Gerald Peters Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition 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.
Two Sisters, ca. 1910, watercolor on paper, 12 1/2 x 8 inches
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.
Max Weber, Decoration with Cloud, 1913, oil on canvas, 60 3/8 x 40 3/8 inches.
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.
The exhibition will open in New York on November 12th and continue through December 14th. It will open in Santa Fe on March 15th, 2019.
