clip & save - cubist artist Max Weber

Arts & Activities, Oct, 2001

Max Weber (Russian-born American, 1881-1961) Rush Hour, New York, 1915. Oil on canvas; 36 1/4" x 30 1/4".

the artist

Max Weber (1881-1961) was born in Bialystock, Russia, and came to live in Brooklyn, N.Y., when he was 11 years old. His parents were Orthodox Jews who brought their family to America to escape religious persecution. As a boy, Weber liked art and, when he was 16, he enrolled in an art school. This decision to become a professional artist upset his parents who, like many immigrants, had difficulty understanding life in their new country.

Weber began his career as an art teacher and taught in Virginia and Minnesota before saving enough money to visit Europe for further study. He was 24 when he arrived in Paris. The money he had saved lasted for seven years, after which he had to return home.

During his time in Paris, Weber came to know most of the artists belonging to the important group of modern artists known as The School of Paris. They included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marie Laurencin. He also met American artists Alfred Maurer and John Marin, who were studying in Paris.

On his return home in 1908, Weber discovered that New York had not been influenced at all by the modernist painters of Europe. He realized that New York was a perfect place for painting Cubist pictures, although he had not painted in that style while in Europe. His New York subjects were the new skyscrapers, together with mechanical objects such as trains, bridges and ships--all of which were clearly composed of geometric shapes and forms.

Although Weber continued to paint throughout his long life, some of his best work was done between 1910 and 1920, while he was interested in Cubism. It was as if he understood that the city was undergoing a unique urban experience, It was full of vitality as a result of so many people having recently immigrated there.

At the same time, American wealth and technology was making possible buildings that were larger and taller than anything ever seen before. In addition to what he could see on the streets, he discovered subjects in theater performances and athletic contests, all of which displayed the same kinds of turbulent rhythms and actions.

New York was also a natural place to apply ideas originated by French artists Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, who were trying to give objects painted on flat canvas surfaces the feeling that they were moving. While Matisse and Duchamp each did this in his own way, both men repeated objects several times to make them appear as though they were moving--as in motion photography. Weber had long recognized the importance of photography for art, so it was natural that he should recognize the importance of the new art of motion pictures and apply it in his paintings.

This interest in motion led Weber and other artists to try to represent the passage of time, which, at the time, was thought of as the fourth dimension. The three dimensions that had been used by artists for centuries were length, breadth and depth. The fourth dimension was thought to present a truer vision of reality through the use of geometry than other kinds of art and the more familiar types of Cubism.

Max Weber was one of the first modern American painters and, for a number of years, he found Cubism to be a perfect way to express himself. Nevertheless, after he was about 40--an age when many artists become less creative--he began to experiment with other artistic ideas. He continued searching for new forms of expression throughout the rest of his life.

this painting

New York was unlike any other city in the world about 100 years ago. Not until many years later did other large cities line their streets with such tall buildings, and even today few cities have nearly as many of them crowded in so small an area.

On his return home from Europe, Max Weber soon recognized that the tall, rectangular buildings lining the canyon-like streets were natural subjects for Cubist art. In spite of the fact that, while in Europe, Weber had not painted as a Cubist, he now began to do so and continued to paint in that style for about 10 years. It was during this period that this picture was painted.

While large cities have always been busy, crowded places, New York was more so because of all the thousands of people who worked in the clustered skyscraper buildings. In addition, they all started work at about the same time and went home at about the same time, which resulted in enormous, hurrying crowds being on the streets at those times of day.

Rush hours almost certainly occurred in other large cities at the time, but they would not have been nearly as dramatic as those in New York, especially in Manhattan, where the business district was quite small. In trying to communicate a feeling of the city, Weber not only recognized the Cubist shapes of the buildings, he realized that rash hour was a perfect opportunity to include the idea of feverish motion that later Cubist artists were trying to portray.

In this picture, fragments of buildings are shown together with rectangular, window-like shapes, while sharply pointed triangles suggest the rays that crown the Statue of Liberty. The sense of wild activity present during rash hour is captured by the repetition of geometric shapes, and by the way the whole picture seems to be spinning around.