Head and Shoulders of Figure

Max Weber’s stark Head and Shoulders of Figure is composed of a series of simple flat shapes in red, black, green, and tan, framed by a blue border. Weber used negative or unprinted space for such features as the subject’s elongated nose, eyebrows, and eyes. At once impassively masklike and yet engaged, the slightly turned face seems to wear an expression of guarded scrutiny. The figure’s gender is ambiguous. Narrow bands of black on either side of the face suggest a woman’s loosely falling hair, but they can also be read as the long sidelocks worn by orthodox Jewish men, with the green cap on the top of the head interpreted as the traditional mandatory yarmulke, or skull-cap. As demonstrated in his Rabbi Reading (Pensioned) (TF 1995.50), Weber’s Jewish identity was an important inspiration in his art from the time that he returned to figural imagery following a decade of experimenting with abstraction, during which he painted such adventurous works as Construction (TF 1987.31).

Although it draws on the conventions of portraiture, Head and Shoulders of Figure is as unconventional as Weber’s abstract compositions in its brutal directness and economy of representation as well as its distortion of the subject’s head and features. It reflects the admiration of Weber and many of his avant-garde European and American contemporaries for the so-called primitive arts of non-Western cultures, from Africa to the Americas. The bold continuous lines of the brows and nose, for example, evoke the faces on carved masks and totem poles. Weber used an equally direct process for creating this print. The first of a group of prints he made in the winter of 1919–20, it was inspired by a box of soft basswood that housed a gift of honeycomb. Weber carved his image on the surface of one of the slats of the box and then printed the image simply by placing the inked block beneath a sheet of paper, pressing it against the block under the weight of a book. The result is an impression in which subtle modulations of ink density and the rough edges of the flat shapes tangibly evoke the artist’s creative process.

Weber was one of the first American modernist artists to experiment with color-relief printing, creating his first print in 1910. Beginning with Head and Shoulders of Figure, over the course of a decade he made some forty-five linoleum-cut and woodcut prints. This simple image was a vehicle for Weber’s investigation of the effects of different color schemes. In addition to multicolor versions, he made single-color impressions. One such, in brown ink, was used to advertise the publication of Weber’s book Primitives: Poems and Woodcuts (1926).

Rubenstein, Daryl R. Max Weber: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Graphic Work. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. No. 24, p. 121.

Max Weber: Prints and Color Variations. (exh. booklet, Smithsonian Institution, National Collection of Fine Arts). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Collection of Fine Arts, 1980.

Acton, David. A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking, 1890–1960. (exh. cat., Worcester Art Museum). New York: Norton, 1990. Text pp. 76, 290.