Born into a Jewish family in Poland in the mid 1880s, his family emigrated to the United States where Weber grew up assimilated to Brooklyn culture, and from a young age developed a keen promise for art. Time spent in Paris, attending Gertrude Stein’s salons and taking private lessons from Matisse, gave him an insight into a new understanding of art that he brought back home. Weber became one of the very first American cubists, and a gallery show in New York brought with it a vitriolic response from the public. He was lambasted for his radical depictions, denied as brass, vulgar and offensive, and considered a disgrace. Yet, it would not be even two years before the legendary Armory show would prove that Weber was ahead of the zeitgeist, and a new wave of Modernism would sweep the country. Yet one of its founders would not be carried by the tide: Weber abandoned expressionist and cubist works and began to focus instead on figurative painting. His later work, such as the still life here, is alive with beauty and rendered expertly, but he lost his standing. He was an artist who arrived to early, and abandoned ship too soon, to ever fulfil his potential, or stake his claim.