(2 of 2)
Distortion Is Poetic. Weber had some fairly sympathetic reviews of Paris shows, and that made his reception in the U.S. all the more bitter. Yet Manhattan still cast as strong a spell over him as it did when he first arrived as an immigrant from Russia at the age of ten. He put its terminals and bridges in exploding abstractions-and could give the same sense of excitement to a still life of fruit or a landscape of a road lined with trees. If his female figures seemed heavy, it was because he was concerned with the body as a solid, three-dimensional object in a particular setting. Abstractions, landscapes, the figure-every painting had its internal architecture. Gradually the critics came round to seeing Weber not only as a brilliant eclectic but also as a pioneer whose work, as Critic Lloyd Goodrich said in 1949, "places him among the pioneers of abstract art not only in America but anywhere." In 1930, when the new Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan gave him a large retrospective show, he was the first living American to be so honored.
For all his preoccupation with spatial harmony and with the distortions he used to achieve it, there was nothing cold or seemingly calculated about Weber's art. "Distortion should be born of a poetic impulse," he said. His war scenes, his paintings of workers, the face of an old rabbi could be cries of pain-as much a "search for fundamentals" as the magic key to design. "Art is the real history of nations," Weber said. "Their politics, their wars, their commerce are but records, as the calendar or the clock is not time itself."