New Web objects Abstract

Max Weber

Date: 1915

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1987.31

Text Entries: Though born in Russia, at the age of ten Max Weber moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York. After art training at the Pratt Institute, he returned to Europe and studied in Paris from 1905 to 1908. These years were crucial to Weber's development as a painter: he helped to found the New Society of American Artists in Paris, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1908 and established himself in avant-garde artistic circles. Returning to the United States, Weber assumed an active role in introducing modernism to America as he restlessly searched to uncover the underlying structure of objects and define a twentieth-century artistic language. Even though he received discouraging and often abusive criticism from the art press, he continued to draw inspiration from the French avant-garde. Construction was painted at a time when Weber was America's leading experimenter in the cubist idiom. Despite the architectural association of its title, Construction is similar to a series of landscape scenes that Weber produced during the same year, and the rich earth tones of brown, blue and green also evoke nature. Weber, however, consciously converted three-dimensional natural forms onto canvas by fracturing surfaces into planes and facets that produce multiple views and perspectives. After 1920, his modernism evolved into a more figurative style that addressed post-World War I social changes and problems. Until the end, Weber fluctuated between abstraction and representation, never completely abandoning his cubist experiments or his expressionistic human figures.