Max Weber: Art, Identity and Migrations

MAX WEBER: ART, IDENTITY AND MIGRATIONS SARAH MACDOUGALL

EXTRACT FROM This is the full, original essay.

DATE 2014.

SOURCE Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London 1905–15 (London: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2014).

Max Weber: Art, Identity and Migrations

A series of significant migrations punctuates the early life and career of Max Weber (1881– 1961). The first took him as a young boy from Biolostok in Russia (now Białystok in Poland) to Brooklyn in the United States, where he quickly threw off his Russian roots to embrace a specifically American-Jewish identity.1 He was raised in Williamsburg, an area heavily settled

by Jewish immigrants, many of whom had only recently vacated the overcrowded slum tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.2 He later drew on the memory of this bustling, multicultural neighbourhood to describe the creative foment in Paris in the early 1900s, likening it to ‘a veritable melting pot in the history of art’.3 Although outside the scope of this exhibition and publication, it is worth noting that Weber later explored his Jewish heritage as a significant motif in his art.4

It was over a decade later, as a newly naturalised American citizen, that Weber made his second significant journey, this time to Europe. In the ‘vault’ of his memories, he recalled, were ‘compartments marked “Italy”, “Spain”, [and] “the Netherlands”, but the one marked “Paris”, [was] by far the richest and fullest’ 5 and his prolonged stay there from 1905–09 was of lasting influence on his life and work. His stay coincided with the emergence of Fauvism and Cubism, he studied life drawing under Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian, drew without instruction at the Académie Colarossi and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automone, where he had a seminal encounter with the work of Cézanne. He also befriended Henri Rousseau and became a habitué of the soirées of the Stein family (Gertrude, Leo, Michael and his wife, Sarah) – the four most celebrated Americans in Paris. He later described the Steins’ salon as ‘a sort of international clearing house of ideas and matters of art, for the young and aspiring artist [sic] from all over the world.’6

In 1908 the German émigré artist Hans Purrmann (1880–1966), a close friend of Matisse, invited Weber to join him and Sarah Stein in setting up a life class under the master’s tutelage.

Although Weber ‘assumed an active role within the circle of expatriates’,7 he was unsuccessful in persuading his sceptical compatriots from the American Art Club to enlist, but 1

Leo Stein and the Virginian painter Patrick Bruce (1881–1936) strengthened the American side, together with several European émigrés: Weber’s Dutch friend, a pianist called Mlle de Ward, Oskar and Greta Moll (from Berlin) and Fräulein von Knierim (from Hamburg). They were also joined by an old friend of Matisse’s, Jean Biette. 8 Weber’s exciting experiences in Paris (and his travels within wider Europe) coalesced in the work he created in Matisse's studio towards the end of his stay in the city. He recalled that the students purchased ‘a life-size cast of one of the finest Greek Apollos of the 5th century B.C.’, upon the recommendation of Matisse, who strongly advised them to study it. ‘There were weeks,’ Weber recalled, ‘when the living model was suspended, and our entire time was given up to drawing and even painting from this exquisite plaster cast’.9 Weber invoked this experience in his highly accomplished canvas, The Apollo in Matisse’s Studio (1908), acknowledged as his masterpiece from these classes. Employing a Fauve palette dominated by the purples and greens favoured by Matisse and foregrounding the impressive Apollo, Weber himself is just glimpsed at work at his easel. His vivid, rapidly sketched graphite portrait of Matisse in profile, signed ‘Paris 1908’, also attests to this time. Although the two men lost touch after Weber’s return to New York, Weber was delighted to receive in 1949 a book from Matisse inscribed ‘with memories of the Couvent des Oiseaux days’. In November 1951 Weber read a seventeen-page typescript lecture recalling his time in the ‘Matisse Class’ at the Matisse Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), proudly recalling how Matisse had praised his work on the first day of class. He remembered the atmosphere as ‘tense [sic] tinged with shades of anticipation and fear, but with deep inner joy as well, for we felt that a rising master was coming to bring us light and lead us out of chaos, toward the right path of a veritable renaissance’.

After running out of money, Weber was forced to make his third and final Atlantic crossing, taking him home to New York in 1909, where he was destined – as a pioneering modernist – to become at first reviled and then later revered and celebrated as the first American exponent of cubism in his adopted country. Despite intentions to the contrary, he never visited Europe again.

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This exhibition and publication, Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London 1905– 15, set out to explore the significant journey from Paris to London that Weber made only twice in person (each for only a short period, in 1906 and 1908). However, Weber’s ‘presence’ in London is also invoked by the rich and important early collection of his work created in New York, informed by his experience in Paris, then shipped to London by fellow American and émigré photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (the bulk of this collection is now held at the University of Reading, with the remainder in a small private collection). This unique collection illustrates the importance of the friendship between the two men, who first met in New York in 1910. Their second meeting in 1911, resulted in in a fine pair of reciprocal portraits. Their third and most significant meeting in October 1912, when they explored New York together and shared their fascination for the modern city with its soaring skyscrapers and exhilarating, dizzying views, is captured in both Coburn’s photographs and Weber’s birds-eye view sketches.

It was chiefly through Coburn’s advocacy that Weber played a critical role in the British avant-garde’s dialogue with modernism, when his work was showcased at Roger Fry’s inaugural Grafton Group Exhibition at London’s Alpine Galleries in 1913. When Coburn settled in England in 1912, he brought several of Weber’s paintings with him, then arranged for further works to be shipped across the Atlantic (their comic and somewhat hazardous journey is recorded in Coburn’s letters) for inclusion in Fry’s show. Coburn photographed the artworks and, together with the works he had photographed earlier in New York, created an embryonic Weber catalogue raisonné of 79 works to that date. Remarkably, five of the eleven works shown by Fry are now in the Reading collection. They mark not only the significant cross-cultural exchange between these two men but also that between the three cities of New York, Paris, and London. They are presented alongside work by both Weber’s British contemporaries and by fellow ‘foreigner’ Wassily Kandinsky, allowing us to assess Weber’s modernist contribution in a European context for the first time.

Coburn continued this dialogue when he published two books of photographs of cultural figures from both sides of the Atlantic, many of them literary and artistic subjects. Coburn had been the pupil of Belgian-born British artist Frank Brangwyn at the London School of Art 3

(1904–06) and included his former teacher’s portrait, taken in 1904. Perhaps more importantly, he also included photographic portraits of Weber’s international art triangle: Matisse, the master, in Paris; Fry, the mover and shaker of the British art world, in London; and Weber himself, in New York. Although he concentrated on British men, Coburn underpinned the connection with Paris by his inclusion of French artistic celebrities including Rodin, as well as influential Americans: from the literary world Henry James (another émigré settled in England, with whom he had already established a relationship, and who had made the same journey as Coburn himself),10 writer and humourist Mark Twain, fellow photographer Clarence H White, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Coburn’s second volume included further fellow émigré portraits, this time primarily of American expatriates, mostly settled in London. These include the poet and champion of the Vorticists, Ezra Pound, who noticed Weber’s work in Coburn’s studio and was the subject of a number of his striking experimental Vortographs,11 the modernist graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer,12 and the sculptor Jacob Epstein,13 whose Russian/American-Jewish background was similar to Weber’s; so too was that of Israel Zangwill, the subject of another photograph, the so-called ‘Jewish Dickens’, who though born in London was the son of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia.14 This important collection of Weber’s early work from the University of Reading, presented in the context of his relationship to Coburn, allows us to also uncover this rich sub-text of relationships among the émigré networks. The exhibition, Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15, and accompanying publication, seek similarly to invite the examination of new contexts, new relationships, and new influences – with the hope of igniting fresh interest in the cross-cultural exchange between the cities of New York, Paris, and London, as well as between these two émigré adherents of modernism.

© Sarah MacDougall 2014/2021 Extract from: given in full Date: 2014 (revised 2021) Source: Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London 1905–15 (London: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2014)

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In later life he would always correct anyone who pronounced his surname with the hard, foreign sounding ‘V’, in favour of the Americanised soft ‘W’. I am grateful to Percy North for this information.

2 According to Alfred Werner ‘Jewish Art in the USA’, Jewish Chronicle (17 October 1958), p. 21: by 1958, ‘Max Weber’s memories of his native Bialystok and the Chassidic dance [sic] he had seen there as a child are rather dim.’

3 The term originated with Israel Zangwill’s eponymous play “The Melting Pot” and was also commonly used to describe the wider assimilation of immigrants into the United States of America.

4 See Percy North’s essay, “Max Weber: American Modern”, in this volume, pp. 28–40. See also Avram Kampf et al., Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art (London: Lund Humphries, in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1990).

5 For Max Weber’s Speech on Matisse’s Class, see Max Weber papers, 1902–2008, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: < https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/max-weber-speech-his-class-henrimatisse-15702 > (accessed 9.5.14).

6 Cited Percy North, Bringing Paris to New York (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2013), p. 12.

7 Percy North, Max Weber: the Cubist Decade, 1910–1920 (Atlanta, Ga: High Museum of Art, 1991), p. 14.

8 See Nancy Ireson’s essay, “Max Weber and the ‘Lessons’ of Rousseau and Matisse”, in this volume, pp. 40–58; Max Weber papers, AAA, op. cit; North, Bringing Paris to New York, op. cit; and Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: Man of the North, A Life of Henri Mattise, Volume One, 1869–1908 (London: Penguin, 1998) for full accounts of this period.

9 See fn. 5.

10 From 1906–13 Coburn was ‘informally tutored by Henry James in the typology of cities for the purpose of providing frontispieces for the collected New York edition of James's novels’ (Dictionary of National Biography: Alvin Langdon Coburn: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/templates/article.jsp?articleid=41128&back> accessed 20.5.14.).

11 See Anna Gruetzner Robins’s essay, “The Company of Strangers: Max Weber and the first Grafton Group Exhibition”, in this volume, pp. 58–106, where it is argued that The Dancers became an important source for Coburn’s Vortographs.

12 See Pamela G Roberts and Anna Gruetzner Robins, “Chronology: Max Weber and Alvin Langdon Coburn: History of a Friendship”, in this volume, pp. 112–150.

13 Jacob Epstein is represented by six bronzes in the Ben Uri collection: Jacob Kramer (1921); Professor Samuel Alexander O.M. (1924); Lydia (1931); Shulamite Woman (1935); Alexander Margulies (1942) and Sholem Asch (1953) and is the subject of two Mark Wayner lithographic caricatures, Remorse (1931); and George Lansbury: A Suggestion to Epstein for a Bas-Relief (c. 1940), both from his ‘Celebrities in Caricature’ portfolio. Pamela Roberts has also pointed out (see chronology in this volume) that in February 1917 Coburn photographed work at Epstein’s home for his forthcoming exhibition at the Leicester Galleries.

14 Israel Zangwill (1892–1962) is also the subject of four portraits in the Ben Uri Collection: Henry (Enrico) Glicenstein, Israel Zangwill (1923, bronze); K.W.P., Portrait of Israel Zangwill (not dated, bronze relief and wood); Alfred Wolmark, Portrait of Israel Zangwill (1925, pen and ink on paper); and Jacob Kramer, Portrait of Israel Zangwill (1925, charcoal and white chalk on paper). The collection also includes thirteen of Alfred Wolmark’s ‘Fourteen Illustrations to the novels of Israel Zangwill.

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