Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 17

Max Weber
American Modernist Cubist Lithograph Screenprint "Reclining Woman" Max Weber

1956

$1,500
£1,159.01
€1,339.93
CA$2,119.61
A$2,377.28
CHF 1,244.95
MX$28,886.29
NOK 15,808.73
SEK 14,987.79
DKK 10,001.84

About the Item

Reclining Cubist Nude Woman Max Weber (April 18, 1881 – October 4, 1961) was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, "the finest canvas of his Cubist phase," in the words of art historian Avis Berman. Born in the Polish city of Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn with his Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a fortunate early influence on Weber as he was an "enlightened and vital teacher" in a time of conservative art instruction, a man who was interested in new approaches to creating art. Dow had met Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, was a devoted student of Japanese art, and defended the advanced modernist painting and sculpture he saw at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. In 1905, after teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and acquainted himself with the work of such modernists as Henri Rousseau (who became a good friend), Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other members of the School of Paris. His friends among fellow Americans included some equally adventurous young painters, such as Abraham Walkowitz, H. Lyman Sayen, and Patrick Henry Bruce. Avant-garde France in the years immediately before World War I was fertile and welcoming territory for Weber, then in his early twenties. He arrived in Paris in time to see a major Cézanne exhibition, meet the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, frequent Gertrude Stein's salon, and enroll in classes in Matisse's private "Academie." Rousseau gave him some of his works; others, Weber purchased. He was responsible for Rousseau's first exhibition in the United States. In 1909 he returned to New York and helped to introduce Cubism to America. He is now considered one of the most significant early American Cubists, but the reception his work received in New York at the time was profoundly discouraging. Critical response to his paintings in a 1911 show at the 291 gallery, run by Alfred Stieglitz, was an occasion for "one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America." The reviews were "of an almost hysterical violence." He was attacked for his "brutal, vulgar, and unnecessary art license." Even a critic who usually tried to be sympathetic to new art, James Gibbons Huneker, protested that the artist's clever technique had left viewers with no real picture and made use of the adage, "The operation was successful, but the patient died."[8] As art historian Sam Hunter wrote, "Weber's wistful, tentative Cubism provided the philistine press with their first solid target prior to the Armory Show." The Cellist, 1917, which was featured in Weber's 1930 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Weber was sustained by the respect of some eminent peers, such as photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn and Clarence White, and museum director John Cotton Dana, who saw to it that Weber was the subject of a one-man exhibition at the Newark Museum in 1913, the first modernist exhibition in an American museum. For a few years, Weber enjoyed a productive if rocky relationship with Stieglitz, and he published two essays in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work. (He also wrote Cubist poems and published a book, Essays on Art, in 1916.) So poor was Weber in these years that he camped out for some weeks in Stieglitz's gallery. Weber was also closely acquainted with Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and Thomas Furlong, whom he met at the Art Students League, where he taught from 1919 to 1921 and 1926 to 1927. Weber died in Great Neck, New York in 1961. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1982. Weber evidently was a prickly personality even with his allies. He and Stieglitz had a falling-out, and Weber was not represented in the famous Armory Show because his friend, Arthur B. Davies, one of the show's organizers, had only allotted him space for two paintings. In a fit of pique at Davies, he withdrew entirely from the exhibition. Other artists in the Stieglitz circle kept their distance, especially after Weber told people that there were only three indisputably great modern painters: Cézanne, Rousseau, and himself. "Almost without exception, they found him obnoxious: opinionated, rude, intolerant." n time, Weber's work found more adherents, including Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1930, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work, the first solo exhibition at that museum of an American artist. He was praised as a "pioneer of modern art in America" in a 1945 Life magazine article. In 1948, Look magazine reported on a survey among art experts to determine the greatest living American artists; Weber was rated second, behind only John Marin.[16] He was the subject of a major traveling retrospective in 1949. He became more popular in the 1940s and 1950s for his figurative work, often expressionist renderings of Jewish families, rabbis, and Talmudic scholars, than for the early modernist work he had abandoned circa 1920 and on which his current reputation is founded. Not everyone believed that Weber fulfilled his early potential as he became a more representational and expressionist painter post-World War I. Critic Hilton Kramer wrote of him that, in light of the remarkable beginning of his career, "Weber proved instead to be one of the great disappointments of twentieth-century American art." Others however, because of his bold "Cubist decade," hold him in the same high regard as other native modernists like John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth.
  • Creator:
    Max Weber (1881-1961, American)
  • Creation Year:
    1956
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 18.13 in (46.06 cm)Width: 24.25 in (61.6 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
    Minor wear, Please see photos.
  • Gallery Location:
    Surfside, FL
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU38211229682

More From This Seller

View All
Etching with Aquatint Print Women Reclining
Located in Surfside, FL
Inspired by the energy within the image, fine draftsmanship, purity of line, subtlety of color, and the excitement of combining the media of etching and wood block printing makes Sai...
Category

20th Century Prints and Multiples

Materials

Etching, Aquatint

Chicago Modernist Line Drawing Reclining Nude WPA Artist. Exhibited Work
By William S. Schwartz
Located in Surfside, FL
Reclining Nude.Early modernist line drawing, by American artist William S. Schwartz, c. 1940, gouache painting, signed with initials, framed. (size includes frame). Work is reminisce...
Category

Mid-20th Century American Modern Nude Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

Henry Moore 1973 Lithograph edition 28/75 Sculpture Figures Reclining Nudes
By Henry Moore
Located in Surfside, FL
Henry Spencer Moore (1898 – 1986) Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom later endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts. After the Great War, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education and in 1919 he became a student at the Leeds School of Art (now Leeds College of Art), which set up a sculpture studio especially for him. At the college, he met Barbara Hepworth, a fellow student who would also become a well-known British sculptor, and began a friendship and gentle professional rivalry that lasted for many years. In Leeds, Moore also had access to the modernist works in the collection of Sir Michael Sadler, the University Vice-Chancellor, which had a pronounced effect on his development. In 1921, Moore won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London, along with Hepworth and other Yorkshire contemporaries. While in London, Moore extended his knowledge of primitive art and sculpture, studying the ethnographic collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. Moore's familiarity with primitivism and the influence of sculptors such as Constantin Brâncuși, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Frank Dobson led him to the method of direct carving, in which imperfections in the material and marks left by tools became part of the finished sculpture. After Moore married, the couple moved to a studio in Hampstead at 11a Parkhill Road NW3, joining a small colony of avant-garde artists who were taking root there. Shortly afterward, Hepworth and her second husband Ben Nicholson moved into a studio around the corner from Moore, while Naum Gabo, Roland Penrose, Cecil Stephenson and the art critic Herbert Read also lived in the area (Read referred to the area as "a nest of gentle artists"). This led to a rapid cross-fertilization of ideas that Read would publicise, helping to raise Moore's public profile. The area was also a stopping-off point for many refugee artists, architects and designers from continental Europe en route to America—some of whom would later commission works from Moore. In 1932, after six year's teaching at the Royal College, Moore took up a post as the Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art. Artistically, Moore, Hepworth and other members of The Seven and Five Society would develop steadily more abstract work, partly influenced by their frequent trips to Paris and their contact with leading progressive artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti. Moore flirted with Surrealism, joining Paul Nash's modern art movement "Unit One", in 1933. In 1934, Moore visited Spain; he visited the cave of Altamira (which he described as the "Royal Academy of Cave Painting"), Madrid, Toledo and Pamplona. Moore made his first visit to America when a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[28] Before the war, Moore had been approached by educator Henry Morris, who was trying to reform education with his concept of the Village College. Morris had engaged Walter Gropius as the architect for his second village college at Impington near Cambridge, and he wanted Moore to design a major public sculpture for the site. In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions. He exhibited Reclining Figure: Festival at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and in 1958 produced a large marble reclining figure for the UNESCO building in Paris. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ an increasing number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth. Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described extreme reservations, he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill..At an introductory speech in New York City for an exhibition of one of the finest modernist sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, Sartre spoke of The beginning and the end of history...
Category

1970s Modern Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Jacques Lipchitz French Cubist Modernist Lithograph Hebrew Judaica ZIon
By Jacques Lipchitz
Located in Surfside, FL
Hand signed and numbered. with Hebrew calligraphy "Zion" Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, 1891-1973, was born in Lithuania and came of age in Paris during the early 20th century, where he was...
Category

1960s Modern Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Israeli Josef Zaritsky Abstract Modernist Lithograph Print "Composition"
Located in Surfside, FL
Abstract Composition, 1959 Lithograph This was from a portfolio which included works by Yosl Bergner, Menashe Kadishman, Yosef Zaritsky, Aharon Kahana, Moshe Tamir and Michael Gross. Joseph (Yossef) Zaritsky (Hebrew: יוסף זריצקי‎; September 1, 1891 – November 30, 1985) was one of Israel's greatest artists and one of the early promoters of modern art in the Land of Israel both during the period of the Yishuv (Palestine, the body of Jewish residents in the Land of Israel before the establishment of the State of Israel) and after the establishment of the State. In 1948 Zaritsky was one of the founders of the "Ofakim Hadashim" group. In his works he created a uniquely Israeli style of abstract art, which he sought to promote by means of the group. For this work he was awarded the Israel Prize for painting in 1959. Joseph Zaritsky...
Category

1950s Modern Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph

French Abstract Surrealist Lithograph Andre Masson Mourlot Paris Limited Edition
By André Masson
Located in Surfside, FL
This is from the suite by Jean Paul Sartre and Andre Masson, Limited edition of 175. published by Fernand Mourlot, 1961. The portfolio is numbered #29/175 and hand signed by Andre Ma...
Category

20th Century Surrealist Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph

You May Also Like

Mid 20th-Century French Cubist Portrait Reclining Posed Nude Woman
Located in Cirencester, Gloucestershire
Nude Abstract by Therese Hummel (French, 1911-1999) oil on canvas, unframed canvas : 10.75 x 14 inches Provenance: private collection of this artists work, Paris Condition: sound and...
Category

Mid-20th Century Cubist Nude Paintings

Materials

Oil

Femme Assise, Cubist Lithograph after Pablo Picasso
By Pablo Picasso
Located in Long Island City, NY
Reduced to angular shapes, the female model in this Pablo Picasso print is portrayed in the Cubist style founded and propagated by the artist himself. Relying on invented perspective...
Category

1980s Cubist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

The Rest, Two Reclining Nudes - Lithograph and watercolor stencil
By Le Corbusier
Located in Paris, IDF
Le Corbusier (1887-1965) The Rest, Two Reclining Nudes, 1938 Lithograph and watercolor stencil On light vellum 21 x 27 cm (c. 8 x 11 inch) Very good condition, paper lightly yellow...
Category

1930s Cubist Nude Prints

Materials

Lithograph

FEMME ASSISE DANS UN FAUTEUIL TRESSE
By (after) Pablo Picasso
Located in Aventura, FL
Selected from the personal collection inherited by Marina Picasso, Pablo Picasso's granddaughter. After Pablo Picasso's death, his granddaughter Marina authorized the printing of t...
Category

1980s Cubist Portrait Prints

Materials

Paper, Lithograph

Femme dans un Fauteuil, Cubist Lithograph after Pablo Picasso
By Pablo Picasso
Located in Long Island City, NY
Comprised solely of mostly rigid, straight lines, this print by Pablo Picasso is a fine example of his mastery of perspective through the use of line. Set in a living room, the woman...
Category

Late 20th Century Cubist Abstract Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Femme Endormie, Cubist Lithograph after Pablo Picasso
By Pablo Picasso
Located in Long Island City, NY
This Pablo Picasso print portrays a nude woman who has fallen asleep. The figure reclines backward toward the viewer, resting on her back. The artist's use of flowing line and the br...
Category

1980s Cubist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph