Early years Born in the Polish city of
Białystok, then part of the
Russian Empire, Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in
Brooklyn,
New York City, with his
Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under
Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a fortunate early influence on Weber as he was an "enlightened and vital teacher" in a time of conservative art instruction, a man who was interested in new approaches to creating art. Dow had met
Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, was a devoted student of
Japanese art, and he defended the advanced
modernist painting and sculpture he saw at the
Armory Show in New York in 1913. In 1905, after teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where he studied at the
Académie Julian in
Paris and acquainted himself with the work of such modernists as
Henri Rousseau (who became a good friend),
Henri Matisse,
Pablo Picasso, and other members of the
School of Paris. His friends among fellow Americans included some equally adventurous young painters, such as
Abraham Walkowitz,
H. Lyman Saÿen, and
Patrick Henry Bruce. Avant-garde France in the years immediately before World War I was fertile and welcoming territory for Weber, then in his early twenties. He arrived in Paris in time to see a major Cézanne exhibition, meet the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire, frequent
Gertrude Stein's salon, and enroll in classes in Matisse's private "Academie." Rousseau gave him some of his works; others, Weber purchased. He was responsible for Rousseau's first exhibition in the US.
America In 1909 he returned to New York and helped to introduce
Cubism to America. He is now considered one of the most significant early American Cubists, but the reception his work received in New York at the time was profoundly discouraging. Critical response to his paintings in a 1911 show at the
291 gallery, run by
Alfred Stieglitz, was an occasion for "one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America." The reviews were "of an almost hysterical violence." He was attacked for his "brutal, vulgar, and unnecessary art license." Even a critic who usually tried to be sympathetic to new art,
James Gibbons Huneker, protested that the artist's clever technique had left viewers with no real picture and made use of the adage, "The operation was successful, but the patient died." As art historian
Sam Hunter wrote, "Weber's wistful, tentative Cubism provided the philistine press with their first solid target prior to the Armory Show." Weber was sustained by the respect of some eminent peers, such as photographers
Alvin Langdon Coburn and
Clarence White, and museum director
John Cotton Dana, who saw to it that Weber was the subject of a one-man exhibition at the
Newark Museum in 1913, the first modernist exhibition in an American museum. For a few years, Weber enjoyed a productive if rocky relationship with Stieglitz, and he published two essays in Stieglitz's journal
Camera Work. (He also wrote Cubist poems and published a book,
Essays on Art, in 1916.) So poor was Weber in these years that he camped out for some weeks in Stieglitz's gallery. Weber was also closely acquainted with
Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and
Thomas Furlong, whom he met at the
Art Students League, where he taught from 1919 to 1921 and 1926 to 1927. Weber evidently was a prickly personality—even with his allies. He and Stieglitz had a falling-out, and Weber was not represented in the famous
Armory Show because his friend,
Arthur B. Davies, one of the show's organizers, had only allotted him space for two paintings. In a fit of pique at Davies, he withdrew entirely from the exhibition. Other artists in the Stieglitz circle kept their distance, especially after Weber told people that there were only three indisputably great modern painters: Cézanne, Rousseau, and himself. "Almost without exception, they found him obnoxious: opinionated, rude, intolerant."
Success In time, Weber's work found more adherents, including
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the
Museum of Modern Art. In 1930, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work, the first solo exhibition at that museum of an American artist. He was praised as a "pioneer of modern art in America" in a 1945
Life magazine article. In 1948,
Look magazine reported on a survey among art experts to determine the greatest living American artists; Weber was rated second, behind only
John Marin. He was the subject of a major traveling retrospective in 1949. He became more popular in the 1940s and 1950s for his figurative work, often
expressionist renderings of Jewish families, rabbis, and Talmudic scholars, than for the early modernist work he had abandoned circa 1920 and on which his current reputation is founded. Not everyone believed that Weber fulfilled his early potential as he became a more representational and expressionist painter post-World War I. Critic Hilton Kramer wrote of him that, in light of the remarkable beginning of his career, "Weber proved instead to be one of the great disappointments of twentieth-century American art." Others however, because of his bold "Cubist decade," hold him in the same high regard as other native modernists like
John Marin,
Arthur Dove,
Marsden Hartley, and
Charles Demuth. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the
Jewish Museum in 1982. ==Personal life and demise==