Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris & London, Ben Uri

Max Weber is not an artist well known in Britain (he may suffer from his German sociologist namesake’s reputation) and this exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery will address that serious oversight. 

Max Weber was born in Russia, studied under Matisse in Paris and introduced Cubism to New York. This exhibition looks at Weber’s personal and cultural interactions with New York, Paris and London.

New York

It was unusual for Matisse to teach in his studios, and only a handful of fortunate American émigrés were admitted. Weber’s masterpiece The Apollo in Matisse’s Studio (1908) depicts, a giant plasterwork model of a 5th century Greek Apollo from which the class studied. Elsewhere upstairs, expect a scholarly look at Weber’s time under Matisse, including his very unencumbered pencil portrait of the French painter, and a fascination with the modern city epitomised by New York. 

London

Downstairs, London will be lively. Though Weber did not paint a great deal in this city, his paintings were promoted here by photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. The influential critic Roger Fry was impressed by the aspiring artist and Weber’s influence can even be seen in an unusually cubistic Vanessa Bell portrait of Molly McCarthy. To contextualise the London life of Weber’s picturesThe Towpath by C R W Nevinson (1912) has been borrowed from Oxford’s Ashmolean. As a kind of modern-but-Victorian tableau it shows an urban romance next to a canal at night. Another highlight is Coburn’s foggy photograph of the rigging of a ship and the Thames. Here, to borrow the words of Whistler, ‘the tall chimneys become campanile – and the warehouses are palaces in the night.’

To Close

The final room is the liveliest. The dance was often depicted by Modernist painters as a signifier of free expressivity. Percy Wyndham Lewis’s 1912 Study for Kermesse (the Kermesse masterpiece is sadly now lost) choreographs its figures into a fantastic rhythm. Borrowed from the Victoria & Albert Museum, a red screen decorated with grazing blue sheep is Duncan Grant’s characteristically joyful foray into the genre, and some anthropomorphised cellos by Helen Saunders (it’s nice to see two women exhibited) are a superb emblem of the importance of concepts of music to modern art.