47. Max Weber
(1881-1961)
Mountain Scene with a Lake

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Weber: Mountain Scene

Mountain Scene with a Lake

Original drawing in brush and black ink on brown paper, 1910, 146 x 115 mm. The drawing has been laid down to another sheet and signed and dated in pencil on the support sheet. Weber was born in Bialystok, then part of the Russian pale of settlement, where Jews were allowed to live, and immigrated to America with his parents at the age of ten. He studied first at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow, but later in Paris at Matisse’s School of Paris. He then returned to New York in 1909 and brought Cubism with him. This, then, in its small way, is a Cubist drawing, although one can also see it, on the one hand, as a rough preliminary sketch for a near-conventional landscape and, on the other, as a precursor of Abstract Expressionism. Such are the ambiguities of art. Weber was an immense influence in the avant-garde of American art – in oils, watercolors, prints and sculpture – but after 1920 he tended toward more realistic representations (still modern in style) and eventually, rediscovering his roots, took up Jewish themes.