Max Weber

Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

We wish to thank scholar Percy North for providing the following thoughts:

The single image of the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi is among a group of works that Weber produced from 1918 though the 1940s. Although Weber was Jewish and his wife kept a kosher house and they observed Friday prayers, he was not a regular attendee at the synagogue. In many ways art was his religion. His expressionist Jewish subjects including the portraits of rabbis and genre subjects of the Hasidim reflected a nostalgia for the religious traditions of the 'old country' (especially Eastern Europe) from which Weber's family like many others, especially those in New York had emigrated. The Jewish subjects were very popular during the rise of Nazism in Germany. The rabbi portraits were of a generic type rather than portraits of actual individuals.