Max Weber 1881 - 1961

Charles Daniel Gallery, New York
Mr. Wright Ludington
Townsend Ludington
Babcock Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1998

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Minneapolis, Minnesota, Walker Art Center, Max Weber, February-May 1949, no. 95 (as Fisherman, Fish and Sea Gulls)
San Francisco, California, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Max Weber, possibly 1949
Albuquerque, New Mexico, The University of New Mexico Art Museum, Cubism and Its Impact in the USA 1910-1930, 1967, no. 63, pp. 58, 59, illustrated
Santa Barbara, California, The Art Galleries at University of California, Max Weber, 1968, no. 16
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Early Modernism in America, April 1993
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, American Modernism: The Shein Collection, May 2010-January 2011, no. 20, pp. 4, 110, 112-13, 122, 142, illustrated in color p. 111

Stephen May, "American Modernism: The Shein Collection," Antiques & the Arts Weekly, June 4, 2010, pp. 30-31, illustrated
Karen Wilkin, "Modernism in a Capsule," The Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2010
Charlotte Bruce Harvey, "American Modernism: The Shein Collection," Brown Alumni Magazine, November/December 2010, illustrated in color
Debra Bricker Balken, "Dual Advocacy," Hali, Summer 2013, p. 65

Through both his work and prolific writing, Max Weber played a critical role in the promotion of modern art in America. Born in Russia in 1881, Weber immigrated to the United States at the age of 10. After studying at the Pratt Institute under the tutelage of Arthur Wesley Dow—also a teacher of and formative influence on Georgia O’Keeffe—Weber traveled to Paris in 1905. The artist spent three years in France discovering the work of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse, and returned to New York, “more informed about French Art and aesthetics than anyone else in America” (Barbara Haskell, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950, New York, 1999, p. 95). Cubism began to influence Weber’s work in particular during the summer of 1909, inspired in part by Picasso’s 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he studied in depth at this time (fig. 1).

Weber returned to a markedly changed New York; the city had quickly evolved into a metropolis characterized by disorder and dominated by the presence of machines and industry. The works he produced upon his return directly respond to the changes he observed, bringing “design into this chaos by carefully relating all the rectilinear and curvilinear details, all of the interlocking shapes, into one large whole panorama of the public scene” (Alfred Werner, Max Weber, New York, 1975, pp. 49-50). Through their stark lines, abstract forms and monochromatic palettes, these pictures display Weber’s acute understanding of both the Cubist and Futurist movements that he acquired during his time abroad.

Weber painted The Fisherman in 1919, by which time the artist was increasingly engaging with figurative subjects. According to Percy North, “The Fisherman is a pivotal work created between Weber’s dynamic cubist constructions and his later, more expressionist compositions, and it brings his initial cubist phase to a close (American Modernism: The Shein Collection, Washington, D.C., 2010, p. 112). As indicated by the title but not immediately visually obvious, this abstract portrait depicts a fisherman sitting on a dock. The scene exudes serenity and leisure; the man, clad in a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe, is at peace with his surroundings and the chaos that dominated Weber’s earlier cityscapes is not present.

The Fisherman makes direct reference to Woman in Armchair, a comparably sized portrait that Weber produced two years earlier (fig 2). North calls these works “pendant portraits” and explains that when “considered together, they served to frame the courting couple and family groups in gouache and watercolor that Weber produced from 1917 to 1919. Both pictures address the idea that although we live in the physical world, our interior life may be an even more powerful force” (Ibid, p. 113). In The Fisherman, Weber positions the lone figure at the center of the canvas and uses details, such as the seagulls perched on his head and fish as his feet, to delineate the larger setting. Tones of brown, grey and cream dominate the canvas, which is then highlighted by splashes of bright white, rust and indigo. Woman in Armchair follows a similar compositional structure but lacks the perceivable sense of motion and vitality that is present in The Fisherman. Weber continued to actively produce work until his death in 1961, by which time he had developed an oeuvre that encompassed oil painting, watercolor, engraving, sculpture and poetry, and successfully traversed between abstraction and realism.