Max Weber: Art and Life Are Not Apart

Max Weber: Art and Life Are Not Apart presents 26 paintings and works on paper by Max Weber directly from the Max Weber Foundation spanning the full scope of the artist's career-long still life practice from 1907 to 1955. Informed by Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, Weber's still lifes occupy a pivotal position between the European avant-garde and American modernism. The exhibition, which encompasses a variety of materials including oil, gold leaf collage, pastel, gouache, and watercolor, investigates Weber’s important contributions and reactions to a range of twentieth-century movements such as Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism.

In 1914, Weber claimed that “art and life are not apart,” positioning himself within a modernist tradition of painting quotidian life from lively Impressionist café scenes to hard-edge Pop depictions of mass-produced items. Weber distinguished himself through his deep belief that objects exist as symbols of culture and civilization and should be measured by their usefulness, spirituality, and intellect. According to Weber, culture is realized via the interaction between viewer and object. “Culture will come only when every man will know how to address himself to the inanimate simple things of life,” Weber wrote in his 1916 Essays on Art. “A pot, a cup, a piece of calico, a chair, a mantle, a frame, the binding of a book, the trimming of a dress…these we live with. Culture will come when people touch things with love and see them with a penetrating eye.” During the first half of the twentieth century, when many thinkers began to question the relationship between objects, images, and their meanings following the development of Saussurean semiotics, Weber remained committed to the concrete and tangible presence of objects rooted in the process of making. He believed the viewer could embody, through looking, the qualities of “proportion, harmony, balance, symmetry, in simple objects and works of art.”