A Female Connection : Diversity of ‘Women’ Traces a Half-Century of Max Weber’s Work

“When you are in the gallery looking at the work, you don’t have a sense of being surrounded by 62 women,” dealer Jack Rutberg says of “Max Weber’s Women,” an exhibition in his West Hollywood gallery. “The variety and quality of the art speaks for itself.”

His point is well-taken. Women are the subjects of all 62 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by the American modernist, but they appear in so many different styles, attitudes and materials that they are absorbed into the exhibition’s ever-changing artistic landscape.

Visitors see a towering, statuesque nude drawn in charcoal and a realistic oil painting of a pensive young model who swishes a green garment in a wash basin while sitting on a bed covered with a red blanket. Various other oils explore Expressionistic and abstract approaches to the female figure. In addition, there are delicate watercolor portraits, spare ink drawings and a painted bronze “Figure in Rotation” that reduces the female form to a twisted stack of chunky volumes, topped by a head with piercing eyes.

Why so many different treatments of the same subject matter? They represent more than a half-century’s work, from 1905-1959, by an artist who moved from academic realism to adventurous abstraction and Expressionism, then to visual commentaries on the human condition. But his seeming fixation on women also reflects “a search for an ideal classicized female type placed in imaginary settings to give universal and timeless context,” according to catalog essayist Percy North. Throughout his career, Weber looked for “the archetypal female image, a powerful pervasive presence, embodying the ideals of creation as the most important and most basic element of life,” she writes.

The meaning of women in Weber’s art is open to interpretation, of course, but there’s no denying their omnipresence. Although he created cityscapes, still lifes and religious paintings based on Judaic themes, his idealization of women was among his “sacred canons,” North writes, and “images of women form a major portion of his total creative output.”

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Rutberg’s exhibition is a greatly enlarged version of a March presentation at the Forum Gallery in New York, but it was initially inspired by an entirely different show, “Max Weber: The Cubist Decade 1910-1920,” which was curated by North and originated in 1992 at the High Museum in Atlanta. After stopping at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.; and the Brooklyn Museum, the show was scheduled to conclude in 1993 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but it was canceled because of financial cutbacks during a countywide budget crisis.

Disappointed that the Cubist exhibition would not be seen on the West Coast, representatives of the Weber estate contacted Rutberg to see if he could take it. The notion wasn’t feasible because a change of venue would have entailed extensive negotiations with lenders, and commercial gallery facilities do not measure up to museum standards.

“The logistics were too difficult, but it opened a dialogue for me to do a Weber exhibition,” Rutberg says. “When I decided to pursue it, it made sense to offer a broader view than the Cubist era.” Concentrating on images of women was a logical way to provide a thread of continuity in an extensive survey. “If you can be all-encompassing in one genre, we have done that,” he says. The majority of works come from the Weber estate; others were drawn from Rutberg’s inventory and private collections.

Weber, who was born in Bialystok, Russia, in 1881, the son of a tailor, emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 10. They settled in Brooklyn, where Weber studied at the Pratt Institute with Arthur Wesley Dow, a progressive art educator. After teaching for four years and saving his money, Weber spent three years in Paris, from 1905-8, when he worked with Jean-Paul Laurens, met Henri Matisse, saw a seminal exhibition of Paul Cezanne’s work, became a close friend of Henri Rousseau and developed his own modern idiom. Returning to New York, he showed his avant-garde work in prestigious galleries but attracted harsh criticism from reviewers who found his art ugly and incomprehensible.

Although prominent and controversial in his day, Weber has faded so far into the background that many people who follow the art scene barely know his work, much less that he was a pioneering modernist. “He was a cantankerous guy, not lacking in opinions,” Rutberg says, referring to Weber’s refusal to participate in the landmark Armory Show in 1913 because he was only invited to exhibit two paintings.

“He had great success. But he was more resentful of what he didn’t get than pleased with his achievements, so his personality may have played into [his relative obscurity]. But my theory is, he was doing the right thing at the right time in the wrong place. He achieved recognition in Paris, but when he returned to New York the emphasis was on [the realism of] The Eight and the Ashcan School. By the time America had evolved to modernism, it was more exotic for Americans to look eastward to Europe.”

* “Max Weber’s Women,” Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-5222. Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends June 29.