At the end of 1908, after a three-year stint living and painting in Paris, the artist Max Weber (1881–1960) returned to a New York that had scarcely heard of Henri Rousseau or Paul Cézanne, much less Pablo Picasso, and had no curiosity for them either. This was a New York largely without salons or art dealers with namesake galleries. A New York to whom the contents of Weber’s suitcase—a few African carvings, a ceramic vase made by his friend Rousseau, and some lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec—suggested an almost fanatical and somewhat threatening exoticism.
Thus, the critical attitude with which Weber’s modernism was met when, over the course of the next seven years, he exhibited his work. A collection of still lifes painted in Paris was the first of Weber’s radical visions shown to the unsuspecting American public. They rated the work highly; the critics took longer to convince. “Travesties of the human form,” cried The New York Globe on January 17, 1911, such as one may expect “from the inmate of a lunatic asylum.” “Grotesquerie” was the word in The New York Evening World the next day. His 1913 show at the Newark Museum, the first time a modernist was granted solo billing in an American museum, was Weber’s lone vindication in a decade come and gone with hardly a whisper of critical favor. Disillusioned and embittered, the artist took his wounded pride and left abstract painting behind in 1919. He did not paint a single abstract work for another twenty years.
As quite probably one of the first Cubists ever to step foot on the island of Manhattan, Weber was guaranteed to create a stir. And the stir was, in turn, guaranteed to secure his legacy. But to make of Weber nothing more than a succès de scandale is to shortchange his preternatural talent and dedication to the modernist cause, both of which are on full display in the twenty-six still lifes currently showing at New York’s Schoelkopf Gallery. Is it a collection of Max Weber’s greatest hits? No. Do its grotesqueries promise to dazzle or shock? Not anymore. This is an exhibition for those who wonder how an artist actually does the thing he’s trained to do: how he builds up a painting from plain canvas.
With a title like “Max Weber: Art and Life Are Not Apart,” it’s hardly surprising that the exhibition’s major through line is the painterly creation of harmony. We also shouldn’t be surprised that Weber was uncommonly musical. A limited grasp of English—he was born in the Russian Empire’s Białystok and moved to New York at age ten—wasn’t enough to keep him away from the choir of his local Williamsburg synagogue. This is perhaps where he learned the basic harmonic principles of art: the coalescence of schismatic components, the disassembling and rearranging of nature. By manipulating color and space, and through adroit use of directional brushstrokes to produce a sense of volume, Weber’s still lifes create an order concomitant with nature but separate from it. It’s a new nature, a nature like that of his hero Cézanne: a nature deconstructed and reconstituted.
Financial precarity dictated that most of Weber’s still-life work before 1920 was in gouache, watercolor, and pastel. But in 1907, when he still had a little spare cash, he painted The Green Bottle with oil. Here Weber’s intuitive grasp of color harmony and spatial arrangement shines brilliantly. The edge of the table, diagonally bisecting the canvas (à la Cézanne) and cropped tight like a photograph, and the brushy flowers and glimmering vase possess a poised quality that draws the eye to their lovely shapes. It’s a painting so agreeable you just want to reach out and touch it.
Some have suggested Weber’s instinct for color was inborn, an inheritance of the folk-art tradition of his native Eastern Europe. Others attribute it to the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow, Weber’s teacher at the Pratt Institute, who painted with Gauguin at Pont Aven and whose work exemplifies a kind of ultra-emotive approach to color. In any case, Weber’s was an instinct that, by the time he was studying at the Académie Julien in 1906, set him apart from his cohort. He had transcended seeing his drawings merely in terms of figure, and now saw them in terms of light and shade. His teacher, the despotic Jean-Paul Laurens, would often stop before Weber’s work, nod, and simply say, “Très bon.” Still Life with Blue Bottle (1911) forges the unlikeliest of synchronicities from somewhat unseemly shades of lavender, cement gray, desaturated copper, and cerulean blue, a work delivered with the highest feeling for harmonious color. Très bon.
Of course, the Cubist and the Fauvist know it isn’t enough simply to express through color: it must be arranged just so. There is a logical but intuitive certitude to Weber’s painting that demonstrates a mind adept at conceptual arrangement, a mind that, perhaps unsurprisingly, took in later life to Talmudic thinking. Works like Still Life (1913) and Three Pears (1928) juxtapose an array of hard edges and curvilinear objects to create perfectly weighted images; in The Drawer (1921), Weber is so satisfied with his spatial outlay that he doesn’t even bother to finish the painting. But a successful artwork is never merely a question of logic. “Art and Life” features a handful of still lifes made after Weber had rediscovered Cubism in the early 1940s. Here, he’s perhaps at his strongest intellectually. But the paintings feel dead because, posed with the problem of how to make a painting, Weber is no longer feeling his way towards the answers.
The conflict between the intuitive and the rational can, like the separation of art from life, seem a merely academic distinction. Really, there is no clear demarcation. Cubism is our living proof of that: an art-historical legacy of paintings that retain their power to excite because of how they couple geometry with fluidity, structure with spontaneity, a capacity to put off with a capacity to surprise. Max Weber’s still lifes do all of this, too. This was a man, after all, who came back to New York in 1908 wearing the same suit he’d left in three years earlier. Who would have, indeed who could have guessed it would be such a momentous landing?