Patriarch's Prizes

This has been Max Weber's year-the year when, at 60, he has won recognition as one of the greatest living U.S. artists. Thirty years ago, critics called his work "emanations such as one might expect from the inmate of a lunatic asylum." But in 1941 he took prizes in three of the biggest U.S. exhibitions,* got his pictures in four more U.S. museums. Last week a Weber exhibition was just over in Dayton; another was on in Baltimore; another was soon to open in Washington.

Max Weber is a white-haired, round-faced, patriarchal little man who talks quietly with a New York accent and seldom ventures outside his studio in suburban Great Neck, L.I. There he spends his days painting somber, mysterious-looking pictures of haggard rabbis, massively sedate nudes, weary-muscled workmen and dour, tenebrous landscapes.

Outlined with heavy, wrathful-looking brush strokes and colored with a gloomy kaleidoscope of subtly subdued blues and purples, his paintings have the solidity and repose of monuments, the mystical fervor of ancient Hebrew chants. What makes them great painting is the way in which Painter Weber has transmuted that subject matter into an intricate and balanced symphony of line and color. Painter Weber is a realist, not of the eye but of the mind.

Son of a humble Jewish tailor, Max Weber was born in Bialystok, Russia in 1881, brought to the U.S. at ten. He studied at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, and got jobs as a manual training and art teacher. Hoarding his pennies, Painter Weber spent his savings on a trip to Paris, remained there three years, absorbing most of what the Paris art world had to offer.

When he returned to the U.S. in 1909, he brought with him a sound academic technique from the famed conservative Julian Academy, a crusader's zeal for the ideas of French modern art, and an undying devotion to the best friend of his Paris years, Henri Rousseau (TIME, Feb. 9). He considers Rousseau the greatest figure in modern French art, but no Philistine would suspect it from Weber's pictures. Rousseau smoothed and polished nature until his subjects glistened like artificial jewels. Weber roughens and distorts nature until his pictures, to the cursory observer, look smudged and careless.

Painter Weber, today, is somewhat sour on the subject of contemporary art, feels that recent fads and isms have produced little of value. A man of unorthodox but .deep religious convictions, he believes that great art can spring only from discipline and religious impulse. Says he: "Modern art is a barren field whose soil needs spiritual humus to turn it over for the planting of new seeds. You can't monkey with things of the spirit."

*Pennsylvania Academy's Temple Gold Medal, Corcoran Biennial $1,000 W. A. Clark, Prize, Chicago Art Institute's Ada S. Garrett Prize.

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