Max Weber - An American Cubist in Paris and London

Edited by Sarah MacDougall

MAX WEBER: AN AMERICAN CUBIST IN PARIS AND LONDON, 1905–15

Russian-born American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) is widely recognized for introducing Cubism to New York. Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15 is the first publication to examine his career and influence within a European rather than an American context. It accompanies the first major museum exhibition of Weber’s work in the UK showcasing the University of Reading’s rare collection of 14 works (c. 1910–1912), formed by Weber’s champion in England, American émigré photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966). Following his formative years in Paris (1905–08), as a founding member of Matisse’s art class, Weber played a crucial role in the significant crosscultural dialogue between Paris and London. He was included in Roger Fry’s inaugural Grafton Group Exhibition in 1913 exhibiting alongside artists including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and Wassily Kandinsky.

Max Weber An American Cubist in Paris and London 1905–15

Max Weber An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15

Max Weber An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15

Ben Uri The London Jewish Museum of Art Art Identity Migration www.benuri.org.uk Ben Uri Gallery and Museum Limited Registered Museum 973 Registered Charity 280389 Registered Company in England 1488690

Copyright © 2014

Detail illustrations

ISBN 978-1-84822-163-5

Front cover cat. 34 Max Weber, The Dancers, 1912, University of Reading Art Collection

Lund Humphries Wey Court East Union Road Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT UK and Suite 3-1 110 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-3818 USA

British Library Cataloguing-inPublication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Edited by Sarah MacDougall Picture research by Phoebe Newman Catalogue designed and typeset by Alan Slingsby Printed by Gomer Press

Frontispiece cat. 18 Max Weber, The Blue Pitcher ,1910, University of Reading Art Collection Back cover (left) fig. 1 Henri Matisse, Nude Study in Blue/Académie Bleue, c. 1899–1900, Tate (right) cat. 1 Max Weber, Standing Nude, 1908, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014937338

www.lundhumphries.com Lund Humphries is part of Ashgate Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publishers.

This publication has been generously supported by Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

We thank Manya Igel of Manya Igel Fine Arts for her Preferred Partnership which allows free entry to all our exhibitions in 2014

Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Foreword David J Glasser

12 Max Weber: Art, Identity and Migrations Sarah MacDougall

28 Max Weber: American Modern Percy North

40 Max Weber and the ‘Lessons’ of Rousseau and Matisse Nancy Ireson

58 The Company of Strangers: Max Weber and the first Grafton Group Exhibition Anna Gruetzner Robins

106 The Coburn and Weber Collections, University of Reading Lionel Kelly

112 Chronology: Max Weber and Alvin Langdon Coburn: History of a friendship Pamela G Roberts and Anna Gruetzner Robins

150 Selected Artists’ biographies 154 Notes 162 Appendix 1 164 Appendix 2 166 Appendix 3 170 Select bibliography 174 Selected exhibitions 178 Contributors’ biographies 180 Catalogue of works 188 Lenders and credits 190 Ben Uri: Short history and mission statement 192 Ben Uri patrons and advisory board 194 Index

Acknowledgements The editor, authors and trustees of Ben Uri would like to thank the following for kind assistance in the preparation of this exhibition and publication: We extend thanks to all our lenders: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford; The Book Library, Courtauld Institute of Art; Gerald Peters Gallery, New York; the Government Art Collection; the Guildhall Library, London; Manchester City Art Galleries; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Tate; The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London; the University of Reading Art Collection; the University of Reading Special Collections; the Victoria and Albert Museum; S J Keynes; 31 Studio, England; and those private lenders prefer to remain anonymous.

We are indebted to all our catalogue contributors: Professor Anna GruetznerRobins; Dr Nancy Ireson; Lionel Kelly; Dr Percy North; and Pamela Roberts.

Thanks are also due to our publication designer Alan Slingsby; to photographer Justin Piperger; to our copy-editor Harriet Powney; to Jane Horton for compiling the index; and to Lucy Myers and her team at Lund Humphries, our distribution partners.

We would also like to thank the following for help and advice: Mark Antliff; Sumru Aricanli; Guy Baxter; Jonathan Black; Jake Broadway; Grace Brockington; Paul Caffell; Allesanda Carnielli, Director of the Pierre Matisse Foundation; John Cauman; William Chapman; Roger Cook; Lily deJongh Downing; Kate ArnoldForster; Erica Fuger; Alexander Fyjis Walker; Millicent Gambold; Alfred van der Geer; Vivien Green; Sophie Marquant; Maureen McGovern; Huw Molseed; Biddy Peppin; Christopher Phillips; The Portland Gallery; Gordon Samuel; Frances Spalding; Davina Thackera; Hugh Thomson and Robert Upstone.

Finally we recognise and thank Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund (USA) for their support for this publication; Manya Igel Fine Art for sponsoring free entry to the exhibition; and lastly to curator Sarah MacDougall and her colleagues at Ben Uri for their dedication and scholarship.

Foreword

Although the career and influence of Russian-American Jewish émigré Max Weber (1881–1961) has been widely examined within the United States, with this exhibition Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15 Ben Uri unveils a series of firsts: the first major UK museum show of Weber’s work;1 the first to examine his career and influence within a European context; and the first significant showing of his work in the UK since 1913. We are delighted to be working with the University of Reading, whose generous loan of 14 rare and exciting Weber paintings (c. 1910–1912), initiated this exhibition. There is still very little American painting in UK public collections and no pictures at all

by Weber outside the University’s Collection, which has never previously been exhibited in its entirety.2 Weber has long been recognised as the artist who first introduced cubism to America – a concept explored by Dr Percy North in her survey exhibition, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade 1910–1920 (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, 1991). This exhibition, Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15, specifically addresses the cross-cultural dialogue between Paris and London, as well as referencing that between London and New York. These two equally neglected narratives are also explored in detail within this publication.

From the University of Reading, we pay particular thanks to Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins – with whom the concept originated – who has conducted new research in this area and worked tirelessly to help us deliver the exhibition; as well as to Head of University Museum and Special Collections Services Kate Arnold-Forster, Special Collections Archivist Guy Baxter, and Conservator Alfred van der Geer. We are very grateful to the Friends of the University of Reading for generously raising funds to mount and frame the collection, and also to Jake Broadway, who conducted research for the exhibition with an award from the University of Reading Research Opportunities Programme.

8 Max Weber

We are honoured to be recipients of Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, whose grant has enabled us to realize this ambitious publication.

This exhibition brings the works together for the first time with a number of related images by Weber’s champion in England, American émigré photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966). The origins of the collection, bequeathed

by Coburn to Reading University through the auspices of Professor Gordon, are succinctly explained by Lionel Kelly, former Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Reading, and Director of the degree in American Studies, to whom we also extend our thanks. Although the exhibition foregrounds Weber, we are delighted to include Coburn’s album of 79 photographs of Weber pictures (University of Reading Special Collections), as well as reciprocal portraits by these two modernists, which draw attention to the importance of their friendship. In addition we are pleased to include two further Weber paintings and a number of Coburn’s photogravures from a British private collection that once belonged to Coburn.

We extend our thanks to all our contributors: Dr Percy North, the pre-eminent Weber scholar, whose eloquent introduction opens this publication and summarises Weber’s career; Coburn expert Pamela Roberts, who, together with Anna Gruetzner Robins, in an extended biographical chronology, throws new light on the friendship between Weber and Coburn; and curator Sarah MacDougall for her exploration of the émigré context. We are also very grateful to Dr Nancy Ireson and Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins for their important new research on the Paris and London contexts respectively. Dr Nancy Ireson’s essay on Weber and the Paris art world (1905-1908) outlines Weber’s connections to the Parisian avant-garde, particularly to Matisse, Picasso and Henri Rousseau, showing how their influence was then transmitted to British artists outside France, who shared a common goal.

Max Weber 9

We thank Joy Weber for permission to reproduce both the works of Max Weber and the works in her collection by Picasso and Rousseau which once belonged to her father, and the Baltimore Museum of Art for kindly providing these images.

Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins explores for the first time Weber’s influence on the London art world through her study of the first Grafton Group Exhibition in 1913, in which artists including Vanessa Bell, Frederick Etchells, Duncan Grant and Percy Wyndham Lewis showed anonymously alongside the two invited foreign artists, Weber and Kandinsky. We are thrilled to bring their work together again in London within this context. We greatly thank all our institutional lenders: The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Samuel Courtauld Trust, the Courtauld Gallery, London; the Government Art Collection; the Guildhall Library, London; Manchester City Art Galleries; the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art;Tate; the University of Reading; and the Victoria & Albert Museum. We also thank the Gerald Peters Gallery, New York; S J Keynes; and 31 Studio, England; as well as our private lenders who prefer to remain anonymous.

We thank, too, Manya Igel Fine Art for sponsoring free entry to the exhibition; Furthermore, a program of the J.M.Kaplan Fund (USA), for their important support of this publication; our catalogue designer Alan Slingsby; photographer Justin Piperger; copy-editor Harriet Powney; and indexer Jane Horton, as well as Lucy Myers, Celia Dunne and the team at our distributor Lund Humphries.

Finally, we pay tribute to our curator Sarah MacDougall and her curatorial team: Helena Cuss, Phoebe Newman, Kirsty Donald, Nina Hirschorn and Flora Allen; to Rachel Dickson, our Head of Curatorial Services; to our Operations team headed by Laura Jones; and to our Learning team, Alix Smith, Gabby Edlin and Danielle Heiblum, and to Thomas Hughes for all their hard work in bringing this significant and revealing exhibition and publication to fruition.

David J Glasser Executive Chair

10  Max Weber

Sarah MacDougall

Max Weber: Art, Identity and Migrations A series of significant migrations punctuates the early life and career of Max Weber. 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 Jewish-American 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, 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 1905–08 was of lasting influence on his life and work. He was introduced to the work of Cézanne, befriended Henri Rousseau, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, and became a habitué of the soirées of the Stein family – the four most celebrated Americans in Paris. He later described Leo and Gertrude Stein’s 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 together

12 Max Weber

2 Max Weber The Apollo in Matisse’s Studio, 1908 Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

Max Weber 13

fig. 1

fig. 2 Henri Matisse Standing Nude (Nu debout), 1907 Tate

14 Max Weber

Henri Matisse Nude Study in Blue (Académie bleue), c. 1899-1900 Tate

1 Max Weber Standing Nude, 1908 Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

Max Weber  15

with Sarah Stein to set up a life class under the master’s tutelage. Although he ‘assumed an active role within the circle of expatriates’,7 Weber was unsuccessful in persuading his sceptical compatriots from the American Art Club to enlist; but Leo Stein and the Virginian painter Patrick Bruce (1881–1936) strengthened the American side together with a number of European émigrés.8 Weber’s 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.

In composition, figuration and palette, his impressive Standing Nude (cat. 1) may be compared to Matisse’s Nude Study in Blue/Académie Bleue (fig. 1), although, since the latter had been sold in 1904, it is not known whether Weber actually saw this work9 (after he returned to New York, however, his figurative work would be closer in composition and technique to Matisse’s Standing Nude (fig. 2)).10 Weber also 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.’ Weber invokes this experience in his small but highly accomplished canvas, The Apollo in Matisse’s Studio (cat. 2), in a palette dominated by the purples and greens favoured by Matisse, which is acknowledged as Weber’s masterpiece from these classes.11 A rapidly sketched graphite profile portrait of Matisse (cat. 3) also attests to this time. (This period and Weber’s s artistic relationships with Matisse and Rousseau are addressed in greater detail in Nancy Ireson’s essay in this volume.)

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

This exhibition and publication set out to explore the significant journey from Paris to London that Weber made in reality only twice (each for only a short

16 Max Weber

3 Max Weber Portrait of Matisse, 1908 Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

Max Weber  17

4 Alvin Langdon Coburn A Canal, Rotterdam, 1908 Private collection

18  Max Weber

Max Weber  19

period, in 1906 and 1908). However, Weber’s ‘presence’ in London is also invoked by the rich and important early collection of his work which, although created in New York, was informed and enriched by his experience in Paris, then shipped to London by fellow American 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 Weber and Coburn (see chronology). The two men probably first met in New York in 1910; then again in 1911, which resulted in a fine pair of reciprocal portraits (cats. 7 and 37). Their most significant meeting was in October 1912, however, when they explored their shared fascination for the modern city, particularly the soaring skyscrapers and the exhilarating, dizzying views they offered, and which New York then (and perhaps even now) epitomised. Weber’s New York (cat. 16) and Coburn’s The House of a Thousand Windows, New York (fig. 15) are evidence of this, while the arching tree tentacles in Weber’s two views of Central Park (cats.

13 and 14), may be compared to Coburn’s brilliant Octopus (cat. 15). Moreover, as Anna Gruetzner Robins suggests in her essay in this volume, they can be seen to have influenced future Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, whose masterpiece The Crowd (fig. 17) shares an affinity with the work of both men.

It was chiefly through Coburn’s advocacy that in 1913 Weber played a critical role in the British avant-garde’s dialogue with modernism, when his work was showcased alongside theirs at Roger Fry’s inaugural Grafton Group Exhibition (see cat. 48) at London’s Alpine Galleries. When Coburn settled in England in 1912, he brought several of Weber’s paintings with him. Weber also 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 then photographed them, before bringing the results together with the works he had photographed earlier in New York to create an embryonic Weber catalogue raisonné of 79 works to that date (cat. 42). Remarkably, five of the 11 works shown by Fry are in the Reading collection. They mark not only the significant

20 Max Weber

cross-cultural exchange between these two men but also that between the three cities of New York, Paris and London. They are presented here alongside work by both Weber’s British contemporaries and by fellow ‘foreigner’ Wassily Kandinsky (cat. 17), allowing us to assess Weber’s modernist contribution in a European context for the first time.

As Anna Gruetzner Robins explores in her essay it is clear that the British avant-garde were receptive to and sometimes influenced by Weber’s work.

Vanessa Bell’s portrait of Molly MacCarthy (cat. 31), for example, unusually shows the influence of cubism. A pair of still lifes by Fry (cat. 23) and Winifred Gill (cat. 24) also appear to relate closely to Weber’s (cats. 18 and 22); while the figurative compositions of Lewis’s The Dancers/Study for Kermesse (cat. 26) and Helen Saunders’ Hammock (cat. 28) both have visual resonances with Weber’s The Dancers (cat. 34). Equally, Weber’s Brooklyn Bridge (cat. 32), which was on view in Coburn’s studio, is an obvious source for Lewis’s treatment of the same subject.

Although there is no suggestion of a direct influence, further cross-cultural relationships suggest themselves between Coburn’s London photographs of this period (two books of which were published, the first in 1909 and the second in 1914) and the work of the European painters. For example, the dripping shadows of Coburn’s A Canal, Rotterdam (cat. 4) are reminiscent of Derain’s Fauve landscapes, while his Regent’s Canal (cat. 5) shares with Nevinson’s The Towpath (cat. 6) an atmospheric riverside setting and lyrical vertical composition.

Coburn continued this dialogue when he published two books of photographs of cultural figures, the majority of them literary and artistic subjects, from both sides of the Atlantic: Men of Mark (cat. 46) in 1913, and More Men of Mark (cat. 47) in 1922. Coburn had himself been the pupil of Belgian-born British artist Frank Brangwyn at the London School of Art (1904–06)12 and included his former teacher’s portrait (fig. 28), taken in 1904, in Men of Mark. Perhaps more importantly, he also included photographic portraits of Weber’s art triangle: from Paris, the master, Matisse (fig. 3); from London, Fry (fig. 4), the mover and shaker of the British art world; and from New York, Weber (cat. 7) himself.

Max Weber 21

6 C R W Nevinson The Towpath, 1912 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

22  Max Weber

5 Alvin Langdon Coburn Regent’s Canal, 1904 Private collection Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/Brentano’s, 1909)

Max Weber 23

fig. 4

fig. 3

Alvin Langdon Coburn Roger Fry, 1913

Alvin Langdon Coburn Henri Matisse, 1913

Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXXI Private collection

Illus., M en of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXXIII Private collection

24 Max Weber

7 Alvin Langdon Coburn Max Weber, 1911 Private collection Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXVII

Max Weber  25

Although he concentrates on British men, it is Coburn – again – who establishes the connection with Paris by his inclusion of French artistic celebrities, including Rodin (fig. 30), alongside Matisse, as well as influential Americans: from the literary world Henry James (fig. 29, another émigré settled in England, with whom he had already established a relationship, and who had made the same journey as Coburn himself)13 and Mark Twain, plus fellow photographer Clarence H White (fig. 38), and President Theodore Roosevelt.

The second volume, More Men of Mark (cat. 47), includes further fellow émigré portraits, primarily of American expatriates, mostly settled in London.

These include the poet and champion of the Vorticists, Ezra Pound (fig. 32), who noticed Weber’s work in Coburn’s studio and was the subject of a number of his striking experimental Vortographs (see cat. 36 and figs. 46 and 47),14 modernist painter Edward McKnight Kauffer,15 and sculptor Jacob Epstein (fig. 33).16 Epstein’s Russian-American Jewish background was similar to Weber’s own (as was that of Israel Zangwill, the so-called ‘Jewish Dickens’, who though born in London was the son of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia).17 This important collection of Weber’s early work, presented in the context of his relationship to Coburn, allows us to also uncover this rich sub-text of relationships among the émigré network. Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15 seeks 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, and between these two émigré adherents of modernism.

26 Max Weber

Percy North

Max Weber: American Modern

fig. 5 Alvin Langdon Coburn Max Weber George Eastman House

A Russian émigré from a devout Jewish family, Max Weber (fig. 5) was an unlikely candidate to herald a revolution in art, but he is acknowledged today as one of the most important and influential American artists of his generation of early moderns. In 1909, nurtured by his sojourn in Paris, he introduced the New York art cognoscenti not only to his own revolutionary work, but also to that of Picasso, Henri Rousseau and Cézanne (the latter via photographs), as well as to African sculpture. Weber was the first American to adopt cubist techniques in his work, and one of his initial cubist-inspired works was illustrated in a New York newspaper a month before the first appearance of French Cubism in the American press. In 1919 he began a series of genre subjects centred on religious figures, particularly rabbis, that introduced a new type of imagery, specifically Jewish in content. He won national prizes, was accorded numerous important solo exhibitions, and was considered to be one of the most innovative artists in the United States prior to 1950. His work was featured in art magazines and the press, making him one of America’s first art stars – not only a painter, but also a printmaker, collagist, sculptor and poet who wrote copiously about art and designed sophisticated installations, he became an important advocate of the arts.

Born in Biolostok, Russia (now Białystok in Poland), the ten-year-old Weber ­disembarked at Castle Garden in lower Manhattan in September 1891, with his mother Julia Getz, and his older brother Israel. His father, Morris Weber, a tailor who had been living in the United States, ­established his family in Williamsburg, the predominately Jewish section of Brooklyn, New York, where Weber attended grammar school and quickly mastered English.1 His parents provided a kosher

28 Max Weber

Max Weber  29

house and kept the Sabbath rituals, and Weber sang in religious choirs.2 After Weber married Frances Abrams in 1916 she continued Friday evening prayers and maintained a kosher household. Even Weber’s choice of profession was instigated by a desire for religious observance and his painting was influenced by a deep spirituality. After he completed high school, Weber attended the nearby Pratt Institute, then as now a highly respected art school. He convinced his parents that by taking the teacher training course, then called the Normal course, he would have a career that allowed a free day on the Saturday Sabbath.3 At Pratt Institute, Weber studied with Arthur Wesley Dow, author of the influential text Composition which featured many examples of Asian art. Dow sparked Weber’s interest in non-European sources of inspir­ation, providing him with a global awareness that would inform his mature work. In 1901 Weber left cosmopolitan New York for teaching positions in drawing and manual training in the cultural outposts of Lynchburg, Virginia and Duluth, Minnesota. In four years he saved enough money to finance an extended stay in Europe, based primarily in Paris, then considered the epicentre of the art world.

After having obtained official American citizenship, Weber sailed to Europe in September 1905, to expand his artistic education. His 39 months in Paris (with trips to England, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Holland) were formative for his career.

Following the path of his mentor Dow, Weber enrolled at the Académie Julian in the class of Jean-Paul Laurens, reputedly the best teacher of academic drawing in the world. Weber advanced rapidly and his facility as a draughtsman is evident in his extant drawings from Laurens’s class. Weber befriended many of the young men in the class including Leo Stein with whom he would head out into more adventurous artistic territory. That summer he went to Spain, where he copied paintings by Velázquez in the Prado, indicating his concern to understand the lessons of the great artists of the past.4 Weber’s years in Paris coincided with the most fertile period of the century for modern art, from the appearance of the Fauves at the third Salon d’Automne in 1905, through to the development of Cubism by Picasso and Braque by 1908.

30 Max Weber

fig. 6 Pablo Picasso Still Life, 1908 Collection of Joy S. Weber

fig. 7 Henri Rousseau Study for the view of Malakoff, Outskirts of Paris, 1908 Collection of Joy S. Weber

Max Weber 31

He frequented Leo and Gertrude Stein’s Saturday soirées at 27 rue de Fleurus, where he met Matisse and Picasso along with numerous other American and European artists; was one of the founding members of Matisse’s class early in 1908, as well as a founding member of the New Society of American Artists in Paris; developed a special friendship with Henri Rousseau whom he considered to be his spiritual father in art; and exhibited in the avant-garde exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. Weber’s encounter with the work of Cézanne at the fourth Salon d’Automne in 1906 had the most profound effect on his art throughout his career. Weber sketched incessantly in Europe and produced over 20 hand-sized books filled with graphite, ink, and coloured pencil drawings of landscapes, city scenes, caricatures, and rudimentary copies of art from the many museums that he haunted, eager to learn as much as possible about the history of art. Realizing that his funds were rapidly decreasing, Weber prepared to return to the United States at the end of 1908 by purchasing works that would serve him as touchstones. Along with numerous books and reproductions he collected around 18 black and white photographs of Cézanne paintings by Eugène Druet, Japanese prints, a small ceramic tile painted by Matisse with an image of his now iconic Blue Nude, a still life by Picasso (fig. 6), small African carvings, three Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs, and four paintings (including fig. 7), two drawings and a ceramic vase

by Rousseau.5 Weber was fêted by Rousseau at one of his legendary soirées on 19 December, 1908, and Rousseau accompanied Weber to the Gare St Lazare for his departure to England prior to his return to America.

Shortly after he returned to Manhattan, Weber became an artist of note on the New York art scene. He secured his first solo show in April 1909 from which he sold a couple of paintings and received reviews in local newspapers. The summer of 1909 was pivotal for Weber’s assimilation of the modernist ideas that he had absorbed in Paris, and he developed his first paintings related to the cubist works that he had observed in Picasso’s studio. Weber, however, was interested in the movement of the figures and chose subjects from Vaudeville, a particularly American entertainment, and modern dance, which set his work apart from its

32 Max Weber

8 Max Weber The Emergence of Order out of Chaos, 1912 Private collection

Max Weber  33

French counterparts. When the works were exhibited in March the following year in the exhibition Younger American Painters at Alfred Stieglitz’s now legendary gallery 291 – known by its address on Fifth Avenue – they were incomprehensible to public and critics alike who had no familiarity with modernism. The 291 exhibition showcased innovative works by ten artists, many of whom had been in Paris and were inspired by Cézanne and Matisse. Weber was the most radical artist of the group and his works were singled out for especially harsh criticism.

His cubist-informed painting, Spring Song, appeared in the New York World on 3 April 1910, a month before European cubism was introduced to America in ‘The Wild Men of Paris’, an article in Architectural Record.6 Weber began his publishing career in 1910 with two articles in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work, ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’ and ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’.7 To memorialise Rousseau after his death on 2 September, Weber organised the French artist’s first New York exhibition at 291 in November, consisting of his small Rousseau collection. At the same time Weber designed and installed the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the largest and last event of the Photo-Secession photographers, for which he was highly praised. In 1910 Temple Scott published the first instalment of a trilogy featuring Michael Weaver, a lightly disguised Max Weber, and his theories of art.8 Weber’s proselytising about modern art would have been familiar to the art coterie in New York associated with Stieglitz, but this article introduced his ideas to a broader audience.

Throughout the second decade of the century, Weber explored cubist and futurist ideas about the nature of pictorial space. Initial cubist experiments included works he called ‘Crystal Figures’, equating crystals with the basis of matter. Soon, however, Weber turned his attention to the city as a subject with its persistent movement and visual stimulation. Although Weber staged a solo show in 1911 at 291, he had a dispute with Stieglitz during the run of the exhibition that fractured their relationship and alienated Weber from the people with whom he was most in sympathy. Nonetheless, he continued to stage annual one-man

34 Max Weber

fig. 8 Max Weber Chinese Restaurant, 1915 Whitney Museum of American Art

Max Weber  35

exhibitions that generated copious coverage in the New York press through 1915.9 Modern art was finally introduced to the United States on a grand scale at the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan from 17 February to 15 March 1913.10 Weber, however, refused to participate in this important exhibition because he was only allowed to exhibit the two works permissible to anyone who paid the entry fee, while artists whom he considered to be his inferiors were invited to send more works. Alvin Langdon Coburn (cat. 37), the American photographer living in England whom Weber had known in New York, convinced Roger Fry (fig. 4) to include Weber in the first Grafton Group Exhibition (cat. 48) at the Alpine Gallery in London which opened the day that the Armory Show closed in New York.11 Coburn also included Weber as one of 12 artists (the others included Fry and Matisse (fig. 3)) in his photographic portrait study Men of Mark (cat. 46) published that year (see chronology).

In June, John Cotton Dana, the director of the Newark Museum in New Jersey, gave Weber a solo show that was the first to be held in a museum by a member of his generation of moderns and, in December, Weber published ‘The Filling of Space’, an article about photography in Platinum Print.12 The year of the Armory show was momentous for Weber and he expanded the scale and drama of his paintings, focusing on the movement and sensory stimulation of New York City. During the next few years he produced large-scale paintings that explored many aspects of the dynamic energy of the city with its canyon-producing skyscrapers (fig. 24), subway system, department stores and cultural events. Throughout the second and third decades of the century he taught for several years at the Clarence H White School of Photography and the Art Students League. In 1916, the year of his marriage, he published Essays on Art, the first discussion of the aesthetics of modernism in America developed from his lectures at the White School.13 The devastation of the First World War and the deaths of both his parents by the end of it affected a change in the subjects, size and style of his paintings. Like many of his European counterparts, most notably Picasso, Weber returned to recognisable subject matter and humanised

36 Max Weber

subjects during the 1920s, concentrating on the subjects preferred by Cézanne: landscapes, nudes in landscapes, and still-lifes (see fig. 14). In 1919 Weber was the sole American modern on the committee to send American art to Paris as a gesture of Franco-American friendship after the First World War, but the exhibition at the Luxembourg Museum created a scandal when none of the advanced American pictures were exhibited. In 1924 Weber was given a solo show at the renowned Bernheim-Jeune Galleries in Paris. Two years later the Société Anonyme, a group of avant-garde American artists, presented a follow-up exhibition to the Armory Show of advanced European and American art at the Brooklyn Museum, where Weber was showcased along with his European counterparts.

In 1928 Weber became a major figure on the national stage when he won the coveted Potter Palmer Gold Medal at the 41st annual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago with a Cézannesque still life later titled The Sugar Bowl. From then on Weber was an artist to be reckoned with as a participant in and/or a juror for the most prestigious exhibitions. He was included in the second exhibition of Nineteen Americans at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929. The following year the museum hosted Max Weber, their first solo exhibition for an American artist which included a catalogue written by the director A H Barr. The Downtown Gallery sponsored a monograph about Weber by Holger Cahill to accompany the exhibition. The 1930s witnessed a further change in Weber’s art. His subjects turned to religious scenes and social themes and his formerly brilliant palette became dark and gloomy, in keeping with the mood of the period. Weber mined his Jewish heritage to introduce paintings of the ecstatic mystical activities of the Hasidim, who then as now inhabited the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where Weber grew up, and who followed ancient religious traditions from Eastern Europe where Weber had been born. Weber’s socially conscious works, as well as the religious ones, were depicted with swirling energised lines designed to induce an emotional response that contrasted with the more intellectual tone of his earlier work.

During the Depression of the 1930s Weber became a spokesperson for the plight of artists across the United States as the National Chairman for the

Max Weber 37

American Artists’ Congress from 1936 to 1938. In 1936 he presented the first inaugural address to the Congress, ‘The Artist and His Audience’, which was published that May in Art Front.14 Among the numerous juries on which he served during the last 20 years of his life, his position as selector of American art for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York would have been a highlight. At the end of the Depression and the arrival of the Second World War, Weber changed direction again. He created works inspired by cubist practice, thus bringing his stylistic development full circle, and he had major retrospective exhibitions at The Baltimore Museum of Art (1942); The Carnegie institute (1943); The Whitney Museum of American Art (1949); The Jewish Museum in Manhattan (1956); and The Newark Museum (1959). During the 1940s he appeared in feature articles in all of the popular picture magazines in America including Time, Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, introducing his work to a large general audience. The feature spread in Life magazine in 1945 heralded Weber as ‘the pioneer of modern art in America’ and in 1948 he was selected as one of the ten best painters in America by a poll of museum professionals sponsored by Look magazine.15 Although Weber had the honour of being included in the 20th Venice Biennale in 1950, by that year Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists (including Weber’s former student Mark Rothko) had begun to dominate art dialogue as they do to the present day.16 Weber’s reputation as a prime mover in American modernism has been acknowledged in American art circles since his return to New York in 1909, but his popular appeal was submerged under the wave of Abstract Expressionism.

It is appropriate that he now be examined in a global context to take his place alongside his European counterparts.

38 Max Weber

Nancy Ireson

Max Weber and the ‘Lessons’ of Rousseau and Matisse It is fitting that Roger Fry (fig. 4) included Max Weber in the first Grafton Group Exhibition (cat. 48). Fry made the choice on artistic merit; but there were clear parallels between the energies the two devoted to promoting the art of their time. And ­significantly, though this was not their sole motivation, they furthered a common cause while they championed the artists they admired. Both were modernists in countries where audiences were unused to the latest painting styles; both had a pressing need to prepare the ground for favourable criticism.1 One of the artists whom Weber most admired was Henri Rousseau: a petit bourgeois civil servant-turned-artist, a man who came to painting as an amateur and ended his life as the toast of the bohemian art world. This essay focuses on that relationship, but Fry offers a convenient point of departure, for having featured Picasso in the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, he went on to feature Rousseau in the second. ‘Rousseau was a customs-house officer who painted without any training in the art(s)’, Fry explained in his introduction, [...] but scarcely anyone now would deny the authentic quality of his inspiration or the certainty of his imaginative conviction. Here then is one case where want of skill and knowledge do not completely obscure, though they may mar, expression. And this is true of all perfectly naïve and primitive art. But most of the art here is neither naïve nor primitive. It is the work of highly civilised and modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook.2

As will become apparent over the course of the next few pages, Weber may well have shaped Fry’s views on the artist, for in his suggestion that even

40 Max Weber

fig. 9 Pablo Picasso Three Women, 1908 The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

‘civilised and modern’ artists could look to Rousseau’s simplicity in their quest for ‘authentic’ means of self-expression, Fry echoed Weber’s idealistic vision of Rousseau’s significance.

The friendship between Weber and Rousseau was profound though brief. It played out during Weber’s time in Europe, the years when, with little more than the 2,000 dollars he had amassed in savings, the young émigré came to discover Paris. He had been away for more than a year when the artists met in October 1907, at the salon of Berthe Delaunay, mother of the painter Robert.3 Since they were near neighbours – both inhabitants of unglamorous Montparnasse – Weber accompanied Rousseau home when the party dispersed. He went to renew the acquaintance the following week. ‘[...] after this first visit’, Weber remembered, ‘[...] I felt that I had been favored [sic] by the gods to meet one of the most

Max Weber 41

inspiring and precious personalities in all of Paris: a personality that was well for a young painter to learn to understand and emulate. “Here,” I said to myself, “is a man, an artist, a poet whose friendship and advice I must cultivate and cherish.”’4 Weber valued Rousseau’s remoteness; he stood ‘aloof from studio, gallery and salon harangue, away from the speculation of the Parisian art exchange, free from its collectors [...] To visit my friend was like going from a suffocating atmosphere into that of a fragrant vineyard. His studio was a spiritual haven, a place to recuperate, to set the young mind at peace.’5 Weber frequented Rousseau until his funds ran out in December 1908. Before he left for the USA, his friend threw him a leaving party, where the guests included artists and shopkeepers.6 Weber used his last resources to buy what artwork he could afford – he acquired several Rousseaus (including fig. 7) and even a small work by Picasso (fig. 6) – and left with hopes to return the following year. On December 21, as Weber’s train pulled out of the station, Rousseau shouted to his young friend a few words that he would take to heart: ‘Don’t forget nature, Weber!’7 Given the difference in age between the two men, a gap of almost 40 years, it was perhaps natural that Weber would look to Rousseau as a mentor. However, though the younger man had the deepest respect for his elder, it seems that the admiration was as symbolic as it was literal. Weber was one of the few who took Rousseau seriously at a time when the avant-garde had just begun to appreciate his work. While the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire found Rousseau, the man, somewhat amusing (for a sense of this, the reader need look no further than the Rousseau issue of Les Soirées de Paris), there would be no hint of irony in Weber’s account of his friend.8 Or, if there was any humour (such as an anecdote about Rousseau’s wish to ‘finish off ’ the Cézannes that had so impressed Weber at the Salon d’Automne in 1907), it was so gentle as not to dilute the message that his art stood for all that was good and authentic.9 In many respects, by valuing Rousseau for his supposed unpretentiousness, he anticipated the terms on which the artist would be celebrated in the years to follow.10 Like many of his peers, as the first decade of the twentieth century came to a

42 Max Weber

9 Max Weber Two Female Figures, 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber 43

close, Weber sought new artistic directions, the most fertile possibilities for which seemed to lie in a supposed return to origins: be they tribal, archaic, or mystic.11 It is no coincidence that Picasso – at work on his Three Women (fig. 9) at the time he knew Weber – engaged with Rousseau’s art as he borrowed from African statuary.12 Another contemporary, the dealer Joseph Brummer (with whom Weber attended sketch classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière), displayed his landscape sketches by Rousseau next to ‘two or three excellent Congo statuettes’.13 Since Weber claimed to have introduced both men to Rousseau for the first time (though they would undoubtedly have known the artist’s works from visits to the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne), he may well have been astute enough to sense that, for his generation, a connection with bygone times or ideas of the ‘primitive’ made Rousseau all the more important for the future. André Salmon – who Weber must have met in his visits to the Bateau-Lavoir – would write in 1912 that the young French painters had turned to Rousseau because they needed a ‘virgin ancestor, a negro-white long-lost uncle, rich with the countless jewels trapped in their gangue’.14 Perhaps Weber was one of the first to sense that his friend could help him locate and mine a personal painting style. While the subject of his Two Female Figures (cat. 9) shows an interest in the embryonic that connects with Picasso’s experiments, the palette and distortions of his Landscapes I (cat. 10) II (cat. 11) and III (cat. 12) are surely indebted to Rousseau.15 Works including Weber’s Two Women in a Landscape (fig. 10) seem to conflate influences; the primary robust figure, dressed in sober attire, strikes an Ingres-esque pose in the heart of a jungle setting.16 Sadly, Rousseau did not live to witness the measure of his impact, but Weber continued to champion his cause. On hearing of the artist’s death, in September 1910, he persuaded Alfred Stieglitz to stage a Rousseau exhibition at the 291 Gallery in New York. The exhibition – which took place even before the Salon des Indépendants arranged its customary posthumous retrospective – opened that December. To fill even Stieglitz’s tiny space, the organisers had to augment Weber’s modest collection of Rousseaus (which included the Study for View of Malakoff,

44 Max Weber

10 Max Weber Landscape (I), 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber  45

11 Max Weber Landscape (II), 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

46  Max Weber

12 Max Weber Landscape III University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber  47

Outskirts of Paris (fig. 7) and a rare decorated vase) with lithographs by the likes of Renoir and Lautrec, but they were undeterred. ‘Weber’s daily songs were “Cézanne cet homme” followed by “Rousseau, cet ange”’, remembered Stieglitz.17 Some critics scoffed; but others took note. In 1913 Rousseau’s work would feature in the Armory show, again thanks to Weber’s efforts, and by the mid-century the art world embraced him as a forerunner of the modernist movement.18 In his text for the show at 291, Weber described the self-taught Rousseau as ‘truly naïve and personal. A real “primitive” living in our time’, and observed that the artist’s large-scale works (not exhibited in the show) resembled those of Giotto. Some of the press followed his lead; Elizabeth Luther Carey, in the New York Times, took up the idea that Rousseau belonged to a long-gone era. She considered his art as the visual equivalent of the croaking frogs whose music had charmed Aristophanes. To appreciate it would require, as she put it, a ‘leap into the unknown’.19 Inevitably, some were not prepared to make that leap, perhaps because they sensed that it would expose them to ridicule. In response to Weber’s claim that Rousseau had ‘lived a life of simplicity and purity, the spirit of which dominates his work’,20 James Huneker, writing for the New York Sun, suggested that ‘It would have been far better if Henry Rousseau had spent his nights in drinking and gaming and his days under the eye of the dreariest pedant of a drawing master [...] than leading his simple life.’21 Nonetheless, despite his negative appraisal, Huneker apparently accepted the assertion that Rousseau had led a ‘simple life’, and so in essence did not contradict Weber’s conflation of person and production. The idea proved remarkably durable, so much so that later writings on Weber’s own art would conflate Rousseau, simplicity and generic ideas of the ‘primitive’, as if following the painter’s own stance on his late friend. ‘Weber has never forgotten nature’, wrote Holger Cahill, on the occasion of a show of Weber’s work at the Downtown Gallery in 1930. ‘He has always adhered to the grand advice of his paternal friend Henri Rousseau. And he understands the primitives as few others understand them.’22

48 Max Weber

fig. 11

fig. 12

Henri Matisse Woman with a Hat, 1905

Henri Matisse Blue Still Life (Nature morte bleue), 1907

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The Barnes Foundation

With hindsight, it transpires, Rousseau’s life in 1907 was far from simple. The artist had been involved in an elaborate bank fraud just a few months after he and Weber met; his arrest was announced in the press on 4 December, and he spent the rest of the month in prison.23 It is clear that the artist’s personality was complex, and that he may have had some agency in the myth-making that surrounded his persona.24 However, if Weber had discerned as much, he made no mention of it in his notice for the exhibition. Arguably, a sophisticated Rousseau would not have suited his purposes, for Weber constructed his admiration for (and advocacy of) his friend on a ‘truth’ that was above all symbolic.

Max Weber 49

fig. 10 Max Weber Two Women in a Landscape, 1911 The Cleveland Museum of Art

50  Max Weber

fig. 13 Max Weber Still Life, 1911 The Art Institute of Chicago

Max Weber  51

This vision of an artist unsullied by worldly concerns would become all the more significant to Weber with the passage of time. Gradually, Rousseau’s significance became ever more mythical, as Weber acknowledged tacitly. ‘As life goes on, memories of things and experiences accumulate. Some memories fade away, while others become indelible and range [sic] and ripen in accordance with their relative importance and significance in our spiritual and intellectual development’, he wrote, in 1951. He told of how young artists at the start of the century had ‘found peace of mind and reassurance in contemplating the Uccello-esque grandeur and serenity, the uniquely abstract, yet real informing beauty, poetry _ [sic] love’ in Rousseau’s work, ‘while in him, they found the personification of humility, deep silent authority, infallible instinct and conviction’.25 Rousseau became an icon, a talisman, a constant in a changing world. Joy Weber, the artist’s daughter, recalled how her father would contemplate his Rousseaus often, repeating the words ‘Beautiful, just beautiful.’26 Preserved in the realm of memory, though time marched on, Rousseau would always belong to Weber’s beginnings as an artist. His advocacy was surely mingled with nostalgia for his youth and for a time when his own ideas about art were relatively nascent. However, it may have taken longer for Weber to look on another of his Paris contacts, Henri Matisse (cat. 3), with comparable affection. He studied with Matisse while in the city – after following drawing classes at the Académie Julian, the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière – and so perhaps this was inevitable; as a pupil it was only natural that, as he learnt from his teacher, he questioned his methods.

Also, whereas Weber encountered Rousseau independently, he came to Matisse through the artist Hans Purrmann, a fellow foreign student with ambitions similar to Weber’s own. This was unsurprising – by this time Matisse was known and admired in the avant-garde circles – but it might have meant that the artist seemed less of a personal discovery. Members of the Stein family were also ahead of Weber – as they were most of Paris – in their appreciation of Matisse. Leo bought the Woman with a Hat (fig. 11) in 1905 as the first of many notable works by the

52 Max Weber

fig. 14 Max Weber Still Life with Chinese Teapot, 1925 The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)

Max Weber  53

artist and, for the next few years, Gertrude and Leo welcomed a steady influx of interested visitors to their apartment on the rue de Fleurus.27 Weber would cite evenings with Leo and Gertrude Stein as an important influence. He also attended gatherings at the nearby residence of their elder brother Michael and his wife Sarah on the rue Madame, where Matisse’s canvases included the Blue Still Life (fig. 12) and La Coiffure (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).28 Evenings there were quieter, Weber remembered, but no less interesting as a result.

Sarah Stein’s patronage was probably still more important to Matisse than that of Leo and Gertrude; Paris’s social salons had long facilitated Jewish assimilation into mainstream society and, suitably integrated, she used her influence to find him new buyers.29 In later years, Weber told of how he and Purrmann persuaded Matisse to set up school at the Couvent des Oiseaux early in 1908, where they became part of the inaugural class.30 ‘Matisse’s criticism was very generous and searching, at times very severe and admonishing, but always constructive, enlightening and sympathetic’, Weber recalled. ‘He encouraged experimentation, but cautioned us of the subtle inroads and dangers of capricious violent exaggeration and dubious emphasis.’31 Matisse – by his own admission – was a reluctant professor; he worked in a studio alongside his pupils and preferred ‘not to become a slave’ to teaching.32 There are minor points of difference between pupil and master’s recollections of the class.

For instance, while Weber wrote that their teacher had refused payment for his services, Matisse said he had insisted on charging. He established what the going rate was for classes of the kind; he didn’t want students to attend simply because he charged less.33 However, reading their accounts and those of others, it seems as if the classes were fairly informal. Walter Pach (who would always regret not having joined the class) recalled that the students were of the ‘wild-eyed type’.34 Sometimes, instead of giving verbal feedback, he showed the class examples from his modest art collection that included works by Cézanne, Van Gogh and Rouault.35 Later, in the 1950s, Weber was proud to tell of how Matisse had praised his work on the first day of class.36 He recalled the atmosphere: ‘tense [sic] tinged

54 Max Weber

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’.37 Nonetheless, while the class was still a recent memory, it is possible that his approach was less reverent. His 1910 article against the use of pure colour for the periodical Camera Work, ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’, mentioned no names but seemed to insinuate that the master’s influence hadn’t been entirely positive. ‘At the Salon d’Automne, and the Salon des Artistes Indépendants’, he explained, ‘the canvases of some of the color masters shriek out, “why [sic] the whole universe depends on me! Don’t you know that?”

And pretty soon a mob gathers in front, and on all sides of these masterly colored pieces, and all join in the chorus in unison.’38 Rather than a simple attack on Matisse and his followers, however, ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’ was a symptom of Weber’s broader search for direction. Notably, he wrote the text back in New York, as he explored ideas he lacked time to process in Paris.39 A sense of conflict is also present in the works he produced at this time. The bright fauve tones of the 1908 Standing Nude (cat. 1) are clearly indebted to Matisse; and yet the club-like hands and prominent groin recall Picasso’s Dryad. It seems as if the artist – as was typical of his generation – veered between different stylistic principles before settling on a personal path. If Weber’s Still Life (fig. 13) shows that, increasingly, he subscribed to a cubist sense of structure, he had still to develop an individual take on the style. In a different issue of Camera Work, Marius de Zayas expressed concern over the exhibits at the 1910 Salon d’Automne, in words that he could well have addressed to his more immediate circle. ‘What are these people aiming at?’ he wrote.

To find truth, not the absolute truth, but the artistic truth, reproducing the outer truth as they see it, if not through their temperament, at least through their theories. They want to go back to the past, to primitive art, for they consider it less conventional, more spontaneous, more like the truth, if not more truthful. But they are groping as if they were studying the ground before entering fully into it [...]40

Eventually, Weber appears to have found artistic resolution in his preference for

Max Weber 55

fluid colour set within the boundaries of geometric contour, in works that include his Still Life with Chinese Teapot (fig. 14). With his personal style established, having achieved critical acclaim, Weber could remember his erstwhile teacher in the most positive terms. In 1949, Matisse sent a book to his former pupil inscribed ‘with memories of the Couvent des Oiseaux days’, and Weber was delighted.41 Clearly, more than 40 years after the event, hierarchies were less bothersome.

However, if Weber was glad to have learnt from both men on a formal level, Rousseau had by far the greater impact on his philosophical outlook. Perhaps this was clearest in 1942 when, with America at war, Weber addressed an audience at the Art Institute of Chicago. ‘Rousseau is the Genesis of the Art [sic] of our time’, he told visitors.

In the class one day while giving us criticism Matisse widely and fittingly referred to Cézanne as being the father of us all, and with great humility I take the privilege and liberty of saying now – 32 years after Rousseau’s departure – that Rousseau is the mother of us all. He is teaching us how to say and see all over again the eternal things with primitive simplicity in childlike language as clear as A B C [...] Seeing Rousseau’s pictures is like looking through a window on a new world.42

However, even if the idea of a new start may have appealed to his wartime audience, historical distance would suggest that Rousseau’s ‘new world’ was rooted firmly in Weber’s Paris past.

56 Max Weber

Anna Gruetzner Robins

The Company of Strangers: Max Weber and the first Grafton Group Exhibition The first Grafton Group Exhibition took place from 15 to 31 March 1913 at the Alpine Club Gallery, Mill Street, ‘one of the most beautiful little galleries in London’.1 It was a key event for Max Weber, who remembered it for the rest of his life.2 While living in Paris he had visited London twice, at Easter 1906, and for two weeks at the end of December 1908 on his way home to New York. The city and its rich museum collections, especially those at the British Museum, made a powerful impression on him. Weber thought that Roger Fry (fig. 4), who conceived the exhibition, was ‘undoubtedly the greatest art critic of the time of modern art’, and had plans to move to London, where he believed he would be with like-minded artists, but these were not realised.3 Fry’s invitation to exhibit with the Grafton Group came when Weber was in dispute with the organisers of the Armory Show, the first large exhibition of modern art in America, who would only allow him to exhibit two works rather than the ten that Weber wanted to send. Fry asked for five pictures; Weber sent 11, and was delighted when Fry agreed to hang them all.4 There were other reasons for Weber’s discontent. With his experience of the Paris art scene, including first-hand contact with major figures such as Matisse (fig. 3), Picasso, and Rousseau, Weber was annoyed not to be on the Armory Show committee.5 Fry, too, had had his problems with its organisers, who had persuaded some of the major lenders to the blockbuster Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries to let a consignment of works, including 11 by Matisse, go to New York before it closed. Fry was left to scramble around finding replacement pictures before obtaining 33 Cézanne watercolours from Bernheim-Jeune to fill

58 Max Weber

the gaps. Having Weber, one of America’s pre-eminent modernists, in his next London exhibition was something of a coup.

Alvin Langdon Coburn (cat. 37) was closely involved in this art politicking, counselling Weber on a strategy for the Armory Show committee, and canvassing Fry until he took notice of Weber’s pictures. Coburn had first met Max Weber in 1910 in Buffalo, when Weber ‘stood up for Coburn’, making sure that he was well represented, while hanging an exhibition of photographs (see chronology).6 The same year Weber made several sketches (cats. 13 and 14) replicating the striking bird’s-eye view of Madison Square Park of Coburn’s The Octopus (cat. 15), where the dark shapes of the curving paths of the gardens resemble an octopus, which, as Coburn explained, depend ‘more upon pattern than upon subject matter’.7 Weber could not have been a better match for Coburn. The few months that artist and photographer spent together in New York between November 1910 and March 1911 saw the beginning of an intense friendship, marked by an exchange of portraits (cats.

7 and 37) in 1911, cemented in autumn 1912 when the Coburns (mother and son) returned to New York after a long period in California, and recorded in Coburn’s letters to Weber (Weber’s letters to Coburn do not appear to survive). Famously, in October 1912, Coburn and Weber climbed to the top of the Singer Building in New York, and spent a ‘memorable day’ photographing and painting the Liberty Tower building against the New York skyline.8 Coburn’s haunting photograph The House of a Thousand Windows, New York (fig. 15), where the towering building has an anthropomorphic presence, was taken on that occasion, and Weber’s New York, The Liberty

Max Weber 59

13 Max Weber Park Scene with Horse and Cart: The Octopus (I), 1910 University of Reading Art Collection

60  Max Weber

14 Max Weber Octopus (II), 1910 University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber  61

Tower from the Singer Building (fig. 16) a more encompassing view of the New York skyline with buildings and details not evident in Coburn’s photograph, was another result. Weber’s New York (cat. 16), one of several watercolour and charcoal sketches of the New York skyline painted around October 1912, also marks the collaboration between photographer and painter.9 The following month Coburn set sail for London, and the two men never saw each other again.

Coburn recalled that it was through Weber that he ‘first came in touch with the Post-Impressionists’,10 and he lost little time in visiting Fry’s exhibition where there was an abundance of work by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, three of the artists Weber most admired. Coburn saw the exhibition twice in December,11 and discussed its merits with George Bernard Shaw who thought that much of the work was ‘very beautiful’.12 Coburn then arranged to meet Fry in the galleries on New Year’s Day 1913, when the exhibition was temporarily closed, while works were removed to send to the Armory Show. Later, he was invited to Durbins, Fry’s house near Guildford, where he photographed Fry with his two children. Plans were in place for Fry to visit Coburn at Thameside, his house and studio at 9 Lower Mall, Hammersmith, to see his Weber collection, but the visit was delayed so long that Coburn lost patience and returned to the Grafton Galleries with The Blue Pitcher (cat. 18), and The Dancers (cat. 34) under one arm, and an album of photographs of 43 of Weber’s pictures (cat. 42) under the other. Fry was ‘delighted with your work’, Coburn told Weber, saying ‘it was the most interesting new stuff that he had seen in some time’. Coburn added, ‘I am doing all I can to bring your art to the attention of the people over here that matter, and I seem to be making considerable progress.’13 At the end of January Coburn met Fry again, together with Duncan Grant (cat. 29), ‘one of the leaders of the group here’, and Vanessa Bell (cat. 31). Coburn took along The Blue Pitcher, The Dancers, and New York (cat. 16) and the album.

This second meeting convinced them and Fry was soon writing to ask Weber to exhibit in ‘a little show of English artists’ with the idea that he would borrow from Coburn’s collection, as he explained: ‘This will at least make a beginning of yr. Introduction [sic] to the English public without putting you to trouble for

62 Max Weber

fig. 16 Max Weber New York (The Liberty Tower from the Singer Building), 1912 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Max Weber  63

what might prove, under the circumstances, disappointing results.’14 But the plan changed. Weber had no objections to sending pictures ‘for so short and small an exhibition’, and gave his full cooperation.15 By taking the name ‘Grafton Group’, Fry ensured that his association with the Grafton Galleries and his two most famous exhibitions continued,16 but his latest venture, the first Grafton Group Exhibition (cat. 48, not illus.), was small in size (the catalogue lists 63 works although a few more were added ex. catalogue), in a different location, and short in duration.17 Weber and Kandinsky were the only foreign artists, with two watercolours by the latter including Study for Improvisation 28 (fig. 18.).18 Both were lent by Sir Michael Sadler, Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, who started collecting Kandinsky when he acquired five woodcuts, proofs for Klange, in 1911; Reiterweg (cat. 17) is another woodcut in the series.19 Weber’s 11 exhibits included two landscapes and four still lifes (cats. 19, 20, 21 and 22) – all of which are in the present exhibition – three large pictures, including New York (fig. 24), The Mother (fig. 23, now known as Fleeing Mother and Child) and Two Seated Figures (fig. 19) (now known as The Geranium); Interior with Figure; and one unidentified picture.

The unsigned preface to the catalogue, undoubtedly written by Fry, explained that the Grafton Group was ‘a small society of artists of similar aims’, and that some other artists whose work ‘has a general affinity with theirs, had been invited to exhibit with them.’20 Vanessa Bell, Frederick Etchells, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis and Fry formed the core group who invited ten others – Bernard Adeney, Noel Adeney, Jessie Etchells, Winifred Gill, Spencer F Gore, Cuthbert Hamilton, C R W Nevinson, Helen Saunders, Alfred Thornton and Edward Wadsworth.21 Remarkably, all of the British works were listed in the catalogue by title but without the names of the artists because: It has been thought interesting to try the experiment of exhibiting the pictures anonymously in order to invite the spectator to gain at least a first impression of the several works without the slight and almost unconscious predilection which a name generally arouses.22

64 Max Weber

15 Alvin Langdon Coburn The Octopus, 1909, (usually dated 1912) Private collection: 31 Studio, England

Max Weber 65

fig. 15 Alvin Langdon Coburn The House of a Thousand Windows, New York, 1912 A Portfolio of 16 Photographs, (George Eastman House: Rochester, New York, 1962) Private collection

66  Max Weber

16 Max Weber New York, 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

fig. 17 Percy Wyndham Lewis The Crowd, 1915 Tate

Max Weber  67

17 Wassily Kandinsky Reiterweg, c. 1911 Victoria and Albert Museum, London

fig. 18 Wassily Kandinsky Study for Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912 The Hilda von Rebay Foundation, on extended loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

68  Max Weber

Hence the viewer was being asked to test their initial perception of these anonymous works, and the concept was favourably greeted even though Fry, ‘an art historian of considerable rank’, has ‘deprived [...] future generations, of the documentary value of the catalogue.’23 Fry had no wish to keep the identity of the British artists a secret for long, and critics and other visitors were told that they could obtain this information from the secretary of the Alpine Club Gallery. Naturally the press eagerly participated in Fry’s ‘question of attribution’, and many of the nameless exhibits can be identified from the reviews. While the purpose of this essay is largely to discuss Weber’s contribution, some of the works by the nameless exhibitors will also be discussed.

Fry had his reasons for deciding to hold a nameless exhibition. The social groupings to which these artists belonged – the Camden Town Group, the Omega Group, and the Vorticist Group – which tend to determine the focus of any discussion about British art in this period, were all in their infancy. As a letter to Weber reveals, Fry was not concerned with these groupings but rather with the painters who saw the potential in modern painting for a new language, one characterised by original pictorial effects. Fry told Weber that he was ‘greatly struck [...] by the extraordinary power’ that his pictures ‘seemed to me to indicate’, and added that ‘you have understood and absorbed the principles of which the modern French artists have conceived in a most remarkable way.’24 He might have been providing not just an explanation for Weber but a template for the other Grafton Group artists.

Although their paths had not crossed previously, both Fry and Weber had been introduced to the aesthetic ideas of Leo Stein’s Paris circle, and to the theories offered

by Cézanne’s younger followers including Maurice Denis and Emile Bernard. Both agreed on the importance of Cézanne believing that tactile plasticity, deformation of perspective, disregard for anatomical proportion, and what they interpreted as a formalising abstraction in his pictures, should be a touchstone for modern painting.

Like Cézanne, Weber used still life as a means for pictorial experiment. The Blue Pitcher (cat. 18) shares its colour and mark-making with the paintings of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, and his dialogue with the first two artists is especially visible

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fig. 20 Henri Matisse The Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908 The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

in the patterned pink and black cloth, arranged in triangular peaks, and the two large yellow-coloured apples. The multiple viewpoints that deny the illusion of legible space – the green vase and blue pitcher tip forward, the top of the white candlestick tips back – and the cloth are pure Cézanne, but the pink flowers, outlined with the same black curving decorative line on the cloth, that scramble up the wall behind could only be Matisse. (When Weber visited Matisse in his studio he was shown The Red Room (Harmony in Red) (fig. 20), a more daring but similar experiment with all-over pattern.) The distinctive feathered patches of colour in Cézanne’s paintings are re-presented with aplomb – the pale blue, grey and yellow over a whitish ground, and the cloth in pink and red over orange – an array of colour that sets up the ultramarine of the jug, and bursts into a cascade of vigorous brush-marks at the bottom left. The Blue Pitcher is one of several still lifes – including Still Life with Lemon and Blue Vase (cat. 19) – apparently there were ‘six in all’ painted in 1910 with what Weber described as ‘11 cent tubes of water colours on cardboard’ when he had little money to spare.25

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fig. 19 Max Weber The Geranium, 1911 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

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18 Max Weber The Blue Pitcher, 1910 University of Reading Art Collection

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19 Max Weber Still Life with Lemon and Blue Vase, 1910 University of Reading Art Collection

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Weber’s four still lifes (cats. 19, 20, 21 and 22) in the Grafton Show map his growing appreciation of the art and artefacts of other cultures, beginning with those discovered on museum visits in Paris and New York. After The Blue Pitcher, Weber renounced his earlier experiments with colour. Writing in July 1910 he complained about ‘very poorly coloured paintings [...] in red and green, blue and yellow [...] freshly squeezed from the pure tubes’, and announced his liking for ‘marvellously rare and saturated, yet grey colored [sic] forms’.26 The back- to-basics choice of the three primary colours – red, blue and yellow – toned with black and white in Still Life with Lemon and Blue Vase is one result of this thinking. Weber acquired a small Still Life (fig. 6) from Picasso in October 1908. The arrangement of simple objects – a covered pot, a pear, lemon and potato – and the reduced palette of red-brown, green-yellow, yellow-white and black were referents as he pared back his own still-life painting. The blue and white bowl may be Persian; its freehand stylised pattern is more distinct in another still life of the same date.27 Matisse’s teaching on the impact of ‘Far Eastern art – the Chinese, Persian, Hindu’ on ‘Western Art’28 and ‘the superb Japanese prints’ Weber saw at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s Friday evening Paris salons introduced him to a range of Oriental art (first encountered as a student of Arthur Wesley Dow) and also to African art.29 He remembered Matisse taking ‘a figurine in his hands’ from his ‘small but very choice collection’ of African sculpture to ‘point out the authentic and instinctive sculpturesque qualities.’30 What Weber described as the ‘“blending” of non-Western sources with European twentieth-century art’ had a formative effect at a moment when he was finding his place in what he called ‘an international clearing house of ideas’.31 The American Museum of Natural History and its collection of ‘Aztec, Yucatan, [and] Incas art’ was a favourite port of call once he returned to New York. There, he said, he ‘gained ever increasing understanding of the art of the primitives’.32 A 1910 still life, Congo Statuette, includes a Yaka figure that Weber brought back from France,33 while Mexican Statuette (1910, now in the Vilcek Foundation, New York), has a Native American Cochiti figure (New Mexico) and a Zuni pot.34 The duck in

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Still Life with Duck (cat. 20) is probably a Cochiti pottery duck,35 the pottery jar with the black and white geometric patterning could well be Pueblo from New Mexico,36 while the tripod pots are Meso-American.37 A poem, ‘To Xochipilli, Lord of Flowers’, published by Weber in Camera Work38 and inspired by a Mixtec figure on a tripod vase in the American Museum of Natural History, is another example of the impact of these ceramics.39 Presented and laid out like museum exhibits, the ceramics mark Weber’s growing aesthetic appreciation of what he remembered were regarded as anthropological curiosities. In a letter of 1919, he spoke about ‘a new internationalism’ and his hopes that the art of the ‘Far East, the rich South, Africa, Mexico, Peru’ – which he said were ‘art-anthropological neighbours to America, France, and Europe’ – would make up a ‘new, vital interracial art’ rivalling the best art traditions of the past.40 Writing in 1913, Coburn stated that Weber ‘is fond of studying the art of primitive peoples, as he found in it a kindred spirit.’41 At the same time, Fry was developing what Christopher Green aptly describes as a ‘pan- cultural openness’42 about non-European art, so the collections of ceramics in these two Weber still lifes could not have been more appropriate. Just what did Coburn tell Fry about Still Life with Duck when the latter asked for ‘a lantern slide’ of Coburn’s photograph of it for one of his lectures?43 Thinly painted in a sombre range of black, brown and blue with touches of dark red and pale yellow, on unprimed canvas, the picture has none of the luscious painterliness of The Blue Pitcher. The objects are distinctly non-European – the blue and red geometric pattern and llama-like shape on the inside of a tripod bowl, the triangular–shaped tall vase with a pattern of inverted black triangles running its length, the pottery duck with two black zigzag lines, and the wide-mouthed yellowish vase and square-topped blue vase are an exotic mix. The blue line that runs along the left side of the canvas and ends abruptly across the top compares to the green-yellow zigzag line on the right side of Still Life No. 2 (cat. 21),44 where synthetic, non-representational lines emulate its geometric patterning.45 Still Life No. 2 is more spatially complex and richly coloured than Still Life with Duck. The cropped upended table top serves as a blank canvas for a bold

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20 Max Weber Still Life with Duck, 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

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22 Max Weber Still Life No. 9 Private collection

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21 Max Weber Still Life no. 2, 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

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23 Roger Fry Still Life with Coffee Pot, 1915 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

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24 Winifred Gill Still Life with Glass Jar and Silver Box, 1914 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

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arrangement of triangular coloured shapes of blue, red and green – the dark red of the table behind the long-stemmed bowl and tripod pot is painted over with dark blue, a slice of red breaks a triangular area of green behind the blue pot, the bottom edge of the cropped table is red, while the left edge is blue. Behind the table and framed by the zigzag green line (what else could be the source for a similar line in Spencer F Gore’s The Beanfield, 1912, Tate) is another canvas, a painterly exercise in blue, green and yellow.46 The Musée Guimet and its famed Oriental collection was a favourite haunt of Weber’s when he lived in Paris, and he often visited the Chinese collection at the Metropolitan Museum after returning to New York.47 Like Cézanne and Matisse, Weber kept a collection of objects for painting. The blue pitcher in the 1910 still life appears again in Still Life No. 9 (cat. 22), but the later still life is far more complex.48 Fry admired a photograph of Still Life No.9 in Coburn’s album (cat. 42), and it is easy to understand why.49 The compotier and its deliberately irregular shape takes its cue from Cézanne’s disregard for the rules about creating an illusion of the real, but the slice of the same compotier upended with the fruit still in place is pure invention. Two views of a blue and white cup and a section of another painting that repeats the bright blue and orange of the still-life objects add to the pictorial complexity.50 As Fry embarked on a long campaign to convince the Anglophone world of Cézanne’s importance, and encouraged the widespread adoption of Cézannesque methods, it was Cézanne’s evident disinterest in a coherent mimetic programme of representation that symbolised a freedom of choice for Fry and his most immediate circle, searching for ways to express the individualism of the artist.51 I would argue that Weber’s still lifes not only fascinated Fry, but were an inspirational model for him and many other artists including Vanessa Bell, Winifred Gill and Duncan Grant. Fry did not ignore Cézanne’s still-life pictures in his early writing on the artist, but it was not until his 1927 monograph that he made his admiration clear – saying that still-life painting revealed ‘the purest self-revelation of the artist.’52 But Fry’s own painting tells a different story. His Still Life with Coffee Pot (cat. 23) with its several view points, faceted colour and combinations of pattern, is one

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25 Roger Fry White Road with Farm, c. 1912 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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fig. 22 Henri Matisse Dance (I), c. 1909 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

fig. 21 Vanessa Bell Design for a folding screen: Adam and Eve, 1913-14 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

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example of his noticeable upsurge of interest. Winifred Gill’s vibrantly coloured Still Life with Glass Jar and Silver Box (cat. 24), with its patterned cloth and various jars, silver box and a white compotier (nearly identical to the one in Still Life No. 9) represented from different viewpoints, is another example.

None of Weber’s still-life pictures, however, caught the attention of the critics and the two landscapes fared little better. The abstract organic forms, curving arabesque lines of the tree trunks, and billowing rounded shapes of the foliage that encircle a cluster of houses (cat. 12) or that frame dense undergrowth in the forest (cat. 10 and cat 11), were too subtle for the untrained eye. Fry’s The Frosty Morning (1912), which must have been similar in treatment to White Road with Farm (cat. 25) with its moderate adaptation of the faceted geometric forms, was easier for British critics to comprehend.

In a foretaste of the collaborative efforts of the Omega Workshop, Winifred Gill did the needlepoint for a chair back designed by Fry,53 one of several decorative objects in the Grafton Group exhibition which, according to the Daily Express, included ‘fire-screens, bed-screens, wool-work chair-covers and table-covers, all in the most approved of modernist designs’.54 The screens included Screen: Daffodils (lost), one of several designs for screens by Vanessa Bell including Design (fig. 21); Market (lost) by Noel Adeney; and Screen: Sheep (cat. 29) by Grant.55 Matisse sent the first version of his large decorative mural Dance 1 (fig. 22) to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, where it remained until the exhibition closed at the end of January, and no doubt influenced the wide interest in the theme of dance. Many British artists saw the potential of the subject as a means of representing the expressiveness of the figure – whether violent and frenetic as in Lewis’s The Dancers/Study for Kermesse (cat. 26), exuberant and energetic as in Weber’s The Dancers (cat. 34) and Helen Saunders’ Cabaret (cat. 27), lyrical and spontaneous as in Weber’s Two Female Figures (cat. 9), or relaxed as in Saunders Hammock (cat. 28).

Matisse’s Dance 1 was an inspirational model for Grant’s Screen: Sheep where the swirling mass of blue sheep echoes the frenetic movement and vivid primary

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colour of the Matisse.56 Claude Phillips was in no doubt that Grant was a ‘satellite of Matisse’, and he used the example of Grant’s Construction (lost) to prove his point. The descriptions of this large picture focus on the scale and distortion of the male figure described as a ‘violently angular quasi-Egyptian figure at work on monumental construction’,57 ‘who [sic] at first sight might be taken for a gorilla’.58 These comments can be compared to the response to Weber’s Two Seated Figures (now known as The Geranium, fig. 19) and the large-scale The Mother (Fleeing Mother and child, fig. 23). The former, one of Weber’s first representations of crystal figures,59 draws on Picasso’s 1909 paintings. A description in the Daily Citizen of Two Seated Figures ‘evidently carved out of hard wood with painfully sharp edges’ who ‘gesticulate at each other in the most fatuous manner with Indian club-like arms, and gaze intently at what indubitably is a gentleman’s red silk-hat turned upside down and containing a very wan and tragic plant’, identifies the picture as The Geranium.60 The second, The Mother, an abstract female figure carrying a child on a flat red ground, was, seen to be, ‘an ungainly figure, with a chinless head, almost like some prehistoric creature,[who] hugs a clod-like shape’.61 My point is that when the expressiveness of the human form took precedence over correct anatomical proportion in either Weber’s pictures or the lost Grant (or, indeed, in Lewis’s Three Women, another lost picture), a fury of degrading comments ensued.

A picture by Etchells known as The Big Girl (cat. 30) depicting a goldenskinned, dark-haired figure with a distinctive blue geometric-shaped shadow or ‘facets’ on the right side of her face must be the picture entitled The Chinese Student 62 in Fry’s show.63 These facets were also detected in some uncatalogued drawings of faces by Cuthbert Hamilton64 and in a double portrait by him, The Guitar Player. A description of ‘a churned up design […] of a woman sewing, surrounded by heaps or piles of something which […] seems so much less concrete than the figure’, leaves little doubt that it is Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Molly MacCarthy (cat. 31) – who is probably crocheting65 or doing needlepoint of what may be an Omega design – that is being discussed.66 The portrait is a collage made up of geometric shapes to give the effect of faceting and painted with a variety of post-impressionist

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26 Percy Wyndham Lewis The Dancers/Study for Kermesse, 1912 Manchester City Galleries

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27 Helen Saunders Cabaret, c. 1913-20 Private collection

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fig. 23 Max Weber Fleeing Mother and Child, 1913 New Jersey State Museum

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28 Helen Saunders Hammock, c. 1913-20 Private collection

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techniques in the widest range of blue, green, red, orange and violet colour. Bell was an able colour-painter who learned more from Matisse than any other British painter of her generation – the green streak of the nose, the patch of violet in the mask-like face, and the violet, green, blue, pink and magenta sections of the hair are boldly experimental. The complex arrangement of colour in the collaged geometric shapes to the right of the figure, with no pretence to representation, is even more daring.

When Fry first saw photographs of Weber’s pictures, he was especially struck by his ‘New York things’67 and asked for a print of Brooklyn Bridge (cat. 32)68 – in 1914 Weber would send Coburn the picture and a short prose poem, ‘On Brooklyn Bridge’ (see chronology). While advising the Metropolitan Museum on new purchases, Fry travelled back and forth to New York, and so he knew the city well. Weber knew that Fry admired his ‘New York things’ (cats. 16 and 32), and this may be one of the reasons that the artist sent another New York picture (fig. 24), the most complex of all his exhibits and one of three large canvases, including The Mother (fig. 23) and probably the unidentified Panel Decoration, that Coburn and Fry placed ‘each in the centre of a wall’. (Coburn helped Fry to hang the exhibition starting at 8:30 a.m. the same day as the private view.)69 Weber was introduced to the concept of the fourth dimension while living in Paris, and wrote on ‘the consciousness of a great and overwhelming sense of space-magnitude in all directions at one time’ in ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’, after returning to New York.70 He must have known H G Wells’s introduction to Coburn’s book of photographs, New York (1910, cat. 44), where Wells, who also explored the concept, offered a projection in time similar to that in his science fiction and imagined ‘the skyscraper of this altitudinous city’ and the continuous ‘vehement crowding of so much of the commerce and people of vast territories upon the margins of the sea’ a hundred years hence.71 Weber’s New York pictures the ‘vehement crowding’ of ‘this altitudinous city’ where skyscrapers jostle and lean at alarming angles, held together by a snaking cordon of the city’s transport links, while the girders of Brooklyn Bridge loom like a giant canopy over the city,

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and a small patch of green, which Mark Antliff rightly points out is the ‘Octopus’ of Madison Square Park, is a small reminder of its earlier natural state.72 These two New York landmarks resonate with memories of past meetings and with the enduring friendship of Weber and Coburn, and had their own potency for Fry. Shortly after the exhibition closed, Alfred Thornton, one of the exhibitors and an old friend of Fry’s, explained that New York was the ‘kind of mind picture […] that lies between sleeping and waking– the state called “hypnagogie” by psychologists – a perfectly normal condition, quite as […] worth reproducing as transient effects of landscape.’73 Thornton’s comment came when Coburn was discussing ‘painting the imagination of the memory’ with Weber,74 and he may well have discussed these ideas with Thornton.

Claude Phillips was in no doubt that New York was the most successful of Weber’s exhibits,75 but the Standard thought it was a ‘puzzling’ picture which ‘even after a prolonged examination […] resembles nothing so much as a concertina, that, inextricably mixed up in some fashion with the Stars and Stripes, has met with a violent end, and had stakes driven through it afterwards. A faint serpent of smoke plays hide and seek in the whole conglomeration.’76 This misguided interpretation of the topography of New York could have only come from someone unfamiliar with the city. Other British critics who had some familiarity with the philosophical and scientific ideas of cubism, sought to explain New York in those terms saying that it ‘has a logic of its own like the logic of some scientific diagram’, that it ‘is not pure caprice’ and that its ‘form and colour’ have ‘an abstract beauty.’77 A similar comment was made about Lewis’s ‘large design’, Three Women, now lost, and described as ‘pure Cubism’, ‘akin to a diagram from Euclid’ and ‘an algebraic calculation.’78 Weber’s New York was shown alongside pictures by Nevinson and Wadsworth representing modern urban London, with its heavily industrialised river and endless miles of grimy canals. Whistler’s The Thames Set etchings of the warehouses, barges and other river craft along the river in London’s East End was an inspirational model for Wadsworth, and possibly Nevinson, too.79 The broken touches in a

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29 Duncan Grant The Blue Sheep, 1915 Victoria and Albert Museum

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subdued monochromatic range of colour in The Towpath (cat. 6) herald the latter’s engagement with modernist painting during the flood of exhibitions of modern art held in London. Nevinson was in Paris when the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition opened, and only visited it at the beginning of January, when he went with his father and Fry was also present.80 He would have seen recent examples of Picasso’s cubist painting, including Le Bouillon Kub, which, with its graphic use of bold lettering taken from its stock-cube packaging that makes a pun on cubism, could easily have inspired the lettering in Nevinson’s The Port.81 This work, ‘a sea coast motif ’, described as ‘severely geometrical, and up to a point effective’, may be the picture now known as Le Vieux Port (cat. 33). (Nevinson may have been reluctant to identify the picture to his father, who accompanied him to the opening and later noted that his sons ‘two [pictures] of a Paris suburb [... were] much the most beautiful there’, adding that the work of Grant, Max Wilbur [sic], Lewis and Frederick Etchells ‘was just insane’.)82 Rotherhithe (fig. 25),83 ‘depicting a canal’ along which ‘rushes a steamer with three solid ripe plum[e]s ([of] smoke) issuing out of its mustard-coloured funnel’, can be identified as by Wadsworth.84 The bold combinations of flat areas of blue and orange, the view of the warehouses, the jumble of barges and steamboats framed by the cut-off orange sails of a barge on the right, and the oddly askew perspective were compared in treatment to Weber’s New York where ‘the perspective diminishes upwards and downwards, as well as laterally.’85 But Wadsworth had not yet reached Weber’s level of sophistication. That was to come with his Vorticist pictures.

None of the Weber pictures sold from the exhibition, and after it closed Coburn kept all of them in his Hammersmith studio until December 1914, when he sent The Mother, New York, Two Seated Figures and Interior with Figure back to Weber. He paid him for three still lifes and Weber gave him the others (see chronology). Hanging in Coburn’s Hammersmith studio, and later in his house in Wales, they were seen by visitors and sitters alike. As Mark Antliff suggests, New York is a possible source (Coburn’s The House of a Thousand Windows, New York (fig. 15) is another) for a 1914 watercolour by Lewis with the same title.86 In the

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discussions about the possible origin of Coburn’s, where multiple viewpoints are achieved through complex photographic means, no one has suggested one obvious source – The Dancers (cat. 34), the 1912 pastel that Coburn brought back from New York, and one of the first things he showed to Fry. One of the dancers is likely to be the American Ruth St Denis (1879–1968) performing one of ‘her Oriental dances’ with Ted Shawn (1891–1972),who later became her husband (while staying in California, Coburn saw St Denis dance twice).87 Ruth St Denis sported a smooth black bob with a fringe, like that of the female dancer, while Shawn had a sharply peaked hairline like that of the male dancer, and the two danced barefoot. I would suggest that the fractured rays of coloured light that break up the separate movements of the dancers, at different moments in a continuum of time, in Weber’s pastel, and Weber’s avowed investigation of crystal figures, were an inspirational model for Coburn’s vortographs – including his portraits of Pound (see cat. 36; figs. 46 and 47).88 Two weeks is not a long time to launch an unknown artist in a strange city, but Weber must have been pleased with the exposure. He happily included an extract from Fry’s initial letter to him (see above), and comments from the Daily Telegraph and The Times in the catalogue for a 1915 New York exhibition.89 Fry’s promise to find Weber a London dealer90 came to nothing but Coburn continued to campaign at every opportunity. The bequest of his Weber collection to the University of Reading was his last act of generosity on Weber’s behalf.

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31 Vanessa Bell Portrait of Molly MacCarthy, c. 1914-15 S. J. Keynes

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30 Frederick Etchells The Big Girl, c. 1912 Tate

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fig. 25 Edward Wadsworth Rotherhithe, c. 1913 Private collection

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32 Max Weber Brooklyn Bridge, 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

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33 C R W Nevinson Le Vieux Port, 1915 Government Art Collection

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fig. 24 Max Weber New York, 1913 Private collection (Formerly Thyssen Bormezia)

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34 Max Weber The Dancers, 1912 University of Reading Art Collection

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Lionel Kelly

The Coburn and Weber Collections, University of Reading These collections came about through the agency of Professor D J Gordon (cat. 35) of the Department of English at the University of Reading. Gordon (1915–1977) was a distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature with a particular interest in the iconographic relationship of verbal and visual images in literature and art.

He found a compelling combination of such imagery in the poetry of W B Yeats, and in 1957 assembled a photographic exhibition at Reading entitled I, The Poet William Yeats, which later transferred to the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, and then to Dublin, under the title W. B. Yeats Images of a Poet.

During work on this exhibition Gordon was intrigued by a photograph of Yeats taken by Coburn in 1908, later used as the frontispiece image to Yeats’s Poems, Second Series (1909).

Celebrated as an innovative photographer in the early years of the twentieth century in New York and London, Coburn had been a member of the British ‘Linked Ring Brotherhood’ (1892–1910) of photographers who sought to assert the status of professional photography as a fine art, and had a one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Gallery in New York in 1907. His books of photographs include images of London published under that title in 1909 (cat. 49), with an introduction by Hilaire Belloc (fig. 26), and those of New York (cat. 44) in 1910, with an introduction by H G Wells. He photographed most of the notable writers and artists of his time, including Weber (cat. 7), Matisse (fig. 3), Rodin (fig. 30), and Roger Fry fig. 4), published in his two books Men of Mark (1913, cat. 45) and More Men of Mark (1922, cat. 47). Henry James (fig. 29)

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35 Alvin Langdon Coburn Portrait of Donald Gordon, 1961 Private collection

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fig. 26

fig. 27

Alvin Langdon Coburn H. Belloc, 1908

Alvin Langdon Coburn W. B. Yeats, 1908

Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XVII Private collection

Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XIX University of Reading Special Collections

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commissioned Coburn to provide frontispiece images for the 24-volume New York Edition of his collected works (1907–1909), and Gordon thought Coburn’s photographic portraits of James to be brilliantly indicative of the man who wrote those novels. In 1917, under the influence of Ezra Pound, Coburn made a brief excursion into abstract photography in a set of images he called ‘Vortographs’ (see cat. 36; figs. 46 and 47), made by clamping three mirrors together in a triangle, poking his camera into the triangle, and photographing the multiple reflections of bits of glass and wood laid on a table with a glass top: he wrote that the resulting patterns ‘amazed and fascinated me’.

By the 1930s Coburn had largely abandoned photography and moved from his studio in Hammersmith to Harlech and later to Rhos-on-Sea, Colwyn Bay, where Gordon made several visits to him. By this time Coburn’s primary interests were in Freemasonry and comparative religion, and he was a member of the Societas Rosicruciana, and the Universal Order. As a result of his visits to Coburn, Gordon arranged for a retrospective exhibition of Coburn’s photographs at the University of Reading in 1962, and this proved to be Coburn’s largest one-man show. In gratitude for this renewed interest in his work as a photographer Coburn made gifts of a selection of his photographs and the books he had illustrated to the University Library, and the bulk of his collection of paintings by Max Weber, whom he had known and supported for many years, to the University. In 1914 he had arranged for Weber’s Cubist Poems to be published by Elkin Matthews in London, and Coburn’s copy of this bibliographic rarity (cat. 43) was also donated to the University Library.

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36 Alvin Langdon Coburn Vortograph of Ezra Pound, 1917 Private collection

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Pamela G Roberts and Anna Gruetzner Robins

Max Weber and Alvin Langdon Coburn: History of a Friendship 1881

18 April Max Weber born in Biolostok, Russia (now Białystok in Poland)

1882

11 June Alvin Langdon Coburn born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA

1891

Weber emigrates from Russia to the United States with his family, settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

1898–1900

Weber attends Pratt Institute, studying under Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922)

1900

27 April Coburn, travelling with his mother, Fannie E Coburn (1848– 1928), and a distant cousin, photographer Fred Holland Day (1864–1933), arrives in London on the SS Menominee, the first of 11 transatlantic crossings

1901

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Weber takes up teaching positions in drawing and manual training in Lynchburg, Virginia and Duluth, Minnesota and saves enough money to visit Europe

7 Alvin Langdon Coburn Max Weber, 1911 Private collection Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXVII

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1902 After touring Europe (France, Switzerland, Germany and Ireland) with his mother and Day in 1900–1901, Coburn opens a studio at 384 Fifth Avenue, New York in 1902, and attends Arthur Wesley Dow’s Summer School of Art in Ipswich, Massachusetts for five weeks in the summer of 1903

26 December Coburn elected a member of Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) Photo-Secession

1903 12–30 January Coburn’s first one-man exhibition in USA is held at New York Camera Club comprising 56 prints

1905

16 September Weber sails from New York

25 September Weber arrives in Paris and finds studio at 9, rue Campagne Première, Montparnasse

9 October Weber enrols at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens, where a fellow student introduces him to Jules Flandrin

1906 February Weber leaves Académie Julian, and enrols at the Académie Colarossi and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he draws without instruction

5 February – 31 March Coburn’s first one-man exhibition in UK at the Royal Photographic Society in London comprising 110 prints

March Weber exhibits at the Salon des Indépendants 6 October – 15 November Salon d’Automne: Weber describes seeing ten Cézanne 1 pictures there as ‘the turning point in his life’

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37 Max Weber Portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1911 University of Reading Art Collection

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1907 March Weber exhibits at the Salon des Indépendants

28 March Weber leaves Paris for four months in Italy, visiting Venice (fig.

34), Rome, Florence, Milan and Naples Late August Weber returns to Paris and moves to 7 rue Belloni

October Weber attends the salon of Berthe Delaunay (mother of Robert Delaunay), where he meets Delaunay, Metzinger and Henri Rousseau. Weber accompanies Rousseau home, visits his studio the following week and a friendship develops 1908

1 January Matisse gives tuition to the newly formed ‘Matisse class’, which includes Jean Biette, Patrick Bruce, Oskar and Greta Moll, Annette Rosenshine, Leo Stein, Sarah Stein, Hans Purrmann, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber and Mlle de Ward, a Dutch pianist and a friend of Weber’s, in Couvent des Oiseaux, rue de Sèvres. The class moves to Couvent du Sacré Coeur, Boulevard des Invalides in the spring

October Weber exhibits seven works in the Salon d’Automne; Matisse is on the jury

Weber meets Picasso at a soirée given either by Leo and Gertrude Stein, or by Michael and Sarah Stein. He also claims to have taken Picasso to Rousseau’s studio, where the latter is painting Apollinaire’s portrait

Weber purchases works to take back to the USA with him including several Rousseaus (including fig. 7) and a Picasso Still Life (fig. 6), which he collects from the artist’s studio.

Picasso makes a return visit to Weber’s rue Belloni studio

28 November Coburn and his mother arrive in New York from London on board the SS Minnetonka

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fig. 31

fig. 30

Alvin Langdon Coburn Israel Zangwill, 1913

Alvin Langdon Coburn Auguste Rodin, 1906

Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922), pl. X. University of Reading Special Collections

Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. IX University of Reading Special Collections

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fig. 29

fig. 33

Alvin Langdon Coburn Henry James, 1906

Alvin Langdon Coburn Jacob Epstein, 1914

Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913) pl. X Private collection

Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922), pl. XII. University of Reading Special Collections

fig. 28

fig. 32

Alvin Langdon Coburn Frank Brangwyn, 1904

Alvin Langdon Coburn Ezra Pound, 1913

Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. IV. Private collection

Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922), pl. III. University of Reading Special Collections

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19 December Weber’s money runs out; Rousseau holds a ‘Soirée Donnée en l’Honneur des Adieux de M. Weber’: Picasso, Fernande Olivier, Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin are among the 25 guests

21 December Weber leaves Paris for New York by way of London and is seen off by Rousseau

24 December The Coburns spend Christmas Eve with Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and his family in New York

28 December Weber sends a postcard to Picasso from London advising him that ‘the Congo things at the British Museum are 2 numerous and superb’

1909

7 January After two week in London, Weber returns to New York via Southampton on the SS Oceanic 18 January Blizzard in New York

January–March Coburn photographs the snow-cleared paths of Madison Square Park (or Gardens) from the newly built 700-foottall Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower (probably standing on a balcony on the 50th storey, 660 feet up). The result is Coburn’s first abstract photograph, initially published as The Giant Shadow on Madison Square in Metropolitan Magazine (June)

18–30 January Exhibition of Photographs in Monochrome & Color by Mr Alvin Langdon Coburn at 291 Gallery, Fifth Avenue, New York (33 prints and 20 autochromes) 10–21 February Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), the Detroit millionaire railroadcar manufacturer, commissions Coburn to copy his collection of James Abbott McNeill Whistler paintings, Oriental art and ceramics on autochrome colour plates – an early attempt to catalogue and publicise a collection using the medium of photography as Coburn later did with an album of 3 photographs of Weber pictures (cat. 42)

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Arthur B Davies, one of the future organisers of the Armory Show, buys two works from Weber 29 March Coburn returns to London on the SS Minnetonka

April–May Weber holds an exhibition of his Parisian work at Julius G Haas, a picture framer at 648 Madison Avenue, New York April Coburn moves to ‘Thameside’, 9 Lower Mall by the river in Hammersmith, west London, where builders are adapting the house to enable him to run his own photogravure presses for books including London (1909, cat. 49), New York (1910, cat. 44) and Men of Mark (1913, cat. 46) October Coburn’s London book published (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/Brentano’s, 1909), comprising 20 photogravures with an introduction by Hilaire Belloc (fig. 26) 1910

9–21 March Weber is included in Younger American Painters, at 291, Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery on Fifth Avenue

3 April Weber’s Spring Song (later retitled Burlesque, no. 1) is published in New York World, giving the American public their first taste of cubism

May Almost in tandem, European cubism is introduced to America in Gelett Burgess’s article ‘The Wild Men of Paris’, Architectural Record, 27, pp. 400-14 38 Alvin Langdon Coburn Wapping, 1904 Private collection Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/ Brentano’s, 1909)

July 1910 Max Weber publishes ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’ (p. 25) and ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’, Camera Work, no. 31 (p. 51)

120 Max Weber

Apollinaire translates ‘The Fourth Dimension’, which serves as a source for some of his later writings on the subject 2 September Death of Rousseau

Max Weber  121

November Coburn’s New York book (cat. 45) published with 20 photogravures and an introduction by H G Wells (London/ New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/Brentano’s, 1910)

4 November Coburn sails into New York from London on SS Minnehaha; the next day he travels up to the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo for the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography (3 November–1 December 1910). Organised by Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession, the exhibition is hung by Stieglitz, assisted 4

by Weber, who ‘stood up for Coburn’, Paul Burty Haviland (1880–1950) and Clarence Hudson White (1871–1925, see 5 fig. 38). Coburn describes Weber as ‘the painter secessionist’

Weber designs the catalogue and installs the exhibition.

The prints are mounted on large, light mats and hung in single rows on an olive-green taffeta background masked with cheesecloth. The upper two-thirds of the walls are covered with bluish-grey cloth with a black or grey moulding separating the two colours

Coburn makes a series of photographs of the exhibition and designs and plans an unrealised illustrated ‘edition de luxe’ version of the catalogue

Weber makes sketches (cats. 13 and 14) that replicate the composition of Coburn’s Octopus (cat. 15)

8 November Manet and Post-Impressionists, organised by Roger Fry, opens at the Grafton Galleries, London (until 15 January 1911) 15 November Coburn gives Weber a signed and dated print of his 1909 6 photograph of the Singer Building at noon December Weber organises first memorial exhibition for Rousseau at 291

1911 Early Coburn spends the winter in New York where he sees Weber and the Stieglitzes

122 Max Weber

39 Alvin Langdon Coburn London Bridge, 1904 Private collection Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/ Brentano’s, 1909)

Max Weber 123

124  Max Weber

11–31 January Weber has a solo exhibition of 31 paintings including some of the crystal figure pictures and drawings at 291. Stieglitz gives Weber accommodation and provides other support in return for help with the gallery, but the relationship sours; after selling Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887–1970) a picture for $500, which gives him financial independence, Weber breaks with Stieglitz

7 February Coburn makes a series of portraits of Weber, one of which later appears in his book Men of Mark (cat. 7), and Weber’s portrait of Coburn (cat. 37) is painted around this time. Coburn also begins to make photographic copies of Weber’s paintings for assembly into large portable albums

Early March Coburn and his mother leave New York by train from Madison Avenue Station for Los Angeles, and are seen off by Weber

28 March Weber is instrumental in organising a Picasso exhibition at 291

1912 September The Coburns return to New York from California prior to their return to London

10–31 October Coburn exhibits eight of his recent American West prints at the 7 Montross Galleries. The 148 photographs by Arnold Genthe, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H White, George H Seeley, Karl Struss, Coburn and others, are hung by Weber on grey walls

11 October Coburn marries Edith Wightman Clement (1880–1957), a childhood friend from Boston of 20 years’ standing, at the Trinity Chapel, 15 West Twenty-fifth St, New York

40 Alvin Langdon Coburn Waterloo Bridge, 1905 Private collection Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/ Brentano’s, 1909)

5 October Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organised by Roger Fry, opens at the Grafton Galleries, London (until 31 December, subsequently extended until end of January

Over the next few weeks, Coburn and Weber spend time together photographing, painting and sketching New York

Max Weber 125

from its pinnacles (see fig. 36). Coburn seeks out the city’s own man-made grand canyons after his time photographing the natural canyons of Arizona (see fig. 41). The friends’ visit to the viewing platform of the Singer Building produces Coburn’s The House of a Thousand Windows, New York (fig. 15) and Weber’s cubist painting New York (The Liberty Tower from the Singer Building) (fig. 16). Coburn writes of his photograph when it is exhibited at the Goupil Gallery in London a year later that it is ‘almost as fantastic in its perspective as a 8 Cubist fantasy’

18 November As Coburn’s ship SS Minnetonka pulls into the mouth of the Thames, he writes to Weber, ‘Tell me […] how your New York creations are materializing. I will not forget our days together 9 on the heights of New York.’ The two men never meet again

Coburn ships home with him a case of Weber’s paintings to hang in his Hammersmith house, but also in order to photograph them so that Weber can use the copy prints for publicity and lecture purposes

For the next few years, the two exchange letters practically every week

December Coburn visits Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition twice before arranging to meet Fry in the gallery on New Year’s Day. He writes to Weber that he has had the work ‘you were so kind as to give us for a wedding present, my portrait, the large black white [sic] & red drawing of two figures and 10 several small drawings’, framed by Whistler’s framer and has hung them in his own studio on the top floor of his house as a mini-exhibition, which ‘a few intelligent people’ have been 11 invited to view 1913

126 Max Weber

3 January Coburn writes to Weber, ‘I am sending you today a fine book to keep the reproductions of your things that I have made in. The inside leaves are the finest Japanese velum and the

41 Alvin Langdon Coburn The Stock Exchange, New York, 1905 Private collection Illus., New York (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co/Brentano’s)

Max Weber 127

fig. 34 Max Weber St. Mark’s Venice (Basilica di San Marco), 1907 University of Reading Art Collection

128 Max Weber

Max Weber  129

cover is an original print. I had one made for you and one for me. There are seventy leaves which allows for all we have 12 done and a few more besides for “later on”’

10 January Coburn writes to Weber, ‘All your pictures that needed framing are now at the man [...] who used to work for Whistler [...] I am looking forward to seeing them all hung in the studio where they are going to look stunning’

30 January After meeting Fry at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Grafton Galleries and showing him some pictures and the album of photographs of Weber’s works (cat. 42), Coburn returns with further paintings and the album. Fry is with Duncan Grant (see cat. 29), ‘one of the leaders of the group here’, and Vanessa Bell (see cat. 31); they decide to invite 13 Weber to send work to the first Grafton Group Exhibition

17 February – 15 March The International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), New York, which later travels to Chicago and Boston. Weber refuses to participate because its organisers will only allow him to exhibit two works instead of the ten he offers, and he feels slighted because he was not invited to serve on the Committee. He does lend his collection of Rousseaus (five oils and two works on paper, including fig. 7)

27 February Coburn takes several photographs of Fry in his Hammersmith studio (including fig. 4, later included in Men of Mark).

Coburn sends Weber books of poetry by William Blake and John Masefield, Laurence Binyon’s book Flight of the Dragon (on the theory and practice of art in China and Japan), and encourages him to listen to gramophone records by Rachmaninoff, Wagner and Mussorgsky, then to compose poetry about the music

15 March The first Grafton Group Exhibition opens at the Alpine Club Gallery, Mill Street, off Conduit Street, London. Weber exhibits: (no. 14) The Mother (fig. 23); (no. 27) New York (fig.

24); (no. 33) Landscape; (no. 35) Still Life; (no. 37) Landscape;

130 Max Weber

fig. 35 Alvin Langdon Coburn Fifth Avenue from the St Regis Hotel, 1905 George Eastman House

Max Weber  131

fig. 36 Alvin Langdon Coburn New York from its Pinnacles, 1912 George Eastman House

132  Max Weber

(no. 47) Still Life; (no. 52) Interior with Figure; (no. 54) Still Life; (no. 55) Two Seated Figures; (no. 56) Still Life; and (no. 58) Panel Decoration. After a dash around London the previous day, in an attempt to locate the Weber shipment, Coburn joins Fry at 8.30 a.m. to assist in hanging the exhibition, ahead of the private view that afternoon. He tells Weber that he has hung about ‘one third of the exhibits’, that Weber’s ‘things look splendidly and are all in the best positions’, and that Fry said ‘that your work was a very important addition to the 14 Exhibition’

31 March Coburn purchases Still Life No. 9 (cat. 22) for $125 30 April Coburn writes to Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) asking to see her Matisse collection. He tells her, ‘I first became interested in the work of the modern school through my friend Mr Max Weber’ and adds that ‘about twenty of whose paintings are 15 in my collection.’

Subsequently he visits and photographs her in Paris

13 May After an introduction from Gertrude Stein, Coburn takes a series of photographs of Matisse (see fig. 3) and persuades Matisse to sell him Nu au bord de la mer, ‘a small picture in primary colours […] of a bather on a seashore, with her straw hat hung on a tree’ (which he had first seen at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition), and a Cézanne lithograph, The Large Bathers

2 October Coburn’s book Men of Mark (cat. 46), which in addition to portraits of Fry (fig. 4), Weber (cat. 7) and Matisse, also includes among others Hilaire Belloc (fig. 26), W B Yeats (fig. 27), Frank Brangwyn (fig. 28), Henry James (fig. 29) and Auguste Rodin (fig. 30) – see Appendix for full list of contents. It is published to coincide with the exhibition Camera Pictures by Alvin Langdon Coburn at the Goupil Gallery, London (until 25 October). Photogravures from the book were shown together with a portrait of Fry taken at Fry’s house, Durbins; photographs of the Grand Canyon

Max Weber 133

fig. 37 Clarence H. White Bird’s Eye view of Madison Square, as seen by the workmen on Metropolitan Tower, New York, U.S.A., c. 1908 Library of Congress

fig. 38 Alvin Langdon Coburn Clarence H. White, 1912 Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXVIII Private collection

134  Max Weber

and Yosemite Valley; New York From Its Pinnacles (fig. 36), The Octopus (cat. 15) and The House of a Thousand Windows, New York (fig. 15)

15 October Coburn photographs Holbrook Jackson, editor of T.P.’s Weekly

22 October Coburn photographs Ezra Pound in his dressing gown (fig. 32)

November In a substantial article in Forum magazine, Coburn observes, ‘It was through my friendship with Max Weber and my interest in his work, that I first came in touch with that group of artists styled in England the Post-Impressionists. Weber has a freshness of viewpoint, and a sincerity, that gives his work a unique quality. He is fond of studying the art of primitive peoples, as he finds in it a kindred spirit. He would be out of place in this modern age if it were not really so sophisticated and in need of just the note of that he and his colleagues are giving it in the face of misunderstanding and even ridicule. Weber has a sense of design that never fails him, and what is quite as important, a beauty of color vision; therefore, however revolutionary his ideas may be, he cannot help producing pictures that have a permanent and 16 lasting charm.’

19 November Coburn writes to Weber about his plans to invite the Sunday Times art critic Frank Rutter (also curator of Leeds City Art Gallery) to his Hammersmith studio to see his Webers. He mentions that he has seen Rutter’s Post-Impressionists and Cubists exhibition, which had opened on 12 October at the Doré Galleries, 35 New Bond Street, London

December Coburn finds a publisher (Charles) Elkin Mathews (1851–1921) to publish an edition of 1,000 copies of Weber’s poems at his own expense, planning to give Weber a royalty of 15% on the trade price on any remaining sales once 500 copies have been sold and 50 given to the press for review. The book (cat. 43), printed by Chiswick Press, whom Coburn considers the best printers in London, will sell it for a shilling (24 cents)

Max Weber 135

a copy. Coburn pays for various aspects of production, and prepares a separate limited edition 9 December Coburn purchases Weber’s Still Life No. 2 (cat. 21) for $100 as a way of helping Weber after he mentions ‘a hard winter ahead’ in a letter (now lost). Weber sends Coburn ‘The Filling 17 of Space’

1914 Weber begins teaching at the Clarence H White School of Photography in New York (until 1918). Coburn is on the School’s Advisory Board

13 January Coburn photographs Augustus John in Chelsea Studio (fig.

39) and John gives him a landscape, ‘a greatly treasured possession’ (fig. 40) in return. ‘I was not long in choosing, and John remarked approvingly that I had selected the 18 best one!’

20 January Holbrook Jackson, editor of T.P.’s Weekly, visits Coburn’s studio to see Weber’s paintings and poetry. Coburn gives him Weber’s poem ‘I wonder’ for publication

24 January Coburn photographs Jacob Epstein (fig. 33) on the roof of 19 Epstein’s studio at 35 Devonshire Street, Bloomsbury

14 February After an exchange about Weber’s prose poem ‘On Brooklyn Bridge’ (see below), Coburn advises Weber that his painting Brooklyn Bridge (cat. 32), inscribed in a monogram ‘To Alvin from Max 2.3.14’ [3rd February], ‘[…] has arrived all in safety, and it is even more beautiful than I had imagined it to be.

It shall at once be framed in the narrow white moulding 20 you suggest.’

On Brooklyn Bridge

136 Max Weber

This morning early I was on the old Bridge of this New York. Midst din, crash, outwearing, outliving of its iron and steel muscles and sinews, I stood and

fig. 39 Alvin Langdon Coburn Augustus John, 1914 Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922), pl. XI University of Reading Special Collections

fig. 40 Augustus John Welsh Landscape, 1910 University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber  137

gazed at the millions of cubes, upon billions of cubes, pile upon pile, higher and higher, still piled and still higher with countless window eyes, befogged chimney throats clogged by steam and smoke – all this framed and hurled together in mighty mass against rolling crowds – tied to space above and about by the infinitely numbered iron wire lines of the bridge, spreading interlacedly in every angle. Lulled into calm and meditation (gazed) by the rhythmic music of vision (sight) I gazed and thought of this pile throbbing, boiling and seething, as a pile after destruction, and this noise and dynamic force created in me a peace the opposite of itself. Two worlds I had before me the inner and the outer, I never felt such. I lived in both!

5 April The Japanese poet Noguchi visits Coburn’s studio where he sees Weber’s pictures and hears Coburn read some of Weber’s poems

7 April Coburn sends Weber a copy of the special Edition de Luxe of 100 copies of Cubist Poems printed on ‘a beautifull [sic] handmade paper and I had them bound in the Chinese paper we love 21 so well!’, which Coburn had purchased in California

Coburn is instrumental in finding an English publisher and helping Weber in the selection of poems, and also puts up half the money for the deluxe edition. Weber is given six copies and subsequently sends Coburn No.1 (cat. 43), inscribed ‘Dedicated to Alvin Langdon Coburn and his mother.’ It also states that ‘Of this edition one hundred copies only were printed of which fifty are for sale.’

138 Max Weber

29 April Coburn writes to Weber, ‘Cubist Poems is published at last.’

In an earlier letter he explained that ‘the paper copies are to be black printing on grey red paper, and the cloth copies are to be stamped in gold on a fine blue linen [...] as you 22 suggested […]’ Weber also designed a print for the cover

fig. 41 Alvin Langdon Coburn The Great Temple, Grand Canyon, 1911 A Portfolio of Sixteen Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn (Rochester, New York: George Eastman House, 1962) Private collection

Max Weber  139

fig. 42 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Untitled Drawing (Bird) Private collection

fig. 43 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Untitled Drawing (Horse) Private collection

140  Max Weber

May To mark the publication of Weber’s Cubist Poems, extracts from an unpublished version of Weber’s ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’ and Coburn’s photograph of Weber (cat. 7) are published in Bookman.

Coburn is described as one of Weber’s ‘most enthusiastic’ admirers, and makes the following comment: ‘Art is a serious and vital matter with Max Weber [...] not the amusement of an idle hour; and life is still more important; and they blend imperceptibly. If Weber were cast upon a desert island he would find some way to go on expressing himself. Naturally a primitive, he would hew himself a carving in stone or wood, for the creative impulse is unquenchable. A short time ago I sent him the Oxford edition of Blake’s poetry, as I felt there was much in common between these two. In thanking me for the book Weber has written things which I cannot resist quoting: “A very rare visionary! He made spiritual the dynamics of the earthly as they are perceived by and through the senses. He touches the Unknown and he reveals. He is a poet for the philosopher of truth, not fact. He is wise without caution or precision. He gives, he helps, he 23 enriches – he does not merely entertain.”’

June Coburn makes multiple exposure photographs of Mexican artist and caricaturist Marius de Zayas (1880–1961), a member of 24 Stieglitz’s circle (he exhibits one as a Vorticist portrait) and 25 shows de Zayas some of his Weber pictures

Coburn purchases Still Life with Duck (cat. 20) for $50

July The Ehrichs visit Coburn’s studio to see his Weber collection.

Ehrich buys a copy of Cubist Poems and arranges for its American distribution.

20 October Coburn writes to Weber, ‘The Vorticists are not such a bad lot. I had Ezra Pound, the poet (who is one of the crowd) out here the other day and I showed him some of your things which 26 greatly impressed him.’

Max Weber 141

Coburn photographs Pound’s collection of drawings and sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915). Pound plans a London College of Arts whose prospectus is announced in an article in The Egoist (2 November 1914).

‘The Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts’ offers temporary refuge and a permanent centre to American students who would normally seek art education in Vienna or Prague. Among the teachers listed are Pound, Coburn, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) and Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) 2 December Coburn ships Panel Decoration, The Mother, New York, Two Seated Figures and Interior with Figure to New York, to be included in An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Max Weber, at The Print Gallery, under the direction of the Ehrich Galleries, 27 707 Fifth Avenue, New York (1–13 February, 1915) 31 December Coburn tells Weber, ‘We have your pictures hung all about the house, and they are much talked of by the people who 28 come here.’

1915 January Old Masters of Photography, previously shown at Ehrich Galleries, New York, travels to the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, where 29 Weber designs and hangs the exhibition

Coburn continues to suggest subject matter for paintings such as Chinese Restaurant (fig. 8), a ‘Memory Picture’ of the essence of China Town

1916

25 February Coburn photographs Wyndham Lewis (fig. 44) in his London studio

29 February Coburn photographs Wadsworth (fig. 45) in his studio at his home, 1a Gloucester Walk

142 Max Weber

fig. 44

fig. 45

Alvin Langdon Coburn Wyndham Lewis, 1916

Alvin Langdon Coburn Edward Wadsworth, 1916

Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922), XXII. University of Reading Special Collections

Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922), XXIII University of Reading Special Collections

Max Weber  143

fig. 47 Alvin Langdon Coburn Vortograph of Ezra Pound, 1917 George Eastman House

144  Max Weber

fig. 46 Alvin Langdon Coburn Vortograph of Ezra Pound, 1917 George Eastman House

Max Weber  145

June/July The Coburns and Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954), the émigré American artist and poster designer (for Shell Oil and London Underground), and his wife, the pianist Grace Ehrlich, walk down Chelsea Embankment reading Weber’s poems aloud December Coburn gives Weber a print of the Great Temple, Grand Canyon (fig. 41) to celebrate his marriage to Frances Abrams the previous June. Weber has been hanging the first exhibition of the Pictorial Photographers of America at the National Arts Club, New York (4 October – 10 November 1916) and this is one of several Coburn exhibits Late 1916 Coburn works with Ezra Pound on a series of abstract Vorticistinspired photographs, later named Vortographs (cat. 36; figs.

46 and 47). He gives two Vortographs to Robert Mountsier, an American journalist friend of Weber’s, who takes them 30 back to New York in February 1917. The Vortographs owe much to Weber’s earlier prismatic paintings such as The Dancers (cat. 34).

1917 17 January Coburn photographs Jacob Epstein’s sculpture in his studio to illustrate Epstein’s forthcoming exhibition catalogue for the Feb Leicester Galleries (in February 1917)

5–28 February Coburn exhibits 18 Vortographs. He claims for his new medium that it will do in photography, ‘in the hands of the sympathetic worker, what Cézanne, Matisse, and others had done in painting, or Scriabine [sic], Stravinsky and others in 31 music, as against academic traditions’

146 Max Weber

From now on the Coburn/Weber correspondence becomes intermittent

1918

12 September Coburn tells Weber of his liking for Edward Wadsworth’s camouflage work. Eventually he will own five 32 Wadsworth woodcuts

1922

Coburn publishes More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth & Co, 1922, cat. 47) with 33 images of authors, artists, musicians and politicians. These include Ezra Pound (fig. 32), Israel Zangwill (fig. 31), Augustus John (fig. 39), Jacob Epstein (fig.

31), Wyndham Lewis (fig. 44), Edward Wadsworth (fig. 45) and a self portrait

1927 January Weber sends Coburn a copy of ‘Primitives: Poetry and Woodcuts’. Coburn apparently arranges to have the 33 woodcuts exhibited at the Alpine Club Gallery 1936

34

Weber sends Coburn a copy of Max Weber by Holger Cahill.

There appears to be no correspondence for the next 20 years

1951

35

19 November Weber reads his 15-page manuscript of reminiscences, of studying in Matisse’s art class and of Paris at that time, ‘a veritable melting pot in the history of art’, at the Matisse symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

1956

13 November Coburn writes to Weber about an impending lecture tour of the USA the following year by Eric Newton of the Manchester 36 Guardian, who ‘is a great admirer of your work.’ Coburn gives Newton one of the Weber paintings from his collection 37 as thanks for his help with selling Coburn’s Matisse

Max Weber 147

1957

1 July On hearing from Weber that the first edition of Cubist Poems is now rare, Coburn sends Weber three or four of his copies (of the limited edition priced at $100, printed on handmade paper and bound in Chinese style) to give to collector friends. Coburn is due to have an exhibition and to give a lecture, ‘Retrospect’, at the Royal Photographic Society in 38 October as he has been a member for 50 years

7 July In a rare surviving letter, Weber writes to Coburn: ‘I remember introducing the [...] first abstract approach to nature [...] within the bounds of photographic means [...] you were one 39 of the first gifted innovators in the history of photography’

11 October Edith Coburn dies on the Coburns’ 45th wedding anniversary

1958 Early Coburn and Weber discuss a visit by the former to New York and how this might be funded, but nothing is realised 1960

5 April Coburn’s last (extant) letter to Weber

40

1961

4 October Weber dies aged 80

1962

23 January The largest solo Coburn exhibition, organised by Professor D J Gordon (cat. 35), Department of English, University of Reading, to be held in Coburn’s lifetime opens at the university

1966

148 Max Weber

23 November Coburn dies aged 84, leaving a bequest of Weber pictures and other material to the University of Reading

Artists’ Biographies

Vanessa Bell (1879−1961) London-born painter and designer Bell (née Stephen) trained at Arthur Cope’s School of Art, South Kensington (1896−1901) and the Royal Academy of Arts (1901−04).

In 1905 she established ‘The Friday Club’ as a centre for modern art (Bell resigned in 1913, but the Club continued until 1922 with annual exhibitions featuring progressive young artists between 1910 and 1914). She married Clive Bell (1881−1964) in 1907 and their Gordon Square home became a focus for members of the Bloomsbury Group, including her sister, the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Roger Fry. Bell’s work was included in Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries (1912) and she became a leading designer in the Omega Workshops (1913−19), collaborating with Duncan Grant, with whom she formed a life-long relationship and a professional partnership.

The painted interior of their country home, Charleston, East Sussex, is a tribute to their combined creativity.

Frederick Etchells (1886–1973) Newcastle-born painter, architect and writer; studied at the Royal College (1908–11) and in Paris (1911–14), where he met Braque, Picasso and Modigliani and was influenced by Cubism and Fauvism.

150 Max Weber

He contributed to the 1911 Borough Polytechnic murals with Roger Fry, participated in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries (1912) and worked closely with the Omega Workshops. Together with his sister Jessie (1893–1933), Etchells was a founder member of The London Group. He resigned when Fry joined in 1917 having sided with Wyndham Lewis in the dispute over a commission, joining the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. He exhibited in the Vorticist and Group X exhibitions in 1915 and 1920 respectively and contributed to the Vorticist mouthpiece Blast No. 1 and Blast No. 2. He was called up in 1916 but discharged due to illness in 1917. After the First World War he abandoned painting and trained as an architect.

Roger Eliot Fry (1866−1934) London-born to a Quaker family, Fry studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge (1884−89); trained as a painter under Francis Bate (1889−91), then at the Académie Julian, Paris (1892), and at evening classes under Walter Sickert (1893). He was curator and then European Advisor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1907−10), was appointed editor of The Burlington Magazine in 1909, and declined the Tate Gallery

directorship in 1911. Fry championed modern French painting, organising the two seminal exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, introducing Post-Impressionism to the British public – and to many British artists – for the first time. In 1913 Fry founded the Omega Workshops to give artists employment designing and decorating furniture and textiles, while maintaining their individual careers; it closed in 1919. Fry was also an influential critic and writer; his publications included Vision and Design (1920) and Cézanne (1928).

Winifred Gill (1891–1981) English designer Winifred Gill was invited to join the Omega Workshops in 1913

by Roger Fry, while attending the Slade School of art part-time. During her time at the Omega Workshops, alongside fellow members Vanessa Bell, Henri GaudierBrzeska and Duncan Grant, Gill was heavily involved in the production and transference of patterns to furniture, appliances and textiles. She and fellow members were given free rein to create their own designs, and their output was diverse and varied. Gill ran the workshops at 33 Fitzroy Square, and acted as manager from the beginning of the First World War until 1916. As well as an artist and craftswoman, she was also a social

reformer and puppeteer, and played a key role in the running of the workshops.

Duncan Grant (1885−1978) Painter and designer Duncan Grant was born in Scotland and spent his early years in Burma and India, where his father served as a soldier. Grant studied at the Westminster School of Art (1902–05) and at La Palette, Paris (1906−07) under JacquesÉmile Blanche. He was greatly influenced

by Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910–13. In 1913 he became co-director of Fry’s Omega Workshops with Vanessa Bell, with whom he formed a life-long partnership. In 1915 Grant exhibited with the Vorticist group as a non-member.

In 1916 he and Bell set up home in Charleston, East Sussex. Grant had his first solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery, London in 1919, and was elected to The London Group the same year. During the First World War Grant, as a conscientious objector, carried out farm work; he was appointed an Official War Artist during the Second World War. Grant’s major commissions included Berwick Church, near Charleston, with Bell (1940–43), and a series of decorative panels for the Russell Chantry in Lincoln Cathedral (1959).

Max Weber 151

Wassily Kandinsky (1866−1944) Born in Moscow, Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow and entered the Faculty of Law, also managing an art-printing works. In his thirties he moved to Munich, where he studied at the Academy and devoted himself full-time to the study of art. He employed rich, Fauvist colours in his painting and drew inspiration from Russian folk art, going on to become one of the most significant exponents of abstract art.

He wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1910 and founded the Blue Rider group with Franz Marc in 1911. Kandinsky’s work was first exhibited in Britain at the Allied Artists’ Association exhibition in 1909, where it was disparaged by the British press, but acquired by both the collector Michael Sadler and his son, known as Michael Sadleir. Sadleir also corresponded regularly with Kandinsky and in 1913 translated Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Fry became a supporter of Kandinsky’s in 1913 including him alongside Weber as one of only two non-English members in the Grafton Group Exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery.

Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921 where he taught at the Bauhaus school in Berlin until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. He moved to Paris in the same year and spent the rest of his life in France.

Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) Painter, novelist and critic, born in Nova Scotia, Canada; attended the Slade

152 Max Weber

(1898–1901), then travelled in Europe until 1909. On his return to England he co-founded the Camden Town Group and, through his involvement with the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, began working with Roger Fry at the Omega Workshops.

In October 1913, after quarrelling with Fry, he founded the rival Rebel Art Centre, home to the Vorticist movement.

Strongly politicised in both his writing and visual work, Lewis was present at the inaugural meeting of The London Group, but left in 1917 when Fry was elected. An artillery officer in France during the First World War, the experience made him vehemently anti-military and influenced his philosophical theories. He attempted to revive the Vorticists as the short-lived Group X in 1920. During the Second World War he lived in America, becoming blind from a brain tumour. He wrote art criticism for The Listener (1946–51).

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889−1946) London-born painter, etcher and lithographer; studied at St John’s Wood School of Art (1907−08) and the Slade (1908−12), where his contemporaries included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. He studied at the Académie Julian, Paris (1912−13), sharing a studio with Modigliani and meeting the Italian Futurists. Influenced by both Cubism and Futurism, he famously became the only

English Futurist, publishing with Marinetti the Futurist manifesto ‘Vital English Art’.

During the First World War he was made an Official War Artist in 1917. He first showed his war images at The London Group in 1915, participating in the Vorticist exhibition in the same year. In 1916 and 1918 he held his first solo shows at the Leicester Galleries. Although a founder member and wartime secretary of The London Group, Nevinson resigned in 1920 after quarrelling with Roger Fry.

Helen Saunders (1885−1963) Born in Croydon, Surrey, Saunders studied at a teaching studio before training at the Slade (1906−07) and the Central Schools of Art. She gained attention after exhibiting at the Friday Club in 1912; at Fry’s Quelques Indépendants Anglais, Paris, and at the Allied Artists’ Association (1912, 1913 and 1916), where she also met Wyndham Lewis. She was included in Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914 and was one of the signatories to the Vorticist manifesto, exhibiting at the Vorticist exhibition in London in 1915.

Her work was published in Blast No. 1 and Blast No. 2. Later on, her style became more naturalistic.

Max Weber 153

Notes

Foreword 1 A handful of Weber’s works were shown at Tate in 1956, at the Leicester Galleries in 1965 and at the Hayward Gallery in 1977 (see exhibition history).

2 One further sketch, an untitled pen and ink landscape (reference UR_027) by Weber in the University’s collection is not included in the current exhibition; UR_028, St Mark’s, Venice, is catalogue only.

Max Weber: Art, Identity and Migrations 1 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.

4 See Percy North’s essay in this volume. 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 Max Weber papers, 1902–2008, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/ detail/max-weber-14194 (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 They comprised 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. See Nancy Ireson’s essay in this volume; 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 Matisse, Volume One, 1869–1908 (London: Penguin, 1998) for full accounts of this period.

154 Max Weber

9 See Tate catalogue entry: N04718 Académie bleue (Nude Study in Blue) c.1899–1900, for full provenance and exhibition history: www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/matisse-nude-studyin-blue-n04718/text-catalogue-entry (accessed 9.5.14).

10 In this work Matisse was probably more influenced by African sculpture. See Tate display caption and catalogue entry: T00368 Nu debout (Standing Nude) 1907: www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/matisse-standing-nude-t00368/textdisplay-caption. Weber found enormous inspiration in the non-European collections of the British Museum in 1908, signalling this interest by sending a postcard from London to Picasso in Paris in 1908. See chronology; and North ‘Bringing Cubism to America: Max Weber and Pablo Picasso’, American Art 14, no. 3 (autumn 2000), p. 68.

11 North, Bringing Paris to New York, op. cit, p. 14.

12 Pamela Roberts and Anna Gruetzner Robins: see chronology in this volume.

13 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: www.oxforddnb.com/templates/article. jsp?articleid=41128&back accessed 20.5.14.).

14 See Anna Gruetzner Robins’s essay in this volume, where it is argued that The Dancers became an important source for Coburn’s Vortographs.

15 Roberts and Gruetzner Robins: op. cit.

16 Jacob Epstein is represented by six works in the Ben Uri collection: 2003–1 Jacob Kramer, 1921, bronze, 64 x 49 x 25 cm; 1987–88 Lydia, 1931, bronze, 48 x 40 x 20 cm; 1987–89; 1987–90 Shulamite Woman, 1935, bronze, (h) 52.5 cm; 1988–17 Sholem Asch, 1953, bronze, 50 x 22.5 x 32; 1987–86 Alexander Margulies, 1963, bronze, 42 x 31 x 25 cm; and Professor Samuel Alexander O.M., bronze, 51 x 57 x 37 cm; and is the subject of two caricatures by Mark Wayner: 1987-424xxxvii Remorse, 1931, stone lithograph on paper, 21 x 38 cm; and George Lansbury: A Suggestion to Epstein for a Bas-Relief, c. 1940, stone lithograph on paper, 35.5 x 24 cm, both from ‘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.

17 Israel Zangwill (1892–1962) is the subject of four portraits: 1987–123 Henry (Enrico) Glicenstein, Israel Zangwill, 1923,

bronze; 1987-198 K.W.P., Portrait of Israel Zangwill, bronze relief and wood, 69 x 60.5 x 7 cm; 1987–439 Alfred Wolmark, Portrait of Israel Zangwill, 1925, pen and ink on paper, 24 x 21 cm; and 1987–192 Jacob Kramer, Portrait of Israel Zangwill, 1925, charcoal and white chalk on paper, 47 x 43 cm in the Ben Uri Collection, which also includes 13 of Alfred Wolmark’s ‘Fourteen Illustrations to the novels of Israel Zangwill’ (BU 1987–438i-xiii). I am also grateful to Pamela Roberts for pointing out that Gertrude Salaman, niece of the Royal Academician Solomon J Solomon, was tutored in photography by Coburn (see 1987–395 Solmon J Solomon, Gertrude Salaman, oil on canvas, 82 x 65 cm, one of six works

by Solomon in the Ben Uri collection).

Max Weber: American Modern 1 Weber told his daughter Joy (who related it to the author 11 July 2013) that he had picked up English at school in six months. This facility for language served him well when he studied in Europe. Weber spoke and wrote Yiddish, undoubtedly his first language, throughout his life.

He never gave any indication of a familiarity with Russian, despite interest in Russian causes later in his life (confirmed by the artist’s son Maynard in conversation with the author, 11 January 2014).

2 I have never been able to ascertain whether he had a Bar Mitzvah, if so he never mentioned this to his children. His only son Maynard (b. 1923) did not have a Bar Mitzvah. Weber attended at least one Seder in the studio of Jo Davidson while he was in Paris, but he did not attend religious services regularly.

3 Weber enrolled in the Normal course with an emphasis in draughtsmanship and manual training, which provided him with the skills to make his own frames.

4 His copies of Las Meninas and Mercury and Argus remain in the Weber family. Unfortunately, his life-size copy of Aesop that appears in a photograph of Weber in his studio is unlocated. Although previously published with the date of 1908, the photo is probably earlier since the paintings that appear in it are from the early years of Weber’s stay in Paris.

5 Many of these works were recently featured in the author’s exhibition Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York at the Baltimore Museum of Art from March 3 to June 23, 2013.

Some of them are illustrated in the accompanying catalogue.

Weber also acquired several small drawings by Matisse.

6 Spring Song (subsequently retitled Burlesque #1), illustrated in the special April Fool’s section of New York World on April 3, 1910, was obviously considered to be a joke. It is illustrated in Percy North, ‘Bringing Cubism to America: Max Weber and Pablo Picasso’, American Art 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000): pp. 58-77. Gelett Burgess, ‘The Wild Men of Paris’, Architectural Record XXXVII (May 1910): pp. 400-414. This interesting and historically important article was curiously published in a scholarly journal for architects.

7 Max Weber, ‘The Fourth Dimension From a Plastic Point of View’, Camera Work (New York), no. 31 (July 1910): p. 25.

Max Weber, ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’, Camera Work (New York), no. 31 (July 1910): p. 51. Although Camera Work was initially published in 1905 as a journal dedicated to photography, the articles became increasingly devoted to fine art issues as Stieglitz’s interest in art increased. Not surprisingly, Stieglitz was abandoned by his initial subscribers and had to suspend publication in 1917.

8 Temple Scott was the English-sounding pseudonym for Weber’s Jewish friend I F Isaacs. Temple Scott, ‘Fifth Avenue and the Boulevard Saint-Michel’, Forum 44 (July-December): pp. 665-685. Reprinted along with the two subsequent articles, ‘The Faubourg St Bronnex: The Study of a PostImpressionist Artist’ and ‘At the Sign of the Golden Disk’ in Temple Scott, The Silver Age (New York: Scott and Seltzer, 1919), pp. 143-174. Weber in the guise of Weaver, the English translation of the German Weber, appears as the protagonist in the saga, an artist recently arrived back in New York from the heady atmosphere of Paris to find sterility in New York.

9 Weber collected his press clippings and pasted them into scrapbooks. They have been microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. 10 The show travelled to Chicago and Boston in abbreviated form.

11 Weber and Coburn corresponded regularly throughout the 1910s. Although Weber saved his letters from Coburn and they have been microfilmed by the Archives of American Art, Weber’s letters to Coburn have never been located despite repeated searches by numerous researchers. Weber and Wassily Kandinsky were the only non-English artists in the show. Since the English artists had intended to stage a show of anonymous work and the two foreigners signed theirs, the critics focused on the work by the identifiable painters.

Coburn subscribed to the clipping service Romeike & Curtice to provide Weber with the articles from the Alpine Club show.

They are included in Weber’s personal scrapbook.

Max Weber 155

12 Max Weber, ‘The Filling of Space’, Platinum Print (New York) 1, (December 1913): p. 6.

of these see Le Douanier Rousseau (Paris: Grand Palais, 1984), pp.262-67.

13 Max Weber, Essays on Art (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1916).

10 See chapter four of Nancy Ireson, ‘Making Images: The Life and Work of Henri Rousseau’ (unpublished PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2005).

14 Max Weber, ‘The Artist and His Audience’, Art Front (May 1936): pp. 8-9.

15 Winthrop Sargeant, ‘Max Weber: A Great Neck Poet and Philosopher is the Pioneer of Modern Art in America’, Life 18, no. 8 (August 1945): pp. 84-89. Mahonri Sharp Young, ‘Are These Men the Best Painters in America Today?’ Look 12, no.

3 (February 1948): p. 44. Weber was awarded second place while his contemporary John Marin was number one.

16 ‘Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ Life 27, no. 6 (August 1959): pp. 42-43, 45.

Max Weber and the ‘Lessons’ of Rousseau and Matisse 1 This observation is made with regard to Weber in Michael Fitzgerald, Picasso and American Art (New York: The Whitney Museum, 2006), p. 15.

2 Roger Fry, ‘The French Group’, Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (London: The Grafton Galleries, 1913), pp. 25-6.

3 A socialite with bohemian leanings, earlier that year, she may have commissioned Rousseau to paint the Snake Charmer. For more on the commission, see Nancy Ireson, ‘The Snake Charmer’, Henri Rousseau (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2010), pp.86-7.

4 Max Weber, ‘Rousseau as I knew him’ (unpublished typescript of a lecture given at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1942), private collection, no pagination.

5 Weber, ‘Rousseau as I knew him’.

6 The programme that Rousseau produced for his ‘Soirée donnée en l’honneur des adieux de M. Weber’, is reproduced in Sandra Leonard, Henri Rousseau and Max Weber (New York: R.L. Feigen, 1970), pp. 78-9; those in attendance are discussed on pp. 39-40. The performers included Weber and Rousseau, Armand Queval (the wife of his landlord), and a ‘Mlle Lescafette’ (the daughter of another artist friend).

7 Weber, ‘Rousseau as I knew him’.

8 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Henri Rousseau le Douanier’, Les Soirées de Paris, no. 20 (15 January 1914).

9 For the anecdote, see Max Weber, ‘Rousseau and the Cézanne memorial exhibition’, unpublished typed manuscript, quoted in Leonard, Henri Rousseau and Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 22-3. Rousseau was actually very ambitious, and believed in his right to success, as the letters he wrote to government officials make clear. For a selection

156 Max Weber

11 For an over-arching study of this trend see Philippe Dagen, Le peintre, le poete, le sauvage: les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris: Flammarion, 1998).

12 Christopher Green, Picasso, Architecture and Vertigo (London: Yale, 2005), pp. 98-100.

13 Max Weber, untitled, undated three-page typescript, on the subject of introducing Brummer to Rousseau (n. p., private collection).

14 André Salmon, La jeune peinture français (Paris: Messein, 1912), p. 12 ‘[...] il leur fallait un ancêtre vierge, un oncle d’Amérique nègre-blanc, riche de joyaux innombrables enfermés dans leurs gangues.’

15 The generic nature of these borrowings brings Jacqueline Francis’s recent readings of Weber’s Semitic imagery into question. Jacqueline Francis, Making Race (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2012), pp. 65-70.

16 For potential connections between Picasso’s Dryad and Rousseau’s women in forests see Christopher Green, Picasso, Architecture and Vertigo, op. cit, p. 98.

17 Alfred Stieglitz, cited in Lloyd Goodrich, Max Weber (New York: Whitney Museum, 1949), pp. 21-2.

18 Weber lent seven works by Rousseau to the exhibition, an act that proved all the more important in the face of a major loan refusal from Rosenberg. Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Abbeville Press, 1963), p. 52, pp.

74-5.

19 Elizabeth Luther Carey, ‘Art at Home and Abroad: News and notes of the art world’, New York Times (27 November 1910), p. 15.

20 Max Weber, introduction to the Henri Rousseau exhibition at 291 (New York: Stieglitz, 1910)., no pagination.

21 Cited in Weber, ‘Rousseau as I knew him’.

22 Holger Cahill, Max Weber (New York: Downtown Gallery, 1930), pp. 42-3.

23 Maurice Garçon, Le Douanier Rousseau: Accusé naïf (Paris: Quatre Chemains Editart, 1953), p. 7, p. 24.

24 The book that confirmed or disputed details of the artist’s received biography was Henri Certigny, La vérité sur le douanier Rousseau (Paris: Plon, 1961). On the various ‘myths’ constructed around Rousseau, see Ireson, ‘Making Images’.

25 Max Weber, speech on class with Henri Matisse, 22 October 1951 (Max Weber Papers, Archives of American Art), pp. 3-4.

26 Author’s correspondence with Joy Weber, 2001.

27 Leo Stein purchased Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre after viewing it at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. In January 1907, Sarah and Michael Stein invited Matisse to their rue Madame apartment as they renovated, with the hope of acquiring new works to display. Rebecca Rainbow, ‘Discovering Modern Art: The Steins’ early years in Paris, 19031907’, in The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-garde (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2011), p. 38.

28 For Weber on the Steins see Weber, speech on class with Henri Matisse, op. cit. For a full list of Matisse see Robert McD. Parker, ‘Catalogue of the Stein Collections’, in The Steins Collect, op. cit., pp. 406-26.

42 Weber, ‘Rousseau as I knew him’.

The Company of Strangers: Max Weber and the first Grafton Group Exhibition 1 Letter from Michael Sadler to Kandinsky, n.d., TGA 8221.2.50; cited in Adrian Glew, ‘Blue Spiritual Sounds’: Kandinsky and the Sadlers, 1911-16, Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1134 (September 1997), p. 604.

2 The Reminiscences of Max Weber, 1958, in the Columbia Center for Oral History Collection (hereafter referenced as CCOHC). See, for example, 3 February 1958, p. 261.

3 Letter from Max Weber to Leonard Van Noppen, 13 March 1913, Max Weber Papers, Archives of American Art, New York (hereafter referenced as AAA, NY), 59-8, 121.

29 Emily Braun, ‘Saturday Evenings at the Steins’’, in The Steins Collect, op. cit., pp. 49-52.

4 The catalogue was printed after the exhibition was hung and accurately reflects the number and titles of Weber’s exhibits.

30 Matisse’s own reminiscences mention Purrmann. Henri Matisse and Pierre Courthion, Chatting with Henri Matisse; the Lost 1941 Interview, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Los Angeles: Getty, 2013), pp. 74-5.

5 CCOHC; Weber refers to his annoyance about this omission on 28 January 1958, p. 109, and 3 February 1958, pp. 273-274.

31 Max Weber, ‘Matisse Class’, 17-page typescript of lecture given at the MoMA Matisse symposium, 19 November 1951, AAA (NY 59-6), cited in Percy North, Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2013), p. 14.

32 For Matisse’s reminiscence of the class, see Matisse and Courthion, Chatting with Henri Matisse, op. cit., pp. 74-5.

33 Ibid; Weber, ‘Matisse Class’, op. cit., p. 7.

34 Walter Pach, Queer Thing, Painting: Forty Years in the World of Art (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1938), p.

119, cited in John Cauman and Henri Matisse, ‘Henri Matisse’s Letters to Walter Pach’, Archives of American Art Journal 31, no.

3, (1991), p. 2.

35 Weber, ‘Matisse Class’, p. 14.

36 North, Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York, op. cit., p. 14.

37 Weber, ‘Matisse Class’, p. 9.

38 Weber, ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’, Camera Work, no. 31 (July 1910), p. 51.

39 Alfred Barr recognised that Weber processed the lessons of his travels once back in New York. Alfred Barr, ‘Max Weber’ in Three American Modernist Painters (New York: MoMA [1969] date of reprint), p. 10.

6 Ibid., p. 277.

7 Alvin Langdon Coburn in Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, eds., Alvin Langdon Coburn: Photographer: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 84 (cat. 51); cited in North, 1991, p.32. I am grateful to Pamela Roberts (see chronology) for identifying that the correct dating of Coburn’s Octopus is 1909, not 1912 as has been previously thought.

8 Coburn to Weber, 9 November 1912, AAA, NY 69-85, 268; cited in North, 1992, p. 46, n.66.

9 New York must have meant a great deal to Weber; in 1928 he made a lithograph after it, probably from a photograph because Coburn took the picture back to London in 1912. He also made a lithograph of Brooklyn Bridge at the same time.

10 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Forum (New York), May 1914, p.

668.

11 Coburn first saw the exhibition around 10 December 1912 when he discussed it with Shaw (Coburn to Weber 10 December 1912, AAA, NY 69-85, and again on 14 December 1912 (Coburn to Weber,15 December 1912, ibid., 69-85.

12 Coburn to Weber, 10 December 1912, ibid., 69-85.

13 Coburn to Weber, 29 January 1913, ibid., 69-85.

40 Maurice de Zayas, ‘The New Art in Paris’, Camera Work, no.

34-5 (April-July 1911), pp. 29-34.

14 Letter from Roger Fry to Max Weber, 10 February 1913, ibid., 59-7, 530-531.

41 North, Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York, op. cit., p. 28.

15 Fry to Weber, 28 February 1913, ibid., 59-7, 533.

Max Weber 157

16 The first was Manet and the Post-Impressionists, 1910. For a discussion of both post-impressionist exhibitions see Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain 1910-1914 (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997).

17 For an earlier discussion of the exhibition see Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits (London: Phaidon, [1976] 1993), pp. 92-94; Isabelle Anscombe, Omega and After, Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p.25; Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), pp. 38-43; Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity (New Haven and London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York

by Yale University Press, 2004), pp.139,141.

18 Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours: Catalogue Raisonné, 1900-1921, vol.1 (London: Philip Wilson Publishers for Sotheby’s Publications, 1992), cat. 316. Improvisation no. 28 can be identified from the following description: ‘an incoherent series of colour-splashes, streaks, whirls, formless and meaningless, with two sticks of asparagus as the only recognisable feature, and plenty of white paper showing between the brushmarks’. (‘The Grafton Group’, Pall Mall Gazette, 27 March 1913) And ‘a mere riot of unrecognisable objects’ including ‘an extremely emaciated bird’ and ‘two unripe damsons, seven patches of sprouting grass, a pair of scales, the broken yolk of an egg, and an unaccountably black star-fish.’(‘Artists’ Cult of the Horrible, Exhibition of Wild Eccentricities’, Daily Citizen, 26 March, 1913, p. 8). Sadler also owned Aquarelle no.10, 1911-12, Barnett p. 304.

19 The woodcuts were proofs for Klange which were acquired by Sadler from the Salon of the Allied Artists’ Association where they were listed in the catalogue as ‘Six Woodcuts and Album with text £1’ (in fact only five prints were received), and auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1980 (16/17 May, lots 525-9). See Frances Carey and Anthony Griffiths The Print in Germany 1880-1933. The Age of Expressionism (London: British Museum Press [1984]1993), p. 152.

20 Anon., Grafton Group Exhibition, Alpine Club Gallery, 15-31 March 1913, n. p. The preface, which is untitled, is unsigned but is generally believed to be by Fry. See Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), p.38.

21 Fry would have known Wadsworth because he had links with the Friday Club, the exhibition group formed by Vanessa Bell etc. In bringing these young artists together Fry inadvertently brought together what would become the Vorticist group. While it has been assumed that Wadsworth and Lewis met by summer 1913, surely this must have been in March 1913 at the time of the Grafton Group Exhibition.

22 Fry, 1913, cited in Collins, p. 39.

23 Anon.,‘The Grafton Group’, Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913); Weber Papers, AAA, NY 59-6, 405.

158 Max Weber

24 Letter from Roger Fry to Max Weber, 10 February 1913, ibid., 59-7.

25 CCOHC, p. 89.

26 Max Weber, ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’, Camera Work (July 1910), p.25; reprinted in Percy North, The Cubist Decade, p. 25.

27 CCOHC, p. 308. Weber described it as ‘very nice Persian bowl’ in a small still life. There is photograph of a painting which matches this description in Coburn’s album. (cat. 42) 28 Max Weber on Matisse Class, 1951; a paper given at the time of a Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 19 November 1951, Max Weber Papers, AAA, Smithsonian Institute, Washington; www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/ max-weber-speech-his-class-henri-matisse-15702.

29 Weber, Matisse, 1951.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 CCOHC, p. 94.

33 The sculpture is illustrated in Percy North, Max Weber.

Bringing Paris to New York (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2013), p. 17.

34 I am grateful to Percy North for this information.

35 Coburn purchased the picture from Weber 5 June 1914 for $50 (Coburn to Weber, 3 December 1914, AAA, NY 69-85).

36 The jar in Still Life with Duck has the same patterning as a jar in the National Museum of the American Indian, New York that is described as probably Pueblo, AD 900-1130, cat. 5 /2109.

37 Speaking in 1958, Weber said he took inspiration from ‘the pottery of the Indian’ and praised ‘the form, the design, in these things’ (Weber, 21 April 1958, p. 510).

38 ‘Max Weber, To Xochipilli,, Lord of Flowers’, Camera Work, p.34. Weber used the asterisk to indicate that Xochipilli was a ‘primitive Mexican sculpture’. Later scholars assumed this to be Aztec but it could equally be Mixtec.

39 The figure is Macuilxochitl, AMHA, 30/10736, who is not the Lord of Flowers but the God of Games. This identification, however, was probably not available to Weber in 1910. I am grateful to Sumru Aricanli, American Museum of Natural History, for this information.

40 Weber in a letter to the Sun (January 1919) entitled ‘Max Weber’s Startling Accusation’, written after he failed to persuade other members of the committee to have proper representation of modern art in an exhibition of American Art at the Luxembourg Museum, Paris. He cited the letter in full in CCOHC, pp. 331, 334.

41 Coburn Papers, Forum, 1913, p.668.

58 Times (20 March 1913).

42 Green, p. 127.

59 Weber included the following explanation of The Geranium in Max Weber, Retrospective Exhibition (New York: MoMA, 1930): ‘Two crouching figures of women dwelling and brooding in a nether or unworldly realm. The conception and treatment spring from a search of form in the crystal. It is a painter’s realization of sculpturesque and tactile values.’

43 Coburn to Weber: where Coburn refers to what appears to be a dove as a duck.

44 Coburn purchased the picture from Weber, 9 December 1913, for $100 (letter from Coburn to Weber 3 December 1914, AAA, NY 69-85).

45 Letter, Coburn to Weber, 11 December 1913, ibid., when Coburn referred to it by that title and sent a $100 cheque for it.

46 In 1918 Fry praised similar ceramics in an article ‘American Archaeology’ for the Burlington Magazine where he drew attention to the tripod vases of the ‘Guetar [Costa Rican] Indians’(Roger Fry, ‘American Archaeology’, Burlington Magazine (November 1918), p. 157; reprinted as ‘Ancient American Art’, in Vision and Design).

47 CCOHC, p. 164.

48 Letter from Coburn to Weber, 30 January 1913, AAA, NY 69-85. Coburn refers to the picture ‘still life no.9, and makes it clear that it was the same picture that he described in an earlier letter to Weber, 15 December 1912 (Weber, AAA, NY 59-85).

49 Letter from Coburn to Weber, 30 January 1913, AAA, NY 69-85.

50 The picture was painted before Coburn left New York because he referred to it in a letter to Weber, 15 December YEAR?, AAA, NY 69-85.

51 See Reed, pp.12-14, for an illuminating discussion of this point.

60 Daily Citizen (26 March 1913).

61 Standard (20 March 1913).

62 The Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913) and the Daily Telegraph (22 March 1913) identified Etchells as the painter of The Chinese Student (cat.11).

63 When the picture was acquired by Tate from Miss Madge Pulsford, she explained (18 May 1958): ‘I should say it was painted in 1912 and was exhibited at one of Roger Fry’s exhibitions of the Younger Artists at the Alpine Club Gallery, I think there were two and that this painting was in the first of them [catalogues have not been traced]. As far as I know it was not exhibited again but given by Etchells to my mother soon after. It is not a portrait of any one person but painted from life partly with his sister Jessie Etchells as sitter and partly from me. The original frame was similar to the present one but was painted chequer board white and the greymauve-blue tone of the present one. Four squares to the width of the frame or perhaps five.’; cited in Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964. www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/etchells-the-big-girl-t00192/text-catalogue-entry: accessed 26 April 2014.

64 Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913).

52 Roger Fry, Cézanne, 1927, cited in Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999), p.117.

65 Omega produced crocheted hats. I am grateful to Frances Spalding for this reference.

53 The chair back is illustrated and credited to Fry and Gill in the Sketch (2 April 1913), p. 406.

54 Anon., ‘“Futurist” Woolwork Samples of Weird Art at a Pictures Show’, Daily Express (18 March 1913), p.2; cited in Collins, p.42.

66 ‘Exhibition’, Athenaeum (22 March 1913), p.339. where it playfully suggests that the portrait may be by Fry, however, the Daily Telegraph 22 March 1913 identified Bell. Bell painted another portrait of the same sitter but it does not match the Athenaeum description.

55 These were identified by the Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913).

67 Coburn to Weber, 8 February 1913, Weber Papers, AAA, NY 69-85.

56 The description of the ‘violently ultramarine sheep on an orange-hued background’ suggests that the screen may have been more brilliantly coloured when first painted. See ‘More Post-Impressionism, Exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery’, Standard (20 March 1913), Max Weber papers, AAA, NY 59-6, 399.

68 Coburn to Weber, 29 January 1913, ibid.

57 Daily Telegraph (22 March 1913), Max Weber Papers, AAA, NY 596, 403.

69 Coburn to Weber, 16 March 1913, ibid.

70 Max Weber, ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’, Camera Work, (New York), no. 31 (July), p. 25. For a discussion of this article see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 173.

Max Weber 159

71 H G Wells, ‘Introduction’, in Alvin Langdon Coburn, New York (London: Duckworth & Co., 1910), pp. 9-10. For Wells, see Henderson, pp. 46-47 and p. 166.

72 Mark Antliff, ‘Alvin Langdon Coburn among the Vorticists: studio photographs and lost works by Epstein, Lewis and Wadsworth’, Burlington Magazine CLII, (September 2010), p.

582.

73 Alfred Thornton, ‘Editorial: Post Impressionism’, Observer (6 April 1913), Weber Papers, AAA, NY 59-6; cited in North, 1992, p. 36.

74 Letter from Coburn to Weber, 8 February 1913, Weber Papers, AAA,NY 69-85.

75 Daily Telegraph (22 March 1913).

76 Standard (20 March 1913); cited in North, 1992, p. 37.

77 Times (20 March 1913).

AAA, NY 69-85, 262, cited North (1992, p. 45, n.38) suggests that the female dancer may be Isadora Duncan.

88 For a recent discussion of Coburn’s vortographs see Anne McCauley, ‘Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of Abstraction: Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Vortographs’ in Antliff and Klein, pp.156-174.

89 Weber cited the following comments from the Times (20 March 1913): ‘The picture called New York though [sic] could guess even that it was a representation of a place, has a logic of its own like the logic of some scientific diagram. One feels that it’s not a pure caprice of the artist, while the form and colour certainly have an abstract beauty.’ And from the Daily Telegraph (22 March 1913): ‘Mr Max Weber is a born colourist, and altogether a technician of great subtlety.’

90 Weber to Leonard Van Noppen, 13 March 1913. Referring to Fry, Weber wrote: ‘after the exhibition he will arrange with a dealer of modern art – in London – to take my work up.’

78 Pall Mall Gazette, 27 March 1913, p. 7.

79 Jonathan Black, ‘Constructing a Chinese-Puzzle Universe’: Industry, National Identity, and Edward Wadsworth’s Vorticist Woodcuts of West Yorkshire 1914-1916’ in Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 91, points out that Wadsworth first saw these etchings at the Slade. For a list of etchings see Margaret MacDonald, ed., The Etchings of James McNeil Whistler: a catalogue raisonné, http://etchings.arts.gla. ac.uk/catalogue/sets_texts/?eid=thames 28 April 1913.

80 Michael J. K. Walsh, C R W Nevinson: This Cult of Violence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for Paul Mellon Centre, 2002), p. 51.

81 Nevinson’s plans for the Grafton Group were well underway by the beginning of March when he sent two sketches entitled Port de Montmartre and Falmouth. The sketches are reproduced in Michael K. Walsh, p. 52, where it also states that Lewis invited Nevinson to exhibit.

82 H W Nevinson, Journals (Mss Eng. Misc. e.610-628). See 617/4 15 March 1915; cited in Walsh, p. 51.

83 Jonathan Black, Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005), p. 160, cat. 28.

84 Daily Citizen (26 March 1913).

85 Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913), which also identified Rotherhithe as being by Wadsworth.

86 Antliff (2010; p. 583) was the first to make the connection.

87 Coburn went to see St Denis dance twice in Los Angeles, and informed Weber that ‘she is very wonderful in her Oriental dances, her sense of colour is so fine.’ A letter from Coburn to Weber (Los Angeles, 8 May 1911, Weber Papers,

160 Max Weber

Chronology The Coburn material is a shortened version of a long chronological summary by Pamela Roberts, who is working on Coburn’s biography.

1 Max Weber, ‘The Reminiscences of Max Weber’ (typescript of tape-recorded interview by Carol S Gruber (Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 3 February 1958), p. 118.

2 Percy North, ‘Bringing Cubism to America: Max Weber and Pablo Picasso’, American Art 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2000), p. 68.

3 These autochromes are now in the Collection of the Royal Photographic Society at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK. 4 Weber, ‘The Reminiscences of Max Weber’ (21 February 1958), p. 277.

5 Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘Artists of the Lens: the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo’, Harper’s Weekly (26 November 1910), pp. 10-11.

6 Max Weber Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. 7 Exhibition Illustrating the Progress of the Art of Photography in America (New York: Montross Galleries, 550 Fifth Avenue, 1912).

8 Camera Pictures by Alvin Langdon Coburn: exhibition catalogue (London: The Goupil Gallery, 1913).

9 Letter from Coburn to Weber, 18 November 1912, Weber Papers, AAA N69-85.

10 Coburn to Weber, 1 January 1913, ibid.

11 Coburn to Weber, ibid.

12 Coburn to Weber, 3 January 1913, ibid.

13 Coburn to Weber, 30 January 1913, ibid.

14 Coburn to Weber, 16 March 1913, ibid.

15 Coburn to Gertrude Stein, 30 April 1913; cited in Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of a Friendship: Letters written to Gertrude Stein (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1953), p. 78.

16 Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘Men of Mark’, Forum (November 1913), pp. 653-668.

17 Platinum Print (New York), December 1913, p. 6.

35 Now in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

36 Coburn to Weber, 13 November 1956, Weber Papers, op. cit.

37 The work was sold (to a London banker via Dr Roland of Roland, Browse & Delbanco); see Coburn to Weber, 13 November 1956, ibid.

38 Coburn to Weber, 1 July 1957, ibid.

39 Weber to Coburn, 7 July 1957, ibid.

40 Weber to Coburn, 5 April 1960, ibid.

18 Alvin Langdon Coburn, More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth & Co., 1922), p. 14.

19 Mark Antliff observes that Coburn recorded in More Men of Mark, op. cit., p.14, that he photographed Epstein on the balcony of his London flat; see Mark Antliff, ‘Alvin Langdon Coburn among the Vorticists: studio photographs and lost works by Epstein, Lewis and Wadsworth’, Burlington Magazine CLII, (September 2010), pp. 582-3.

20 Coburn to Weber, 14 February 1914, Weber Papers, op. cit.

21 Coburn to Weber, 7 April 1914, ibid.

22 Coburn to Weber, ibid.

23 Bookman XLVI (May 1914), p. 60. This is the only known letter from Weber to Coburn of this date.

24 Coburn exhibits Vorticist Portraits of de Zayas and Ezra Pound at the London Salon of Photography, 16 September–14 October 1916.

25 Coburn to Weber, 14 June 1914. Weber Papers, op. cit.

26 Coburn to Weber, 20 October 1914, ibid.

27 Coburn to Weber, 6 December 1914, ibid.

28 MS Letter, Coburn to Weber, 31 December 1914, ibid.

29 An Exhibition of the Old Masters of Photography, arranged

by Alvin Langdon Coburn (Buffalo: Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 1915).

30 The Vortographs Coburn gave to Mountsier are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, donated by Silas Mountsier, a descendant.

31 ‘The Camera Club’, British Journal of Photography (16 February 1917), p. 87.

32 Now in Coburn Bequest at George Eastman House: Coburn to Weber, 18 October 1918, Weber Papers, op. cit.

33 Primitives, Poems and Woodcuts (New York: The Spiral Press, 1926) 34 Holger Cahill, Max Weber (New York: Downtown Gallery, 1930).

Max Weber 161

Appendix 1

Weber and Coburn ephemera 42 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882– 1966) Album of 79 Photographs of Max Weber Pictures 1910 Photographic album: 75 leaves on mounted plates, paper & textile 51 x 34.5 x 4.5 University of Reading Special Collections

162 Max Weber

43 Max Weber (1881–1961) Cubist Poems (London: Elkin Matthews, Cork Street, 1914) Printed book 16.5 x 13.5 x 1 University of Reading Special Collections

44 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882– 1966) New York (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1910) Printed book: 20 mounted plates, paper & leather 41.5 x 31.5 x 2 University of Reading Special Collections

45 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882– 1966) Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913) 30 pp. XXIII leaves of mounted portrait plates Printed book in boxed case 31.3 x 24 x 2.5 University of Reading Special Collections

47 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882– 1966) More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922) 33 leaves of mounted portrait plates, paper & textile Printed book 31.3 x 24.3 x 3 University of Reading Special Collections

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Appendix 2

Men Of Mark and More Men Of Mark contents pages 45 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913) 30 pp. XXIII leaves of mounted portrait plates Printed book in boxed case 31.3 x 24 x 2.5 University of Reading Special Collections

164  Max Weber

47 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922) 33 leaves of mounted portrait plates, paper & textile Printed book 31.3 x 24.3 x 3 University of Reading Special Collections

Max Weber  165

Appendix 3

Exhibited works by Max Weber from the University of Reading Art Collection Dimensions are given in centimetres; height before width 9

11

Max Weber (1881–1961) Two Female Figures 1912 Gouache, pen & ink on card 41.4 x 27.2 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber 1912’ University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber (1881–1961) Landscape II 1912 Gouache on board 26.9 x 21.4 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection 12

10

Max Weber (1881–1961) Landscape I 1912 Gouache on board 27 x 21.3 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection

166 Max Weber

Max Weber (1881–1961) Landscape III 1912 Oil on canvas 45.7 x 37.8 University of Reading Art Collection

13

16

Max Weber (1881–1961) Octopus I 1910 Watercolour, gouache & pencil 14 x 15 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1910’ University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber (1881–1961) New York 1912 Chalk, watercolour and gouache on paper 61.5 x 47 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1912’ University of Reading Art Collection

14

18

Max Weber (1881–1961) Octopus II 1910 Watercolour, gouache & pencil 14 x 21.8 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber 1910’ University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber (1881–1961) The Blue Pitcher 1910 Gouache and pencil on cardboard 100.5 x 42 Signed and dated (upper left) ‘Max Weber 1910’ University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber 167

19

32

Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life with Lemon and Blue Vase 1910 Gouache on cardboard 26 x 21 University of Reading Art Collection

Max Weber (1881–1961) Brooklyn Bridge 1912 Watercolour and gouache on paper 75 x 90 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1912’ Inscribed with monogram to ‘Alvin from Max 2-3-‘14’ University of Reading Art Collection

20

Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life with Duck 1912 Oil on canvas 54 x 45 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection 21

Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life no. 2 1912 Oil on canvas 54 x 45 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection

168 Max Weber

34

Max Weber (1881–1961) The Dancers 1912 Pastel and chalk 61.8 x 46.8 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1912’ University of Reading Art Collection 37

Max Weber (1881–1961) Portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn 1911 Gouache and pencil on card 62.9 x 47 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1911’ University of Reading Art Collection

Select bibliography

Primary Sources Archives of American Art Journal 31, no. 3, (1991), p. 2 Reminiscences of Max Weber, 1958, Columbia Center for Oral History Collection, 3 February 1958 Max Weber Papers, Archives of American Art, New York Websites www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/maxweber-speech-his-class-henri-matisse-15702 Articles by Weber Max Weber, ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colourists’, Camera Work, no. 31 (July 1910), p. 51 Max Weber, ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’, Camera Work, no. 31 (July 1910), p. 25 Max Weber, ‘The Filling of Space’, Platinum Print, no. 1 (December 1913) Max Weber, Essays on Art, (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1916) Max Weber, ‘Rousseau as I knew him’ (unpublished typescript of a lecture given at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1942), private collection, no pagination Max Weber, ‘The Artist and his Audience’, Art Front (May 1926), pp. 8–9

Maurice de Zayas, ‘The New Art in Paris’, Camera Work no. 34–35 (April–July, 1911), pp. 29–34 Percy North, ‘Bringing Cubism to America: Max Weber and Pablo Picasso’, American Art 14, no. 3 (fall 2000), pp. 59–77 Winthrop Sargeant, ‘Max Weber: A Great Neck Poet and Philosopher is the Pioneer of Modern Art in America’, Life 18, no. 8 (August 1945), pp. 84–89 Temple Scott, ‘Fifth Avenue and the Boulevard SaintMichel’, Forum 44 (July–December), pp. 665–85 Books and Exhibition Catalogues on Weber Anon., Max Weber: Memorial Exhibition (Boston: Boston University Press, 1962) Anon., Max Weber, Drawings (Bernard Danenberg Galleries, 1972) Anon., Max Weber, 1881–1961: An Exhibition of Works (Santa Fe, NM: The Gallery, 1982) Anon., Max Weber: Selected Works 1908–32 (Houston: Meredith, Long and Company, 1989) Anon., Max Weber: Discoveries (Forum Gallery, 1999) Anon., Max Weber (New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2000) Holger Cahill, Max Weber (New York: Downtown Gallery, 1930)

Secondary Sources

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and No-Euclidean Geometry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)

Articles on Weber

William H Gerdts, Max Weber: Retrospective Exhibition (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1959)

Alfred Barr, ‘Max Weber’, Three American Modernist Painters (New York: Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Arno Press, 1969), p. 10

Lloyd Goodrich, Max Weber: Retrospective Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre, 1949)

Gellett Burgess, ‘The Wild Men of Paris’, Architectural Record 5 (May 1910), pp. 407–14

Lloyd Goodrich, Max Weber (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art & Macmillan Co., 1949)

170 Max Weber

Lloyd Goodrich (intro, reprinted) Fifty Years of Painting

by Max Weber (New York: Bernard Danenberg Galleries Inc., 1969)

Milton W Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955)

Percy North, Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2013)

Frances Carey and Anthony Griffiths, The Print in Germany 1880–1933: The Age of Expressionism (London: British Museum Press, 1984], 1993)

Percy North and Susan Krane, Max Weber: the Cubist Decade, 1910–1920 (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 1991)

Henri Certigny, La Vérité sur le Douanier Rousseau (Paris: Plon, 1961)

Percy North, Max Weber: Max Weber’s Women (New York: Forum Gallery, 1996)

Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (London, Oldbourne Press, 1964)

Percy North and Joan Rosenbaum, Max Weber: American Modern (New York: Jewish Museum, 1982)

Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (London, Secker and Warburg, 1983)

Percy North, Max Weber, American Modern (New York: Jewish Museum, 1956)

Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alvin Langdon Coburn: Photographer: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1966)

Daryl R Rubinstein, Max Weber: Prints and Colour Variations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1980)

Alvin Langdon Coburn, New York (London: Duckworth & Co, 1910)

Ellen Schwartz, Max Weber: Sculpture, Drawings & Prints (New York, NY: Forum Gallery, 1979)

Alvin Langdon Coburn, More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth & Co, 1922)

Other Books and Exhibition Catalogues

Philippe Dagen, Le peintre, le poete, le sauvage: les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris: Flammarion, 1998)

Anon., [attributed to Roger Fry] Grafton Group Exhibition, Alpine Club Gallery (March 1913) Isabelle Anscombe, Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981) Mark Antliff and Scott W Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) Vivian Endicott Barnet, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, 1900–1921 (London: Philip Wilson Publishers for Sotheby’s publications, 1992) Jonathan Black, Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005)

Abraham A Davidson, Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–1935 (New York: DaCapo, 1994) Jacqueline Francis, Making Race (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2012) Donald Gallup ed., The Flowers of a Friendship: Letters written to Gertrude Stein (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1953) Maurice Garçon, Le Douanier Rousseau: Accusé Naïf (Paris: Quatre Chemains Editart, 1953) Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain, 1910– 1914 (London: Merrell Holberton in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1997)

Max Weber 171

Serge Guilbaut ed., Henri Matisse and Pierre Courthion, Chatting with Henri Matisse; The Lost 1941 Interview (Los Angeles: Getty, 2013)

Alfred Werner, Max Weber, 1881–1961 (New York: Abrams, 1975)

Christopher Green, Picasso, Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven, Conn; London: Yale University Press, 2005)

Other Articles

R Scott Harnsberger, Four Artists of the Stieglitz Circle: A Sourcebook on Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Max Weber, Art Reference Collection, no. 26 (Westport, Conn; London: Greenwood Press, 2002) Sam Hunter, Modern American Painting and Sculpture (New York: Dell, 1959) Nancy Ireson, ‘Making Images: The Life and Work of Henri Rousseau’ (unpublished PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2005) Walter Pach, Queer Thing, Painting: Forty Years in the World of Art (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1938) Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity (New Haven and London: Published for the Bard Graduate Centre for the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, New York by Yale University Press, 2004) Daryl R Rubinstein, Max Weber: A Catalogue Raisonné of his Graphic Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) André Salmon, La Jeune Peinture Français (Paris: Messein, 1912) Temple Scott, The Silver Age (New York: Scott and Seltzer, 1919) Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits (London: Phaidon, 1976], 1993) Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury (London: Tate Gallery publishing, 1999) Michael J K Walsh, C.R.W. Nevinson: This Cult of Violence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for Paul Mellon Centre, 2002)

172 Max Weber

Anon., ‘Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ Life 27, no. 6 (August 1959), pp. 42–43, 45 Anon., ‘“Futurist” Woolwork Samples of Weird Art at a Pictures Show’, Daily Express (18 March 1913), p. 2 Anon.,‘ The Grafton Group’, Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913) Anon., ‘More Post-Impressionism, Exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery’, Standard (20 March 1913) Mark Antliff, ‘Alvin Langdon Coburn among the Vorticists: studio photographs and lost works by Epstein, Lewis and Wadsworth’, Burlington Magazine CLII (September 2010), p. 582 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Henri Rousseau le Douanier’, Les Soirées de Paris, no. 20 (15 January 1914) Elizabeth Luther Carey, ‘Art at Home and Abroad: News and notes of the art world’, New York Times (27 November 1910), p. 15 Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘Artists of the Lens, The International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo’, Harper’s Weekly (26 November 1910), pp. 10–11 Roger Fry, ‘The French Group’, Second PostImpressionist Exhibition (London: The Grafton Galleries, 1913), pp. 25–26 Adrian Glew, ‘“Blue Spiritual Sounds”: Kandinsky and the Sadlers, 1911–16’, Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1134 (September 1997) Rebecca Rainbow, ‘Discovering Modern Art: The Steins’ early years in Paris, 1903–1907’, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-garde (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2011), p. 38 Alfred Thornton, ‘Editorial: Post Impressionism’, Observer (6 April 1913)

Mahonri Sharp Young, ‘Are These Men the Best Painters of Modern Art in America?’, Look 12, no. 3 (February 1948), p. 44 Anon., ‘The Grafton Group’, Pall Mall Gazette (27 March 1913) The Camera Club, British Journal of Photography (16 February 1917) Burlington Magazine (September 2010) ‘Artists’ Cult of the Horrible, Exhibition of Wild Eccentricities’, Daily Citizen (26 March 1913), p. 8 Daily Express (2 April 1913) Daily Telegraph (22 March 1913) Standard (20 March 1913) The Sketch (2 April 1913) The Times (20 March 1913) Westminster Gazette (25 March 1913)

Max Weber 173

Exhibitions

Max Weber: Exhibitions in Europe 1906 Salon des Indépendants, The Grand Palais, Paris 1907 Salon des Indépendants, The Grand Palais, Paris Salon d’Automne, The Grand Palais, Paris 1908 Salon d’Automne, The Grand Palais, Paris International Exposition, Beaux-Arts Société, Nice 1913 The Grafton Group Exhibition The Alpine Club Gallery, London 1919 Exhibition of American Art, Luxembourg Museum, Paris 1924 Retrospective: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris 1950 25th Biennale di Venezia, Venice 1954 Sixteen American Watercolour Artists, travelling exhibition in France 1956 Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate, London 1965 Six Decades of American Art, The Leicester Galleries, London 1977 The Modern Spirit: American painting 1908–1935, The Arts Council of Great Britain in association with the Edinburgh Festival

174 Max Weber

Society and the Royal Scottish Academy, [held at the] Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (20 August – 11 September 1977), and the Hayward Gallery, London (28 September – 20 November 1977) 1980 American Prints: 1879-1979, The British Museum, London 1983 Maestri Americani della Collezione ThyssenBornemisza, Vatican Museum. Rome 1984 Maestri Americani della Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Villa Malpensata, Lugano (revision of 1983 exhibition) 1986 Pioniere der Abstrakten Kunst aus der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza, Galerie Gmurzynska. Cologne 1990 Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, Barbican Art Gallery, London 1991 Malerei im Prisma: Freundeskreis Sonia und Robert Delaunay, Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne 2014 Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15, Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Max Weber: Selected Exhibitions in America *Solo exhibitions 1909 *First one-artist exhibition, Julius Haas Gallery, New York 1910 Younger American Painters, Gallery 291, New York 1911 *An Exhibition of Thirty Paintings and Drawings by Mr. Max Weber of New York Gallery 291, New York 1912 *Max Weber, Arlington Gallery (Murray Hill Gallery), New York 1915 The Print Gallery at The Ehrich Galleries, New York *Paintings by Max Weber, Jones Galleries, Baltimore Montross Gallery, New York (and 1923)

1930 *Max Weber: Retrospective Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York *Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington 1931 *Galerie Beaux-Arts, San Francisco 1938 *Dayton Art Institute, Ohio 1941 *Associated American Artists Galleries 1942 *Baltimore Museum of Art *Retrospective: Paul Rosenberg Gallery, New York 1943 *Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh *Paul Rosenberg Gallery, New York (and 1944, 1945, 1947) 1949 *Retrospective: Whitney Museum of American art, New York

1924 *J B Neumann’s New Art Circle, New York (and 1926, 1927, 1930, 1935 and 1937)

1950 Painting in the United States, 17211950, Pomona, California

1925 *J B Neumann’s Print Room

1953 Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1928 Lithographs, Downtown Gallery, New York Forty-first Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago 1929 Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, Museum of Modern Art, New York

1956 *Retrospective: Jewish Museum, New York Pioneers of Modern Art in America, American Federation of Art travelling exhibition 1957 Retrospective: Rose Art Gallery, Brandeis University, Boston

Max Weber 175

1959 Retrospective: Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York Retrospective: Newark Museum, New Jersey 1969 Fifty Years of Painting by Max Weber, Bernard Danenberg Galleries, Inc., New York 1981 Max Weber: Early Works on Paper, 1910–1918, Forum Gallery, New York Modern Masters 1910–1981, Aaron Berman Gallery, New York 1982 Max Weber: An Exhibition of Works, Santa Fe East Gallery, Santa Fe Max Weber: Work in all Media, Forum Gallery, New York Max Weber: American Modern, The Jewish Museum, New York; Travelled to Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska 1983 Max Weber: Pioneer of American Modernism, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita 1984 Max Weber: Lithographs and Woodcuts, Forum Gallery, New York Max Weber: Works on Paper 1908–1956, Pembroke Gallery, Houston 1985 Into the Melting Pot: The Immigration of American Modernism (1909–1929) Muscarelle Museum of Art, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945, The Jewish Museum, New York

176 Max Weber

1986 Max Weber: Cubist Vision, Early and Late, Forum Gallery, New York 1987 Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Max Weber: An Exhibition of Works, Santa Fe East Gallery, Santa Fe 1988 Chicago Collects: Selections from the Collection of Dr Eugene A Solow, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago 1989 Max Weber: Selected Works 1908–1932, Feingarten Galleries, Los Angeles 1990 Max Weber: Selected Works 1908–1932, Meredith Long & Company, Houston Max Weber: Graphic Work, Forum Gallery, New York 1991 Max Weber: The Figure, 1906-1957, Forum Gallery, New York Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910– 1920, High Museum of Art, Atlanta 1992 Painting a place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945 – A Tribute to the Educational Alliance Art School, The Jewish Museum at the New York Historical Society, New York 2000 Max Weber, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York 2013 Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland

Contributors’ Biographies Anna Gruetzner Robins is a Professor in History of Art at the University of Reading.

Her areas of research include the work of Degas, Gwen John, Sickert and Whistler, internationalism, reception theory and the formation of taste, and exhibition histories. She has also curated a number of exhibitions and edited and contributed to the related catalogues including Modern Art in Britain 1910–1914 (Barbican, 1997) and Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec (Tate Britain and the Phillips Collection, Washington, 2005-2006). Her other publications include A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and his Impressionist Followers (Yale University Press, 2007).

Dr. Nancy Ireson is currently the Rothman Family Associate Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her previous posts include Assistant Curator of Post-1800 Paintings / Exhibitions at The National Gallery, London (2006–2008); Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2009); the Schroder Foundation Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery (2010–2011); and Drawings Institute Fellow at the Morgan Library and Museum (2011–12). Her exhibitions have included Beyond the Moulin Rouge: Toulouse Lautrec and Jane Avril (2011). Most recently she has published essays in the exhibitions

178 Max Weber

catalogues Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando at the Morgan Library, and Cézanne and the Past at the Fine Arts Museum, Budapest (both 2012).

Lionel Kelly , now retired, was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Reading, and Director of the degree in American Studies, a degree programme involving the study of American literature, history, politics and film. His publications include essays in books and journals on a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth century British and American poetry and fiction, among them Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, ed., (2000); “Anton Chekov and Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Strategies of Reading”, Modern Humanities Research Association, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 26 (1996): and “Beckett’s Human Wishes” in The ideal core of the onion, eds., John Pilling & Mary Bryden (Reading Beckett Archives: Beckett International Foundation, 1992).

Sarah MacDougall is the Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists, and Head of Collections at Ben Uri. She is co-curator, with Rachel Dickson, of the Whitechapel Boys exhibitions series and the survey exhibitions Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile

in Britain, c. 1933–45 (2009) and Uproar!

The First 50 Years of The London Group (2013). Other recent exhibitions include From Russia to Paris: Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries (2012). She is the author of a biography of Mark Gertler ( John Murray, 2002) and is preparing a catalogue raisonné of his work (Yale University Press).

Dr. Percy North is the leading authority on Max Weber and wrote her doctoral dissertation on his early paintings for the University of Delaware. She has continued her research over four decades, organising several retrospectives of Weber’s work.

Her many publications on Weber include Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910-1920 (1992), Max Weber (2000) and most recently, Max Weber: Bringing Paris to New York (Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2013).

She has published extensively on Coburn, including an essay to accompany a limited edition portfolio of modern platinum/ palladium prints by 31 Studio made from Coburn’s negatives held at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York (2005). She is currently working on a Coburn catalogue and exhibition to open in Madrid at Fundación Mapfre in December 2014, as well as a biography of Coburn.

Pamela G Roberts is an independent researcher, writer and curator and has made a special study of Weber and Coburn. From 1982–2001 she was the Curator of the Royal Photographic Society Collection, Bath, which has a large collection of Coburn material donated by the photographer in 1930 (Collection now at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK). In 2003 she was a Guest Scholar at the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Max Weber 179

Catalogue of works

Dimensions are given in centimetres; height before width 1 Max Weber (1881–1961) Standing Nude 1908 Oil on canvas 53.3 x 33 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber Paris 1908’ Gerald Peters Gallery, New York 2 Ma x Weber (1881–1961) The Apollo in Matisse’s Studio 1908 Oil on canvas 58.4 x 47 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber [19]08’ Gerald Peters Gallery, New York 3 Max Weber (1881–1961) Portrait of Matisse 1908 Graphite on paper 25 x 20.3 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber Paris 1908’ Gerald Peters Gallery, New York 4 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) A Canal, Rotterdam 1908 Photogravure 32 x 41 Signed (verso) ‘1908’ Private collection

180 Max Weber

5 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Regent’s Canal 1904 Photogravure 22 x 16.5 Dated (verso) ‘1911’ Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1909) Private collection 6 C R W Nevinson (1889–1946) The Towpath 1912 Oil on canvas 76.5 x 56 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford 7 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Max Weber 1911 Photogravure 21 x 14.5 Dated (verso) ‘1911’ Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXVII Private collection 8 Max Weber (1881–1961) The Emergence of Order Out of Chaos 1912 Gouache on board 46.99 x 31.12 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ Private collection

9 Max Weber (1881–1961) Two Female Figures 1912 Gouache, pen & ink on card 41.4 x 27.2 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber 1912’ University of Reading Art Collection 10 Max Weber (1881–1961) Landscape I 1912 Gouache on board 27 x 21.3 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection 11 Max Weber (1881–1961) Landscape II 1912 Gouache on board 26.9 x 21.4 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection 12 Max Weber (1881–1961) Landscape III 1912 Oil on canvas 45.7 x 37.8 University of Reading Art Collection

13 Max Weber (1881–1961) Park Scene with Horse and Cart: The Octopus (I) 1910 Watercolour, gouache & pencil 13.9 x 15.5 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1910’ University of Reading Art Collection 14 Max Weber (1881–1961) The Octopus (II) 1910 Watercolour, gouache & pencil 14 x 21.8 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber 1910’ University of Reading Art Collection

17 Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Reiterweg c. 1911 Woodcut on paper 42.3 x 57.5 Victoria and Albert Museum, London

21 Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life no. 2 1912 Oil on canvas 54 x 45 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection

18 Max Weber (1881–1961) The Blue Pitcher 1910 Gouache and pencil on cardboard 100.5 x 42 Signed and dated (upper left) ‘Max Weber 1910’ University of Reading Art Collection

22 Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life no. 9 Oil on canvas 51 x 59 Private collection

15 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) The Octopus 1909 [usually dated 1912] Facsimile: Photograph 28.7 x 36.5 Private collection: 31 Studio, England

19 Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life with Lemon and Blue Vase 1910 Gouache on cardboard 26 x 21 University of Reading Art Collection

16 Max Weber (1881–1961) New York 1912 Chalk, watercolour and gouache on paper 61.5 x 47 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1912’ University of Reading Art Collection

20 Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life with Duck 1912 Oil on canvas 54 x 45 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber [19]12’ University of Reading Art Collection

23 Roger Fry (1866–1934) Still Life with Coffee Pot 1915 Oil, bodycolour and collage on cardboard 50 x 37 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘Roger Fry 1915’ The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London 24 Winifred Gill (1893–1981) Still Life with Glass Jar and Silver Box 1914 Oil on board 48 x 32.8 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London 25 Roger Fry (1866–1934) White Road with Farm c. 1912 Oil on canvas 64.8 x 80.6 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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26 Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882– 1957) The Dancers / Study for Kermesse 1912 Watercolour, bodycolour, black ink and pencil on paper 30.2 x 29.2 Signed (lower right) ‘WL’ Manchester City Galleries 27 Helen Saunders (1885–1963) Cabaret c. 1913–1920 Ink and watercolour on paper 14 x 21 Private collection 28 Helen Saunders (1885–1963) Hammock c. 1913–1920 Ink and watercolour on paper 35.5 x 41 Private collection 29 Duncan Grant (1885–1978) The Blue Sheep 1915 Distemper on paper over wooden frame 162.5 x 68.3 x 2.6 Victoria and Albert Museum, London 30 Frederick Etchells (1886–1973) The Big Girl c. 1912 Tempera on board 74.9 x 62.9 Signed (lower right) ‘FE’ Tate 31 Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) Portrait of Molly MacCarthy c. 1914-15 Oil collage on paper 91.5 x 73.5 S J Keynes

182 Max Weber

32 Max Weber (1881–1961) Brooklyn Bridge 1912 Watercolour and gouache on paper 75 x 90 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1912’ Inscribed with monogram to ‘Alvin from Max 2-3-‘14’ University of Reading Art Collection 33 C R W Nevinson (1889–1946) Le Vieux Port 1915 Oil on canvas 91.5 x 56 Government Art Collection 34 Max Weber (1881–1961) The Dancers 1912 Pastel and chalk 61.8 x 46.8 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1912’ University of Reading Art Collection 35 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Portrait of Donald Gordon 1961 Photograph 20.2 x 15.5 Signed and dated (verso) ‘DJ. Gordon 1961’ Private collection 36 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Vortograph of Ezra Pound 1917 Gelatin silver print 10 x 17 Private collection

37 Max Weber (1881–1961) Portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn 1911 Gouache and pencil on card 62.9 x 47 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘Max Weber 1911’ University of Reading Art Collection 38 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Wapping 1904 Photogravure 25 x 16.5 Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1909) Private collection 39 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) London Bridge 1904 Photogravure 22.7 x 17 Signed (verso) Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1909) Private collection 40 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Waterloo Bridge 1905 Photogravure 21 x 16.5 Illus., London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1909) Private collection

41 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) The Stock Exchange, New York 1905 Photogravure 20 x 14 Dated (verso) ‘1905’ Illus., New York (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s) Private collection Ephemera 42 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Album of 79 Photographs of Max Weber Pictures 1910 Photographic album: 75 leaves on mounted plates, paper & textile 51 x 34.5 x 4.5 University of Reading Special Collections 43 Max Weber (1881–1961) Cubist Poems (London: Elkin Matthews, Cork Street, 1914) Printed book 16.5 x 13.5 x 1 University of Reading Special Collections 44 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) New York (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1910) Printed book: 20 mounted plates, paper & leather 41.5 x 31.5 x 2 University of Reading Special Collections

45 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913) 30 pp. XXIII leaves of mounted portrait plates Printed book in boxed case 31.3 x 24 x 2.5 University of Reading Special Collections 46 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913) 30 pp. XXIII leaves of mounted portrait plates Printed book in boxed case 31.3 x 24 x 2.5 Private collection 47 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922) 33 leaves of mounted portrait plates, paper & textile Printed book 31.3 x 24.3 x 3 University of Reading Special Collections 48 Grafton Group Exhibition catalogue (London: Alpine Club Gallery, 1913) The Book Library, Courtauld Institute of Art 49 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) London (London & New York: Gerald Duckworth & Co / Brentano’s, 1909) Album (20 mounted photogravures) The Guildhall Library, London

50 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) A Portfolio of 16 Photographs (New York: George Eastman House, 1962) Ephemera (Printed portfolio) 37 x 29 x 1.5 Private collection 51 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Autobiography Eds., Helmut and Alison Gernsheim (London: Faber and Faber, 1966; reprinted Dover publications, 1978) Private collection Figures 1 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Nude Study in Blue c. 1899–1900 Oil on canvas 92.1 x 64.8 Tate 2 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Standing Nude (Nu debout) 1907 Oil on canvas 92.1 x 64.8 Tate 3 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Henri Matisse 1913 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXXIII Private collection

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4 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Roger Fry 1913 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913), pl. XXXI Private collection 5 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882– 1966) Max Weber Negative, gelatin on nitrocellulose roll film 12 x 9 George Eastman House Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn 79:4044:0006 6 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Still Life 1908 Oil on artist’s board 20.8 x 27 The Baltimore Museum of Art: Collection of Joy S. Weber 7 Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) Study for View of Malakoff, Outskirts of Paris 1908 Oil on canvas, mounted on board 19.1 x 27.9 The Baltimore Museum of Art: Collection of Joy S. Weber 8 Max Weber (1881–1961) Chinese Restaurant 1915 Oil, charcoal, and collaged paper on linen 101.6 x 122.2 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

184 Max Weber

9 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Three Women 1908 Oil on canvas 200 x 185 The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg 10 Max Weber (1881–1961) Two Women in a Landscape 1911 Oil on canvas 78.10 x 65.40 The Cleveland Museum of Art 11 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Woman with a Hat 1905 Oil on canvas 80.65 x 59.69 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 12 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Blue Still Life (Nature morte bleue) 1907 Oil on canvas 89.5 x 116.8 The Barnes Foundation 13 Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life 1911 Oil on canvas 54.8 x 46 The Art Institute of Chicago 14 Max Weber (1881–1961) Still Life with Chinese Teapot 1925 Oil on canvas 50.8 x 61.3 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

15 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) The House of a Thousand Windows, New York 1912 Photograph 19.7 x 16.5 From A Portfolio of 16 Photographs (New York: George Eastman House, 1962) Private collection 16 Max Weber (1881–1961) New York (The Liberty Tower from the Singer Building) 1912 Oil on canvas 46.35 x 33.34 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 17 Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882– 1957) The Crowd 1915 Oil, paint and graphite on canvas 200.7 x 153.7 Tate 18 Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Study for “Improvisation 28” (second version) 1912 Watercolour 39.5 x 56.1 The Hilda von Rebay Foundation, on extended loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 19 Max Weber (1881–1961) The Geranium 1911 Oil on canvas 101.3 x 81.9 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

20 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) The Red Room (Harmony in Red) 1908 Oil on canvas 180.5 x 221 The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg 21 Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) Design for a Folding Screen: Adam and Eve 1913-14 Oil, gouache & pencil on paper 35.7 x 50.9 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London 22 Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Dance I c. 1909 Oil on canvas 259.7 x 390.1 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 23 Max Weber (1881–1961) Fleeing Mother and Child 1913 Oil on canvas 99.1 x 59.7 New Jersey State Museum 24 Max Weber (1881–1961) New York 1913 Oil on canvas 101 x 81.3 Private collection, formerly Thyssen Bormezia 25 Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949) Rotherhithe c. 1913 Oil on canvas 50.8 x 50.8 cm Private collection

26 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) H. Belloc 1908 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark, pl. XVII (London: Duckworth, 1913) Private collection 27 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) W. B. Yeats 1908 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark, pl. XIX (London: Duckworth, 1913) University of Reading Special Collections

30 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Auguste Rodin 1906 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark, pl. IX (London: Duckworth, 1913) University of Reading Special Collections 31 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Israel Zangwill 1913 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., More Men of Mark, pl. X (London: Duckworth, 1922) University of Reading Special Collections

28 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Frank Brangwyn 1904 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark, pl. IV (London: Duckworth, 1913) Private collection

32 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Ezra Pound 1913 Illus., More Men of Mark, pl. III (London: Duckworth, 1922) University of Reading Special Collections

29 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Henry James 1906 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark, pl. X (London: Duckworth, 1913) Private collection

33 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Jacob Epstein 1914 Photogravure 23 x 17 Illus., More Men of Mark, pl. XII (London: Duckworth, 1922) University of Reading Special Collections

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34 Max Weber (1881–1961) St. Mark’s Venice (Basilica di San Marco) 1907 Watercolour on paper 9.5 x 15.1 University of Reading Art Collection 35 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Fifth Avenue from the St Regis Hotel 1905 Platinum print 40 x 31.6 George Eastman House 36 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) New York from its Pinnacles 1912 Platinum print 42 x 32.3 George Eastman House 37 Clarence H White (1871–1925) Bird’s Eye view of Madison Square, as seen by the workmen on Metropolitan Tower, New York, U.S.A. c. 1908 1 photographic print on stereo card: stereograph Library of Congress Prints and photographs division 38 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Clarence H. White 1912 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., Men of Mark, pl. XXVIII (London: Duckworth, 1913) Private collection

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39 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Augustus John 1914 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., More Men of Mark, pl. XI (London: Duckworth, 1922) University of Reading Special Collections

44 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Wyndham Lewis 1916 Photogravure 23 x 17 Illus., More Men of Mark, pl. XXII (London: Duckworth, 1922) University of Reading Special Collections

40 Augustus John (1878–1961) Welsh Landscape 1910 Oil on board 32 x 39 University of Reading Art Collection

45 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Edward Wadsworth 1916 Photogravure 31 x 23.5 Illus., More Men of Mark, pl. XXIII (London: Duckworth, 1922) University of Reading Special Collections

41 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) The Great Temple, Grand Canyon 1911 From A Portfolio of 16 Photographs (New York: George Eastman House, 1962) Photograph 15.5 x 19.5 Private collection 42 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) Untitled Drawing (Bird) Pen and ink and pencil on paper 13.7 x 21 Private collection 43 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) Untitled Drawing (Horse) Pen and ink and pencil on paper 13.7 x 21 Private collection

46 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Vortograph of Ezra Pound 1917 George Eastman House 47 Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) Vortograph of Ezra Pound 1917 George Eastman House 48 Alvin Langdon Coburn Contents page Illus., Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1913) 49 Alvin Langdon Coburn Contents page Illus., More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth, 1922)

Lenders and credits

Lenders

Wassily Kandinsky

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014

Percy Wyndham Lewis

Book Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

Cats. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 32, 34, 37 University of Reading Art Collection © Estate of Max Weber

Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

© The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/ Bridgeman Art Library

Cat. 15 Private collection: 31 Studio, England

Government Art Collection

Henri Matisse

Guildhall Library, London Manchester City Galleries

©Succession Henri Matisse/ DACS, London 2014

Paul Caffell: 31 Studio, England

C R W Nevinson

Cat. 17 Victoria and Albert Museum, London © Victoria and Albert Museum, London © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

© Courtesy of the artist’s estate/ Bridgeman Art Library

S J Keynes Tate The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London University of Reading Art Collection University of Reading Special Collections

Pablo Picasso © Succession Picasso/ DACS, London 2014

Helen Saunders © Estate of Helen Saunders

Victoria and Albert Museum

Edward Wadsworth

And those private collectors who prefer to remain anonymous

© Estate of Edward Wadsworth.

All rights reserved, DACS 2014

Max Weber

Copyright

© Estate of Max Weber

Vanessa Bell

Ongoing efforts are being made to seek formal permission from the estates of the artists currently untraced. The museum offers its appreciation to all those who have granted permission and apologies to those where we were unsuccessful in making contact.

© Estate of Vanessa Bell, Courtesy of Henrietta Garnett

Frederick Etchells © Estate of Frederick Etchells. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014

Winifred Gill © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Duncan Grant © Estate of Duncan Grant. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014

Augustus John ©The Estate of Augustus John/ The Bridgeman Art Library

188 Max Weber

Picture credits Cats. 1, 2, 3 © 2014 Estate of Max Weber, courtesy Gerald Peters Gallery © Estate of Max Weber Cats. 4, 5, 7, 8, 22, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 50 Private collection Photography: © Justin Piperger Cat. 6 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford © Courtesy of the artist’s estate/ Bridgeman Art Library

Cat. 23 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London Cat. 24 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Cat. 25 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Cat. 26 Manchester City Galleries Manchester Art Gallery, UK © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/ The Bridgeman Art Library Cat. 27, 28 Private collection Photography: © Justin Piperger © Estate of Helen Saunders Cat. 29 Victoria and Albert Museum © Victoria and Albert Museum, London © Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2014 Cat. 30 Tate © Tate, London 2014 © Estate of Frederick Etchells. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014 Cat. 31 S J Keynes © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett Cat. 33 Government Art Collection © Crown Copyright: UK Government Art Collection © Courtesy of the artist’s estate/Bridgeman Art Library/ Government Art Collection (UK) Cats. 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 University of Reading Special Collections © Estate of Max Weber

Figures Figs.1, 2 © Tate, London 2014 ©Succession Henri Matisse/ DACS, London 2014 Figs. 3, 4, 15, 26, 28, 29, 38, 41, 42, 43 Private collection Photography: © Justin Piperger Figs. 6, 7 The Baltimore Museum of Art: Collection of Joy S. Weber © Succession Picasso/ DACS, London 2014 Fig. 8 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Digital Image © Whitney Museum of American Art © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 9 The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum /photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets © Succession Picasso/ DACS, London 2014 Fig. 10 The Cleveland Museum of Art, seventy-fifth anniversary gift in memory of Virginia H. Silver, Abba Hillel Silver, and Daniel Jeremy Silver, from Adele Zeidman Silver, Joan Micklin Silver, and Raphael D. Silver © The Cleveland Museum of Art © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 11 The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bequest of Elise S. Haas © Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ©Succession Henri Matisse/ DACS, London 2014 Fig. 12 The Barnes Foundation Image © 2014 The Barnes Foundation ©Succession Henri Matisse/ DACS, London 2014 Fig. 13 The Art Institute of Chicago Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago © Estate of Max Weber

Fig. 14 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 16 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 17 © Tate, London 2014 © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/ The Bridgeman Art Library Fig. 18 Guggenheim New York, Hilda Rebay Collection on long-term loan to Guggenheim Museum © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014 Fig. 19 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 20 The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum /photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Uri Molodkovets ©Succession Henri Matisse/ DACS, London 2014

Reproduced with permission © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 24 Private collection, Formerly Thyssen Bormezia Courtesy of Phillips Auction House, New York © Estate of Max Weber Fig. 25 Private collection Courtesy of Portland Gallery © Estate of Edward Wadsworth.

All rights reserved, DACS 2014 Figs. 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 39, 44, 45 University of Reading Special Collections Fig. 34 University of Reading Art Collection © Estate of Max Weber Figs. 5, 35, 36, 46, 47 George Eastman House © 2000-2014 George Eastman House Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film Fig. 37 Library of Congress Prints and photographs division Fig. 40 University of Reading Art Collection ©The Estate of Augustus John/ Bridgeman Art Library

Fig. 21 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett Fig. 22 New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence ©Succession Henri Matisse/ DACS, London 2014 Fig. 23 New Jersey State Museum Collection of the New Jersey State Museum Gift of the Friends of the New Jersey State Museum and Purchase FA1974.41

Max Weber 189

Ben Uri – Short history and mission Ben Uri, ‘The Art Museum for Everyone,’ focuses distinctively on Art, Identity and Migration across all migrant communities to London since the turn of the 20th century. It engages the broadest possible audience through its exhibitions and learning programmes.

The museum was founded on 1 July 1915 by the Russian émigré artist Lazar Berson at Gradel’s Restaurant, Whitechapel, in London’s East End. The name, ‘The Jewish National Decorative Art Association (London), “Ben Ouri”’, echoed that of legendary biblical craftsman Bezalel Ben Uri, the creator of the tabernacle in the Temple of Jerusalem.

It also reflects a kinship with the ideals of the famous Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts founded in Jerusalem nine years earlier in 1906.

Ben Uri’s philosophy is based on our conviction that, by fostering easy access to art and creativity at every level, it can add weight to our two guiding principles:‘The Dignity of Difference’ and ‘The Equality of Citizenship’. Ben Uri connects with over 300,000 people a year via its various creative platforms.

The museum positively and imaginatively demonstrates its value as a robust and unique bridge between the cultural, religious, political differences and beliefs of fellow British citizens.

190 Max Weber

Our positioning of migrant artists from different communities in London within the artistic and historical, rather than religious or ethnic, context of the British national heritage is both key and distinctive.

Through the generous support of our ‘Preferred Partner’ Manya Igel Fine Arts, we provide Free Entry to all our exhibitions, removing all barriers to entry and participation.

Ben Uri offers the widest access to all its programming and resources via physical and virtual access including publications, our website and outreach, as follows: The Permanent Collection: Comprising 1,300 works, the collection is dominated by the work of first and second generation émigré artists and supported by a growing group of emerging contemporary artists, who will be a principal attraction in the generations to come. The largest collection of its kind in the world, it can be accessed physically or virtually via continued exhibition, research, conservation and acquisitions.

Temporary Exhibitions: Curating, touring and hosting important internationally focused exhibitions of the widest artistic appeal which, without the museum’s focus, would not be seen in the UK or abroad.

Publications: Commissioning new academic research on artists and their historical context to enhance the museum’s exhibitions and visitor experience.

Library and Archive: A resource dating from the turn of the 20th century, documenting and tracing in parallel the artistic and social development of both Ben Uri and Jewish artists, who were working or exhibiting in Britain, as part of the evolving British historical landscape.

Education and Community Learning: For adults and students through symposia, lectures, curatorial tours and publications.

Schools: Ben Uri’s nationally available ‘Art in the Open’ programme via the ‘National Education Network’ and The London Grid for Learning’ is available on demand to 25,000 schools across the United Kingdom. Focusrelated visits, after-school art clubs, family art days and competitions are also regular features.

Website: Provides an online educational and access tool, to function as a virtual gallery and artists’ reference resource for students, scholars and collectors.

Social Media: Engaging audiences worldwide through Facebook, Twitter and others which will follow.

Future: The strength of the museum’s growing collection and our active engagement with our public – nationally and internationally – reinforce the need for Ben Uri to have a permanent museum and gallery in the heart of Central London alongside this country’s great national institutions. Only then will the museum fulfil its potential and impact the largest audiences from the widest communities from home and abroad.

Artists: Regular artists’ peer group programmes, competitions, guidance and affiliation benefits.

Care in the Community: Pioneering project exploiting the many diverse facets of the visual arts as a component part of addressing the relevant needs of the elderly and in particular those caring for individuals with or themselves living with the early stages of dementia.

Max Weber 191

Ben Uri International Advisory Board UK

Prof. Brian Allen, Hazlitt Group Dr. Shulamith Behr, Courtauld Dr. Richard Cork, Art Historian Gill Hedley, Curator Norman Lebrecht, Writer Prof. Griselda Pollock, Scholar Dr. Andrew Renton, Gallerist Sir Norman Rosenthal, Curator Sir Nicholas Serota Brian Sewell, Critic Dr. Evelyn Silber, Historian Peyton Skipworth, Writer ISRAEL

Prof. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Scholar Shlomit Steinberg, Curator EUROPE

Joel Cahan, Director Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Curator Dr. Leo Pávlat, Director Dr. Danielle Spera, Director Edward van Voolen, Curator USA and CANADA

Prof. Bruce Boucher, Director Tom L Freudenheim, Writer Derek Gillman, Director Prof. Sander Gilman, Scholar Susan T Goodman, Curator Daniel Libeskind, Architect Prof. Jack Lohman, Director

192 Max Weber

Ben Uri Patrons Clare Amsel Annely Juda Fine Art Gretha Arwas Pauline and Daniel Auerbach Esther and Simon Bentley Blick Rothenberg Miriam and Richard Borchard Brandler Galleries, Brentwood Barry Cann Jayne Cohen and Howard Spiegler Marion and David Cohen Sheila and Dennis Cohen Charitable Trust Nikki and Mel Corin Suzanne and Henry Davis Rachel and Mike Dickson Peter Dineley Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly Marion and Manfred Durst The Fidelio Charitable Trust H. W. Fisher and Company Wendy Fisher The Foyle Foundation Patsy and David Franks Franklin Family Barbara and David Glass Sue and David Glasser

Lindy and Geoffrey Goldkorn Goldmark Gallery, Rutland Madelaine and Craig Gottlieb Averil and Irving Grose Tresnia and Gideon Harbour Mym and Lawrence Harding Peter Held Sir Michael and Lady Heller Joan Hurst Beverly and Tony Jackson Laura and Lewis Kruger Manya Igel Fine Arts Jacob Mendelson Scholarship Trust Jewish Memorial Council Sandra and John Joseph Neil Kitchener QC Hannah and David Latchman Agnes and Edward Lee Lady Hannah and Lord Parry Mitchell Robin and Edward Milstein Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco Hanno D Mott Diana and Allan Morgenthau

MutualArt.com Olesia and Leonid Nevzlin Susan and Leo Noé Opera Gallery, London Osborne Samuel Gallery, London Susan and Martin Paisner Shoshana and Benjamin Perl Louis Perlman Lélia Pissarro and David Stern Ingrid and Mike Posen Simon Posen Janis and Barry Prince Reed Smith LLP Ashley Rogoff Anthony Rosenfelder Shoresh Charitable Trust Ann Susman Jonathan Symons Esther and Romie Tager Myra Waiman Judit and George Weisz Eva and David Wertheim Cathy Wills The Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation Alma and Leslie Wolfson Sylvie and Saul Woodrow Matt Yeoman

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Index NOTE: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations; page numbers followed by n refer to information in a note. Artists’ works appear at the end of their index entry. In Coburn’s index entry photographic portraits are filed by the surname of the sitter.

A

Brangwyn, Frank 21, 118, 133

Abrams, Frances see Weber, Frances

Braque, Georges 30

Abstract Expressionism 38

Bruce, Patrick 16, 116

Académie Julian, Paris 30, 114

Brummer, Joseph 44

Adeney, Bernard 64

Burgess, Gelett 120

Adeney, Noel 64 Market screen 85

C Cahill, Holger 37, 48, 147

African art 44, 74, 119

Camden Town Group 69, 152

Alpine Club Gallery see Grafton Group Exhibition

Camera Work (journal) 34, 55, 75, 120

American Artists’ Congress 37–38

Carey, Elizabeth Luther 48

American Museum of Natural History, New York 74

Cézanne, Paul 12, 28, 32, 37, 56, 58–59, 69–70, 81, 114

Antliff, Mark 93

Chiswick Press 135–136

Apollinaire, Guillaume 42, 116, 119, 120

Clarence H White School of Photography 36, 136

Armory Show (New York, 1913) 36, 48, 58–59, 130

Clement, Edith Wightman see Coburn, Edith

Art Students League 36

Coburn, Alvin Langdon background 112 career and reputation as photographer 106–109, 114, 119, 120, 122, 125, 133, 135, 146, 148 copies and collection of Weber’s work 20–21, 62, 81, 92, 96, 97, 119, 125, 126, 130, 133, 136, 162 friendship and collaboration with Weber 20–21, 36, 59, 62, 75, 92–93, 116, 122, 125–126, 130, 133, 135–136, 138, 141, 146–148 and Fry 24, 62, 75, 81, 92, 106, 126, 130, 133, 135 gift of photographs and Weber collection to Reading University 9, 97, 109, 148 influence on European avant-garde 21 London as subject of work 21, 106, 120 and Matisse 133 New York as subject of work 20, 119, 120, 125–126 and Pound 26, 97, 109, 135, 141–142, 146 publication of Weber’s Cubist Poems 109, 135–136, 138, 141, 148

avant-garde in Britain and Europe 21 see also modernism

B Barr, Alfred H 37, 157n Bell, Vanessa 62, 64, 81, 130, 150, 151 Design for a folding screen – Adam and Eve 84, 85 Portrait of Molly MacCarthy 21, 86, 92, 98 Screen: Daffodils 85 Belloc, Hilaire 106, 108, 133 Bernard, Emile 69 Biette, Jean 116, 154n Biolostok, Russia 12, 28, 112 Bloomsbury Group 150 see also Bell; Fry; Grant

194 Max Weber

vortographs 26, 97, 109, 110, 144–145, 146 Weber’s portrait of 115, 125 on Weber’s talent and commitment to art 135, 141 H. Belloc 108, 133 Frank Brangwyn 118, 133 A Canal, Rotterdam 18–19, 21 Jacob Epstein 26, 118, 136, 147 Fifth Avenue from the St. Regis Hotel 131 Roger Fry 21, 24, 130, 133 Portrait of Donald Gordon 107 The Great Temple, Grand Canyon 139 The House of a Thousand Windows, New York 20, 59, 62, 66, 96–97, 126 Henry James 26, 118, 133 Augustus John 136, 137, 147 Wyndham Lewis 142, 143, 147 London (book of photographs) 21, 106, 120 London Bridge 123 Henri Matisse 21, 24, 133 Men of Mark and More Men of Mark (books of photographs) 21, 24–25, 26, 36, 106, 125, 133, 135, 147, 163–165 New York (book of photographs) 92, 120, 122, 162 New York from its Pinnacles 132 The Octopus 20, 59, 65 Ezra Pound 26, 118, 135, 147 Vortographs of Ezra Pound 26, 109, 110, 144–145, 146 Regent’s Canal 21, 23 Auguste Rodin 26, 117, 133 The Stock Exchange, New York 127 Edward Wadsworth 143, 146, 147 Wapping 121 Waterloo Bridge 124 Max Weber (1911) 21, 25, 113, 125 Max Weber (no date) 29, 125 Clarence H. White 26, 134, 147 W.B. Yeats 108, 133 Israel Zangwill 26, 117, 147 Coburn, Edith (née Clement) 125, 148 Coburn, Fannie E 112, 114, 116, 125

cubism 21, 28, 30, 34, 38, 93, 96, 120

D Dana, John Cotton 36 Davies, Arthur B 120 Day, Fred Holland 112 Delaunay, Berthe 41, 116 Delaunay, Robert 41, 116 Denis, Maurice 69 Derain, André 21 Dolmetsch, Arnold 142 Dow, Arthur Wesley 30, 74, 114 Druet, Eugène 32 Dulac, Edmund 142

E Ehrich Galleries, New York 141, 142 Ehrlich, Grace 146 Elkin Mathews, Charles 109, 135 Epstein, Jacob 26, 118, 136, 146, 147 Etchells, Frederick 64, 150 The Big Girl (The Chinese Student) 86, 99 Etchells, Jessie 64, 150

F Fauvism 30 First World War 36–37 Flandrin, Jules 114 Freer, Charles Lang 119 ‘Friday Club, The’ 150, 153 Fry, Roger 150–151, 152, 153 and Coburn 21, 24, 62, 75, 81, 92, 106, 126, 130, 133, 135 Manet and Post-Impressionists exhibition 40, 122 and Rousseau 40–41

Max Weber 195

Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (London, 1912) 58–59, 62, 85, 96, 125, 126, 150 The Frosty Morning 85 Still Life with Coffee Pot 21, 79, 81, 85 White Road with Farm 82–83, 85 see also Grafton Group Exhibition

J Jackson, Holbrook 135, 136 James, Henry 26, 106, 109, 118, 133

Futurism 152–153

John, Augustus Coburn’s photograph 136, 137, 147 Welsh Landscape 136, 137

G

K

Gallery 291, New York 34, 44, 48, 125

Genthe, Arnold 125

Kandinsky, Wassily 21, 152, 155n and Grafton Group Exhibition 64, 152 Klange 64 Reiterweg 64, 68 Study for Improvisation 28 (second version) 64, 68

Getz, Julia (mother) 28, 30, 36

Käsebier, Gertrude 125

Gill, Winifred 64, 81, 85, 151 Still Life with Glass Jar and Silver Box 21, 80, 85

Kauffer, Edward McKnight 26, 146

Gordon, D J 106, 107, 109, 148

L

Gore, Spencer F 64 The Beanfield 81

Laurencin, Marie 119

Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 142, 151 Untitled works 140

Grafton Group Exhibition (London, 1913) 20, 36, 40, 58–97, 130, 133 anonymous presentation of works 64, 69 critical responses 85, 86, 93, 96, 97 Grant, Duncan 62, 64, 81, 130, 150, 151 Construction 86 Screen: Sheep/The Blue Sheep 85–86, 94–95 Green, Christopher 75 Group X 150, 152

H

Knierim, Fräulein von 154n

Laurens, Jean-Paul 30, 114 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 64, 142, 143, 147, 150, 152, 153 The Crowd 20, 67 The Dancers/Study for Kermesse 21, 85, 87 New York 97 Three Women 93 ‘Linked Ring Brotherhood’ (photographic society) 106 London Coburn’s photographs 21, 106, 120 Weber’s visits 16, 20, 58, 119 see also Grafton Group Exhibition

Hamilton, Cuthbert 64 The Guitar Player 86

London Group, The 150, 151, 152, 153

Haviland, Paul Burty 122

Manet and Post-Impressionists exhibition (London, 1910) 40, 122

Huneker, James 48

I International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory, New York, 1913) 36, 48, 58–59, 130 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography (New York, 1910) 34, 122 Italy 116

196 Max Weber

M

Matisse, Henri 58, 70, 81, 106 Coburn’s photograph 21, 24, 133 influence on Bell 92 influence on Grant 85–86 as teacher in Paris 12, 16, 32, 52, 54–55, 56, 74, 116, 147 Blue Still Life (Nature morte bleue) 49, 54

La Coiffure 54 Dance (I) 84, 85–86 Nu au bord de la mer 133 Nude Study in Blue (Académie bleue) 14, 16 The Red Room (Harmony in Red) 70, 70 Standing Nude (Nu debout) 14, 16 Woman with a Hat 49, 52 Metzinger, Jean 116 Meyer, Agnes Ernst 125 modernism and Weber 20–21, 34, 36–37, 69–70, 74–75, 81 see also cubism; Grafton Group Exhibition; Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition

friendship and influence of Rousseau 41– 42, 44, 48–49, 52, 56, 116, 119 Matisse as teacher 12, 16, 32, 52, 54–55, 56, 74, 116, 147 work exhibited in 37, 114, 116 Phillips, Claude 86, 93 Photo-Secession group 34, 106, 114, 122 Picasso, Pablo 28, 30, 36, 40, 70, 86, 116, 119, 125 Le Bouillon Kub 96 Dryad 55 Still Life 31, 32, 42, 74 Three Women 41, 44 Pictorial Photographers of America 146

Moll, Greta 116, 154n

Pollock, Jackson 38

Moll, Oskar 116, 154n

Pound, Ezra 141–142 and Coburn 26, 109, 110, 118, 135, 144–145, 146, 147

Mountsier, Robert 146 Musée Guimet, Paris 81 Museum of Modern Art, New York: Max Weber exhibition (1930) 37

N Native American art 74–75 Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne 64, 93, 152–153 The Towpath 21, 22, 96 Le Vieux Port (The Port) 96, 102 New Society of American Artists in Paris 32 Newton, Eric 147 Nineteen Americans exhibition (New York, 1929) 37 Noguchi, Yone 138 non-Western art 30, 44, 74–75, 81, 119, 154n

Pratt Institute, New York 30, 112 primitive Coburn’s view of Weber 141 and influence of Rousseau 44, 48 see also non-Western art Purrmann, Hans 12, 16, 52, 116

R Reading University see University of Reading Rodin, Auguste 26, 106, 117, 133 Roosevelt, Theodore 26 Rosenshine, Annette 116 Rothko, Mark 38

Oriental art 74, 81

Rousseau, Henri 28, 120, 130 friendship and influence on Weber in Paris 12, 32, 40–42, 44, 48–49, 52, 56, 116, 119 influence in Parisian art world 44 posthumous New York exhibition 34, 44, 48, 122 Study for the view of Malakoff, Outskirts of Paris 31, 44, 48

P

Rutter, Frank 135

Pach, Walter 54

S

Paris 34, 36–38, 114

Sadleir, Michael 152

North, Percy 8

O Olivier, Fernande 119 Omega Workshops/Omega Group 69, 150, 151, 152

Max Weber 197

Sadler, Sir Michael 64, 152

Walkowitz, Abraham 116

St Denis, Ruth 97

Ward, Mlle de 116, 154n

Salmon, André 44

Weber, Frances (née Abrams, wife) 30, 146

Salon exhibitions in Paris 12, 30, 32, 114, 116

Weber, Israel (brother) 28

Saunders, Helen 64, 153 Cabaret 85, 88–89 Hammock 21, 85, 91

Weber, Joy (daughter) 52

Scott, Temple 34 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (London, 1912) 58–59, 62, 85, 96, 125, 126, 133, 150 Second World War 38 Seeley, George H 125 Shaw, George Bernard 62 Shawn, Ted 97 Société Anonyme 37 Spain 30 Stein, Gertrude 12, 32, 54, 74, 133 Stein, Leo 12, 16, 30, 32, 52, 54, 69, 74, 116 Stein, Michael 54 Stein, Sarah 16, 54, 116 Stieglitz, Alfred 34, 44, 48, 106, 114, 119, 120, 122, 125 Struss, Karl 125

T Thornton, Alfred 64, 93 Twain, Mark 26

U University of Reading collection 8, 9, 20, 97, 106–109, 148, 166–169

V Venice Biennale (1950) 38 Vorticist Group 69, 96, 141–142, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158n

W Wadsworth, Edward 64, 93, 96, 142, 147 Coburn’s photograph 143, 146, 147 Rotherhithe 96, 100

198 Max Weber

Weber, Max art training in New York and Paris 12, 16, 30, 32, 52, 54–55, 56, 74, 112, 114, 116 background and family 28, 30, 37, 112 city as subject of work 20, 34, 36, 92–93 Coburn’s photographs 21, 25, 29, 106, 113, 125 collection of art from Paris 32, 42, 116 committees and institutional positions 37–39, 58, 59 ‘Crystal Figures’ pictures 34, 86, 97, 125 cubism 21, 28, 34, 38, 93, 120 death 148 development of individual style 55–56 early exhibitions and success in New York 32, 34, 36–37, 120, 125 exhibition in London see Grafton Group Exhibition exhibition in Paris see under Paris exhibitions listing 174–176 experiments with colour 69–70, 74, 75, 81 friendships see Coburn; Rousseau interest in non-European art 30, 44, 74–75, 81, 119, 154n International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography catalogue design 122 Jewish-American identity 12, 28, 30, 37 in London 16, 20, 58, 119 modernism and development of still lifes 69–70, 74–75, 81, 85 New York as subject of work 20, 59, 62, 64, 92–93, 125–126 in Paris see Paris poetry 75, 92, 109, 135–136, 136, 138, 141, 147, 162 press interest and reputation 38 prizes and awards 37 publishing career 34 religious imagery 28, 30, 37 solo exhibitions and retrospectives 37, 38, 142 teaching posts 30, 36, 112 Apollo in Matisse’s Studio 13, 16

The Blue Pitcher 21, 62, 69–70, 72, 74 Brooklyn Bridge 21, 92, 101, 136 ‘Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists’ (article) 55, 120 Chinese Restaurant 35, 142 Congo Statuette 74 Cubist Poems (poetry) 109, 135– 136, 138, 141, 148, 162 The Dancers 21, 62, 85, 97, 104, 146 The Emergence of Order out of Chaos 33 Essays on Art 36 ‘The Filling of Space’ (article) 36, 136 Fleeing Mother and Child (The Mother) 64, 86, 90, 92, 96, 130, 142 ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’ (article) 92, 120, 141 The Geranium (Two Seated Figures) 64, 71, 86, 96, 133, 142 Interior with Figure 64, 96, 133, 142 Landscape (I) 44, 45 Landscape (II) 44, 46 Landscape (III) 44, 47 Mexican Statuette 74–75 New York (1912) 62, 67 New York (1913) 64, 92, 93, 96, 103, 130, 142 New York (The Liberty Tower from the Singer Building) 20, 59, 62, 63, 126 Octopus (II) 20, 59, 61 ‘On Brooklyn Bridge’ (poem) 92, 136, 138 Panel Decoration 92, 133, 142 Park Scene with Horse and Cart: The Octopus (I) 20, 59, 60 Portrait of Alvin Langdon Coburn 115, 125 Portrait of Matisse 16, 17 ‘Primitives: Poetry and Woodcuts’ 147 St. Mark’s Venice (Basilica di San Marco) 128–129 Spring Song (Burlesque, no. 1) 34, 120 Standing Nude 15, 16, 55 Still Life 51, 55 Still Life No.2 74, 75, 78, 81, 136 Still Life No.9 21, 74, 77, 81, 85, 133 Still Life with Chinese Teapot 53, 56 Still Life with Duck 74, 75, 76, 81, 133, 141 Still Life with Lemon and Blue Vase 70, 73, 74, 133 The Sugar Bowl 37 ‘To Xochipilli, Lord of Flowers’ (poem) 75

Two Female Figures 43, 44, 85 Two Women in a Landscape 44, 50 Weber, Morris (father) 28, 30, 36 Wells, H G 92, 106, 122 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 119, 126 The Thames Set 93, 96 White, Clarence Hudson 26, 36, 122, 125, 134, 136, 147 Bird’s-Eye view of Madison Square 134 Williamsburg, Brooklyn 12, 37, 112 World’s Fair (New York, 1939) 38 Wyndham Lewis, Percy see Lewis, Percy Wyndham

Y Yeats, W B 106, 108, 133 Younger American Painters exhibition (New York, 1910) 34, 120

Z Zangwill, Israel 26, 117, 147 Zayas, Marius de 55, 141

Max Weber 199

Edited by Sarah MacDougall

MAX WEBER: AN AMERICAN CUBIST IN PARIS AND LONDON, 1905–15

Russian-born American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) is widely recognized for introducing Cubism to New York. Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905–15 is the first publication to examine his career and influence within a European rather than an American context. It accompanies the first major museum exhibition of Weber’s work in the UK at Ben Uri showcasing the University of Reading’s rare collection of 14 works (c. 1910–1912), formed by Weber’s champion in England, American émigré photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966). Following his formative years in Paris (1905–08), as a founding member of Matisse’s art class, Weber played a crucial role in the significant cross-cultural dialogue between Paris and London. He was included in Roger Fry’s inaugural Grafton Group Exhibition in 1913 exhibiting alongside artists including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Percy Wyndham Lewis, C R W Nevinson, Helen Saunders and Wassily Kandinsky.

Max Weber An American Cubist in Paris and London 1905–15