Max Weber

Max Weber (1881-1961) was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art.  He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1909 he returned to New York and helped to introduce Cubism to America. He is now considered one of the most significant early American Cubists, but the reception his work received in New York at the time was profoundly discouraging. Critical response to his paintings in a 1911 show at the 291 gallery, run by Alfred Stieglitz, was an occasion for “one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America.” The reviews were “of an almost hysterical violence.” He was attacked for his “brutal, vulgar, and unnecessary art license.”

In time, Weber’s work found more adherents including at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1930, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work, the first solo exhibition at that museum of an American artist. He was praised as a “pioneer of modern art in America” in a 1945 Life magazine article. In 1948, Look magazine reported on a survey among art experts to determine the greatest living American artists. He was the subject of a major traveling retrospective in 1949. Ironically, he became more popular in the 1940s and 1950s for his figurative work, often expressionist renderings of Jewish families, rabbis, and Talmudic scholars, than for the early modernist work he had abandoned circa 1920 and on which his current reputation is founded.

Not everyone believed that Weber fulfilled his early potential as he became a more representational and expressionist painter post-World War I. Critic Hilton Kramer wrote of him that, in light of the remarkable beginning of his career, “Weber proved instead to be one of the great disappointments of twentieth-century American art.” Others however, because of his bold “Cubist decade,” hold him in the same high regard as other native modernists like John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth.