What sounded at first like an ordinary famous-artist retrospective at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery turned out to be something vastly more exciting. The current show of the work of Max Weber (see color) consists of gouaches, watercolors, pastels and collages that have never been displayed before because until lately no one knew they existed. Weber's widow found them in a folder that she thought contained only blank paper. They cover almost every phase of Weber's career.
Weber was one of those early 20th century American originals whose reception ("Atrocities"-New York Globe; "Such grotesquerie"-Evening World) must have amused him to recall before he died at 80 in 1961. Everything seemed to fascinate him-still lifes, landscapes, the construction of the human figure, cubist and abstract impressions of the rhythms of great cities. But subject matter was, never foremost in his mind. To a large extent; he treated each painting like a piece of architecture: building with colors as well as with forms. His distortions-the "grotesquerie" that his early critics denounced-were a deliberate effort to achieve a balance of space relations.
Harmonious Spacing. Weber's feeling for design was brought to bloom by Arthur Wesley Dow, his teacher at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Dow was a student of primitive and oriental art, and saw in these forms what he felt was the key to all art-harmonious spacing. By the time Weber sailed for France in 1905, his mind was ready, not only for the experiments that he was to encounter, but also for the timeless lessons to be learned from the masterpieces in Europe's museums. He filled notebook after notebook with sketches of ancient art, of works by Goya and El Greco, of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca.
He was, as he said, on a "search for fundamentals" from every time and every place.
He was "gripped" by Cezanne's efforts to lay bare the bones of nature; he studied under Matisse, shared Picasso's fascination with African sculpture, was enchanted by Henri Rousseau, in whom he saw not merely a quaint primitive but a master of color and harmony. He became Rousseau's close friend and for years afterward told affectionate anecdotes about him. Of a Cezanne painting, Rousseau once exclaimed, "My, that's a good picture! If only I could have it at home for a while, I could finish it up nicely." When Weber told Rousseau that he worked rather like Giotto, Rousseau said, "Who is Giotto?"