MAX WEBER
Pine Trees.
Watercolor and gouache on paper, 1917. 380x276 mm; 15x10 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto.Provenance: Downtown Gallery, New York; Richard D. Brixey, New York.Property of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sold to benefit the Acquisitions Fund (118.1943). Gifted by Richard D. Brixey.Perhaps more than any other American artist returning from Paris in the first decade of the 20th century, Weber (1881-1961), an avid student of art history who possessed a critical eye for the avant-garde, skillfully incorporated the new directions of French modern art into his work. Weber absorbed the primitivism of his good friend, the self-taught artist Henri Rousseau, the early Cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and the Fauvism of Henri Matisse and Émile Othon Frieze.Born in Poland and emigrating to Brooklyn at the age of ten, Weber studied at the Pratt Institute under pioneering modernist teacher, Arthur Wesley Dow, who was also an important influence on Weber as an accomplished printmaker and painter himself. In the early 1920s, Weber traveled to Paris just in time to view a major Paul Cézanne retrospective, as well as visit Gertrude Stein’s artistic salon and take classes at Matisse’s private academy. Weber worked in singular modern style throughout most of his career and influenced many following generations of American artists.