Weber's Search

What sounded at first like an ordinary famous-artist retrospective at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery turned out to be something vastly more exciting. The current show of the work of Max Weber (see color) consists of gouaches, watercolors, pastels and collages that have never been displayed before because until lately no one knew they existed. Weber's widow found them in a folder that she thought contained only blank paper. They cover almost every phase of Weber's career.

Weber was one of those early 20th century American originals whose reception ("Atrocities"-New York Globe; "Such grotesquerie"-Evening World) must have amused him to recall before he died at 80 in 1961. Everything seemed to fascinate him-still lifes, landscapes, the construction of the human figure, cubist and abstract impressions of the rhythms of great cities. But subject matter was, never foremost in his mind. To a large extent; he treated each painting like a piece of architecture: building with colors as well as with forms. His distortions-the "grotesquerie" that his early critics denounced-were a deliberate effort to achieve a balance of space relations.

Harmonious Spacing. Weber's feeling for design was brought to bloom by Arthur Wesley Dow, his teacher at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Dow was a student of primitive and oriental art, and saw in these forms what he felt was the key to all art-harmonious spacing. By the time Weber sailed for France in 1905, his mind was ready, not only for the experiments that he was to encounter, but also for the timeless lessons to be learned from the masterpieces in Europe's museums. He filled notebook after notebook with sketches of ancient art, of works by Goya and El Greco, of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca.

He was, as he said, on a "search for fundamentals" from every time and every place.

He was "gripped" by Cezanne's efforts to lay bare the bones of nature; he studied under Matisse, shared Picasso's fascination with African sculpture, was enchanted by Henri Rousseau, in whom he saw not merely a quaint primitive but a master of color and harmony. He became Rousseau's close friend and for years afterward told affectionate anecdotes about him. Of a Cezanne painting, Rousseau once exclaimed, "My, that's a good picture! If only I could have it at home for a while, I could finish it up nicely." When Weber told Rousseau that he worked rather like Giotto, Rousseau said, "Who is Giotto?"

Distortion Is Poetic. Weber had some fairly sympathetic reviews of Paris shows, and that made his reception in the U.S. all the more bitter. Yet Manhattan still cast as strong a spell over him as it did when he first arrived as an immigrant from Russia at the age of ten. He put its terminals and bridges in exploding abstractions-and could give the same sense of excitement to a still life of fruit or a landscape of a road lined with trees. If his female figures seemed heavy, it was because he was concerned with the body as a solid, three-dimensional object in a particular setting. Abstractions, landscapes, the figure-every painting had its internal architecture. Gradually the critics came round to seeing Weber not only as a brilliant eclectic but also as a pioneer whose work, as Critic Lloyd Goodrich said in 1949, "places him among the pioneers of abstract art not only in America but anywhere." In 1930, when the new Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan gave him a large retrospective show, he was the first living American to be so honored.

For all his preoccupation with spatial harmony and with the distortions he used to achieve it, there was nothing cold or seemingly calculated about Weber's art. "Distortion should be born of a poetic impulse," he said. His war scenes, his paintings of workers, the face of an old rabbi could be cries of pain-as much a "search for fundamentals" as the magic key to design. "Art is the real history of nations," Weber said. "Their politics, their wars, their commerce are but records, as the calendar or the clock is not time itself."

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