Max Weber “Becoming Modern”

Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

[Image: "Decoration with Cloud" (1913) oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 40 3/8 in. © Estate of Max Weber.]

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Gerald Peters Gallery presents Max Weber: Becoming Modern. Spanning the years 1905-1930, the paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures that make up the exhibition will explore Weber’s transformation from art student to arbiter of the avant-garde.

Weber arrived in Paris in 1905 and enrolled at the Academie Colarossi, pursuing a traditinoal, academic course of study. He left Paris four years later an avant-garde artist, an acolyte of Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, and Rousseau, determined to change the course of art in the United States. By 1930, Weber had become a superstar, with a retrospective that year at MOMA, the first that institution had devoted to an American artist. Weber’s rise to stardom, however, was not marked by an easy line of successes, but rather by a trail of baffled critics, financial hardship, and a public whose tastes and perceptions were years behind Weber’s evolved vision.

Between 1905 and 1930, Weber redefined modern art in America: he introduced modern European art but, more importantly, he established American art and artists as part of transatlantic modernism. Before the 1913 Armory Show, Weber was faced with an environment with only one established outlet for showcasing modern art (Stieglitz’s 291) and a public that was still enthralled by Impressionism. Weber persevered in filtering European modernism through an American lens. His works from these years gave visual expression to the “new” and exist, in the words of Lloyd Goodrich, as “the most advanced experimental panting…produced in America in these years.” Max Weber: Becoming Modern will focus on these twenty-five years of struggle and experimentation during which Weber matured from student to master, guiding a reluctant public through a crash course on modern art and becoming a lodestone for American Modernism.