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Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art

1985

Cubism in America

Donald Bartlett Doe Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

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Doe, Donald Bartlett, "Cubism in America" (1985). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 19. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/19

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CUBISM IN SHELDON MEMORIAL ART GALLERY AMERICA Resource/Reservoir is part of Sheldon's on-going Resource Exhibition Series. Resource/Reservoir explores various aspects of the Gallery's permanent collection. The Resource Series is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of the Gallery's general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency that offers general operating support to the nation's museums.

Henry Fitch Taylor Cubis t Still Life, c. 19 14, oil on canvas Cubism in America

.".. As a style, Cubism constitutes the single effort which began in 1907. Their develop­ most important revolution in the history of ment of what came to be called Cubism­ art since the second and third decades of by a hostile critic who took the word from a the 15th century and the beginnings of the skeptical Matisse-can, in very reduced Renaissance. outline, be summarized as follows: A number of circumstances augered in 1908-09: A Cezannesque period, in which favor of the emergence of Cubism and , with both artists produced strongly geometric it, the break with the tradition of depicting a landscapes. convincing illusion of real space within the 1910-12: the Analytic phase, in which both picture frame. Among all of the factors, how­ sought to present reality in a manner unique ever, the most important is the art of Paul to painting. They presented various views Cezanne, who struggled with one of the great of an object which would ordinarily be seen challenges intrinsic to art: how to represent in sequence-its front, side, and back-si­ a three dimensional world on a two dimen­ multaneously. sional surface while sacrificing neither so­ 1912-14: Synthetic cubism, so named by lidity nor flatness. Juan Gris, in which both artists exploited the Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso took resources of their recent invention, the col­ Volume 1 up this challenge in a joined and sustained lage. Number 1 Among them are such otherwise dissimilar artists as Morton Schamberg and Thomas Cubism Hart Benton. John Marin zigzagged his often delicate watercolors with "force lines" taken Synthetic Cubism not only synthesized from Futurism, giving his closely observed "real" materials with painted/constructed street scenes and landscapes a com­ reality, but also synthesized earlier discov­ pressed, geometric structure. eries, permitting objects to seem tangible The post-war development of Cubism in while forms and surfaces were shuffled in America does not follow a single course space as thin as gossamer. either. A number of the early modernists, World War I ended the joint investigations working in a conservative artistic milieu and of Picasso and Braque and dispersed the finding little support for an art perceived as international community of artists who had European, responded to the general isola­ gathered in Paris. Excepting Juan Gris and tionist spirit with increasingly conservative Ferdinand Leger, all of these artists, includ­ imagery. Thomas Hart Benton's rather ab­ ing the American artists, were on-lookers. rupt dismissal of modernism for scenes of Few grasped all of the issues and formal Americana is perhaps only the most famous ideas with which Braque and Picasso ex­ reversal. Several artists, most notably perimented. Most seized upon an aspect of Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth-and the style and wedded it to theories of their Georgia O'Keeffe in a number of paintings own, sometimes political, sometimes purely of Lake George barns and New York sky­ aesthetic. scrapers-produced a uniquely American Those theories produced Futurism in Italy, style which came to be called Precision ism. Vorticism in Britain, Constructivism and Su­ In these paintings, the inherent geometry of prematism in the Soviet Union, De Stijl in colonial architecture or railyards and fac­ Holland. Orphism and Purism were gener­ tories, or steamships and locomotives, were ated by French painters while two Ameri­ pared of detail and awarded a shimmering cans in Paris, Morgan Russell and Stanton kind of clarity in sunlight often given the geo­ MacDonald-Wright developed their concept metric character of Cubist planes. of Synchronism. The work of some of these Finally, there are a small number of Amer­ moved toward pure abstraction, the work of ican painters who produced cubist works others returned to a more traditional, often which are to be found nowhere else. In the figurative art. work of Ralston Crawford, a scene from a Fundamental to nearly all, however, was New Orleans dockside (for instance) is han­ the use of the facets of Analytic Cubism. dled in a manner not found in Futurism or Fractured planes served to generate com­ Precisionism: the shapes of freight con­ plex, geometric images which frequently tainers and equipment are transformed into were held to be a metaphor for the mech­ a static arrangement of geometric shapes anized and shattered quality of modern in­ which hover, like elements of a Braque col­ dustrialized experience. lage, in an airless, compressed space. Stuart To many parts of this complicated avant­ Davis seized frequently upon billboards and garde profusion of styles the American artist commercial packaging to create images in could and did respond. Generally, however, which sometimes overlapping, sometimes progressive American painters did not, col­ discontinuous planes of color and letter lectively, generate a national style as can shapes pulse across the surface of the can­ be discovered in Russia or Holland. Rather, vas in rhythms which suggest the synco­ Cubism in America tends to reflect the di­ pation of American jazz. In space which was versity of styles produced internationally. also airless and flattened to ambiguous but In Joseph Stella's Cubist paintings of narrow confines, Patrick Henry Bruce pre­ Manhattan, Coney Island, and the Brooklyn sented arrangements of inherently geomet­ Bridge, for example, the small planes of ric objects given three-dimensional solidity. shimmering color and the use of line cele­ As with Davis and Crawford, Bruce began brate mechanized and electrified New York with perceived reality, but did not fracture in a manner that clearly reflects the artist's it into juxtaposed facets rendered as geo­ response to the Futurists, who also arranged metric planes. He, like the other two, pre­ the fractured planes of Cubism to produce served a fundamental aspect of the real dynamic images of speeding machinery and things before him-their actual shape-while the rise of modern cities. Max Weber's Cub­ he also transformed those things into an ab­ ism also reflects the influence of Futurism in stracted image that could only exist in the his concentration on the skyscrapers and space of the painted surface. hurry of New York, but his work is often mon­ It is this creation of an actuality that can ochromatic and the space virtually flat, in only exist in a work of art that is the center close accord with Picasso's Analytic Cubist of the Cubist revolution. Cubism in America, canvases of c. 1911. Marsden Hartley, pro­ although originally the source of bafflement foundly influenced by Weber, also produced and the target of derision, proved strong works of analytic cubism, but in his work enough to endure and to provide the foun­ forms are stable and solidly realized in the dation for a continuing tradition of abstract manner of Cezanne's still lifes of c. 1890- art. 1900. Many Americans, in addition to Rus­ Donald Bartlett Doe sell and MacDonald-Wright, fused Neo­ Impressionist color with Cubist geometry. Patrick Henry Bruce

Much about the life of Patrick Henry Bruce remains unknown. Family records show that the great-great-great-grandson of Patrick Henry was born on March 21 , 1881 , but the artist's birth certificate bears the date of March 25. Bruce, as a man , proved aloof and i[1creasingly reclusive as he aged. He communicated nothing about his own art and actually destroyed a major part of his own work. What is known, however, suggests an ex­ traordinary if unhappy life. He was born into an aristrocratic Virginia family. Of their vast holdings-the family had once owned an estate of 5,000 acres-little remained but patrician attitudes. In spite of financial ur­ gancy, Bruce evinced no desire to enter business but very considerable interest in art. By 1902, following several years of classes at the Richmond Art Club, he was in New York, studying under the charismatic teachers Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. Two years later, Bruce was in Paris. Except for a brief return in the summer of 1905, to settle his father's estate and marry another Henri student, Helen Francis Kib­ bery, Bruce was to spend nearly all of the Patrick Henry Bruce Forms, c. 19 18-19, oil on canvas rest of his life in France. He became a Francophile, refusing to Apollinaire's favorable critical attitude to­ leave during the war years, living at the very ward his work. In his last years, he seems center of the Parisian avant-garde, becom­ to have seen hardly anyone. Twice annually, ing a highly respected connoisseur and a long and awkward visits by Henri Roche were dealer in antiques. Until the depths of the an exception. Roche championed his work Depression, he kept a servant, dressed in and to him Bruce gave all 21 of his surviving hand-tailored elegance, and kept company geometric stililifes in 1933. It is one of those with the rich and fashionable of Parisian so­ that is now in the Sheldon's collection. ciety. Bruce's development as an artist, which It was the Depression which proved dis­ culminated in these highly original works, asterous. The market for antiques vanished. spanned a decade and a half. At first, his Poverty forced him from Versailles to his sis­ work reflected the continuing influence of ter's home in New York. For this artist of re­ his American teachers and of James McNeill fined taste but few expectations, life must Whistler. By the Salon d'Automme of 1907, have offered little. On November 12, 1936, however, his work was beginning to reveal a few months after arriving in the United the influence of contemporary art. Meeting States, he committed suicide. Matisse in 1908 completed the transfor­ In Paris , however, he had known every­ mation of his art. The French master held one. By 1906, he and his wife were close to that Cezanne was "the father of us all ," and the Steins; Gertrude, Sara, and Leo. (His Bruce responded to this view with a long letters to them often beg~ intimately with series of Cezannesque still lifes. Dear Girls or Dear Family). By 1908, he was Although his commitment to the still life in close contact with his teacher, Henri Ma­ would be renewed , upon meeting the De­ tisse, taking an apartment above the Ma­ launay's in 1912 this chapter in his career tisse school of art and residence at 33 came to a close. Like many others, Bruce Boulvard des Invalides. For an extended pe­ found in their art a liberation from natural riod, Bruce and his wife lived entwined lives color. Their Orphist works, which fused flat , with Sonia and Robert Delaunay. He came planar forms of Cubism with Fauve color, to know Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. soon displaced the influence of Matisse. Katherine Dreier bought several of his Orph­ At the Salon des Independants of 1913, ist paintings, which are today among the he showed with Delaunay and Francis Pi­ major examples of American abstraction in cabia, receiving good reviews from Guil­ the collection of the Societe Anonyme at Yale . laume Apollinaire and the critic and poet, In 1925, at the "L'Art d'Aujourd hui " exhi­ Andre Salmon. By 1916, his Orphist ab­ bition, his work was viewed as Surreal, per­ stractions had taken on a new geometric haps because of his association with the stability. In these works, it appears that the Surrealists, especially the poet, Tristan Tzara. influence of Picabia and perhaps Duchamp Undoubtedly urbane, notably intelligent, is at work. So too may be the work of British he still managed to alienate others. An es­ Vorticists, whose version of Cubism was re­ pecially abrupt letter reversed Guillaume produced in the magazine, Blast, which cir- 3 culated in Paris. Photographs by Man Ray from Stalybridge, England seventeen years 1909, he took these landscapes to Boston, and Constantin Brancusi have marked af­ earlier, his youth was marked by poverty, showing them to Maurice and Charles Pren­ finities with the elegant compositions and loneliness, and a pervasive sense of dispair. Selected Cubist paintings and sculpture from the collections of dergast. Impressed, Maurice wrote to fellow precision of shapes that is found in Bruce's His mother died when he was eight. Four Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln members of The Eight, William Glackens and work after 1917. Even Leo Stein's profound years later, he was passed into the care of Robert Henri. Glackens, in turn , provided his admiration of Quattrocento Italian painting, an older sister when his father remarried studio for an exhibition of these Post­ especially the powerfully realized still lifes and moved to Cleveland. At 15, he was ARTHUR I. DAVIES i ~y Impressionist images of Maine. found in the work of Mantegna, may have forced to leave school to work in the mills PMdt ",.", MtIMy. c. ,1,. Shortly, Hartley won an introduction to 011 on ClIftY... • ~. X 1.· reinforced Bruce's ideas. for a wage of three dollars per week. When NebrMka Art AMocIdon Alfred Stieglitz. He also responded to the All of these influences tended toward vol­ able to rejoin his family, he went to work in ThonIH C. WoodI CoIIIctIon committed intensity of the painter and his umetric solidity and abstraction within the a quarry for the same wage. Years later, ev­ ~I :~: art and offered Hartley an exhibition at the structure of the still life. These qualities dom­ idently in an effort to heal a rift between 291 Gallery. His first true solo exhibition inated the artist's long series of geometric himself and his father, he took his step­ STUARTArch Hotel, DAVIS ,_ opened on May 8, 1909. works which began c. 1917 and did not end mother's maiden name as his first. The Stieglitz exhibition brought Hartley into 011 on CIIIlWU. _0"x 31 W until within months of his death. In the boy who was to earn himself a place F. M. HIIII Collection sustained contact with the most advanced Barbara Rose and William Agee, whose in American art history as Marsden Hartley art circle in the United States. Max Weber, joint scholarship affords us nearly all that is there was an innate aesthetic sensitivity, only recently back from Paris where he had known about Bruce, have concluded that however. In Cleveland, he began to study LYONIL FElHlNQER been a student of Henri Matisse, imparted the Sheldon still life, Forms, is the second CIty 1Ioon. 1141 art, first with local painters and then , after 011 on CIIIlWU, UW x 21W his knowledge of modernist European de­ of the surviving late works and dates from his work commanded the attention of a NebrMka Art AMocIdon velopments. At Gallery 291 , Hartley saw the c. 1918-19. Between what they believe to trustee, at the Cleveland School of Art. Matisse and Picasso exhibitions-actually be the first and the second, however, there At the end of his first semester, a Cleve­ producing an Analytic Cubist landscape in is hardly any clear relationship. In Forms, RALSTON CRAWFORD land school trustee, Anne Walworth , offered Nft¥ ~ /II. 111H4 the Picasso manner in the spring of 1911. there are far fewer elements and they are the young art student a five-year stipend 011 on CIIIlWU, 10" x 3I~' It was to the work of Cezanne that Hartley arranged on one, not two table tops or sur­ which provided $300.00 each year for study F. M. HIIII Collection responded most profoundly, however. He faces. Because scrutiny of the remaining in New York and half that amount for summer did not see the exhibition at Gallery 291 , but still lifes reveals a clear, serial relationship expenses. In the fall of 1899, ignoring his Arthur B. Davies troubled to take him to see between many-there is a clear relationship father's predictions that he would be an utter MARSDEN HARTLEY the major Cezannes in the Havemeyer col­ IWnIInfI Number One, ,.,3 between Forms and what Rose and Agee failure, Hartley left Cleveland to enroll in Wil­ 011 on CIIIW", 3Mo4" x 31'1." lection. consider to be the third still life, for in­ liam Merritt Chase's New York Art School. F. M. Hall Collection This intensive introduction prepared Hart­ stance-and because Bruce tended to sim­ After a single year, disappointed in Chase's ley for his own extended contact with Eu­ plify as he moved from one work to the next singular emphasis on technique with the ropean modernism. In the spring of 1912, in a series, it seems at least certain that a HANS HOFMANN brush, he became a student at the National FruIt Bowl. 11SO again aided by financial arrangements made number of works, now destroyed, came be­ Academy of Design, remaining there until 011 on CIIIlWU, 21'4" x 38" by Davies and through sales at Stieglitz's tween his first geometric still life and the one the Walworth stipend expired in 1904. NebrMka Art Auocllltlon gallery, Hartley left for a year in Paris. now in Lincoln. Barbara Haskell, who has written the ret­ He arrived in April , made quick contact As a work which seems to come at the rospective exhibition catalogue essay which with other American artists in Paris and was end of a sustained sequence, Forms crys­ most thoroughly explores the vast amount JOHN MARIN soon invited to the Saturday afternoon gath­ tallizes much of the artist's achievement. It ".".""". to IttMuu sn.t, of material on Hartley's life, notes that none Nft¥ tbrIr, 1138 erings at 27 rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude presents a group of inherently geometric of his teachers made an indelible impres­ watercolor, 2M\I" x 20'10" Stein and her brother Leo opened the doors objects, given solidity through draftsman­ sion on the artist. During these years, how­ UnIYer8lty Collection to the avant-garde. The art and the artists ship and the uniform use of local color. The ever, his art did change gradually from an Sheldon Bequest he encountered there struck Hartley im­ triangular rod may be a drafting ruler, the academic realism to an American mode of mediately; on a postcard to Stieglitz, he sphere an orange, (Bruce consumed four Impressionism. By 1908, his work most wrote, "I felt indeed like a severed head JANMATULKA or five daily), and other shapes perhaps de­ closely resembled the muted impressionism CuIIW Nudee, c. 111 ..,. living itself of mystical excitation. " tails from his carefully collected furniture. of John Twachtman and , although less 011 on CIIIlWU, 21" x 21" By the late spring of 1912, his work brought The tradition of perspectival rendering is mystical in character, George Inness. Per­ UnIYer8lty Collection the color of Matisse to the structure and form GIft of Mrs. Mery Rlepma Ron fused with compressed Cubist space. Flat haps the clearest influence, in this period, of Cezanne's stililifes. Only months later, by colored planes seem to rise directly from is that of an Italian impressionistic painter, the end of the summer, he had moved away the rear edge of the sharply inclined plane Giovanni Segantini . His work Hartley found ALFRED H. MAURER from Matisse and toward Picasso, adopting of the table top, yet, at the left, a curvilinear reproduced in an issue of Jugend. The Ital­ SIIII LIfe trHII "-Int ",..,..... c. ,. the sharply angular planes of Analytic Cub­ shape projects past the table top, into space ian's "stitch" brushwork was especially 011 on panel, 30" x 11'4" ism . From this period in Hartley's complex which otherwise does not seem to exist. Unlveralty Collection suited to the difficulty of replicating the vis­ Bertha 8chIIefer 8equHt career, the Sheldon's Still Life With Fan is In all, it is a meticulously composed ual texture of the forested Maine hillsides perhaps the most notable work. grouping which defies gravity-the objects and mountains, scenes to which Hartley A year earlier, working solely from repro­ should slide from the table-and occupies turned every summer. ductions (Davies had yet to take him to the ambiguous space. Bruce has wedded the By the autumn of 1908, Hartley's growth JOSEPH""",. of STELLAL/ght8 (CoMy 1MInd). 111 ...,. ~ 011 on cenvu, 31" x 21W Havemeyer collection), Hartley had already abstraction of geometry to the realism of as a painter was being recognized. A Bos­ F. M. Hllil Collection worked at Cezannesque stililifes. In his work Renaissance illusion. Restricted to a unique ton collector purchased a work for $400.00, done in Paris , he continued his earlier pal­ vocabulary of forms and achieving a notable providing enough money for the artist to ette: tans and browns and deep green, but austerity with its limited range of colors set move to Stoneham Valley, Maine. There, he JOHN STORRS now added a liberal use of white and touches against glistening black, Forms exemplifies produced what he came to call his first ma­ Flgutwtlw AIMtract#on, c. 111 ..21 of dark yellow. The modeled fruit and the calWd mIIl'bIe, 20" x 13" x e" the elegant Cubism of an aristocrat. ture works. In spite of no direct contact with UnIYer8lty Collection goblet of the Sheldon still life all appear to French art, Hartley began to execute thor­ Gift of Mrs. Olga N. Sheldon derive most directly from Hartley's study of oughly Post-Impressionistic landscapes in the French master from Aix; however, these Marsden Hartley which masses of heavily painted foliage ex­ are placed on folded drapery which is thor­ ist on a continous plane with the textured MARGUERITE ZORACH oughly Cubist. Outlined in dark brown , geo­ Su",.,.. Moon.." Provlnt»town, ,." paint of the sky. The brilliant color often ap­ 011 on _, 20" x 24'10" metric facets of cloth are presented as Edmund Hartley was born in Lewiston, proaches the intensity of the Fauves. NebrMka Art AMocIdon sharply defined planes which angle steeply Maine on January 4, 1877. The youngest The quality of these works transformed Nelle Cochnme WoodI Collection from the bottom to the top of the picture, the child of a mill worker who had immigrated the course of Hartley's career. In March, compressed configuration of fabric echoed 4 5 by the inherent geometry of the partially un­ folded fan . Very soon, Hartley would find greater con­ geniality in the group of German artists in Paris and would be drawn toward the Blue Rider artists and Kandinsky's ideas as ex­ pressed in his On the Spiritual in Art. Briefly, however, Hartley was concerned with the intellectual study of forms in compressed Cubist space. Still Life With Fan thus marks one of the moments when this American modernist came closest to the spirit of French Cubism.

Henry Fitch Taylor

Henry Fitch Taylor was born on Septem­ ber 15, 1853 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Six years older than Chi Ide Hassam, the same age as John Twachtman, and only a year older than J. Alden Weir and Theodore Robinson , he belonged to the generation which produced nearly all of the major American Impres­ sionists. Yet Taylor, himself an Impressionist throughout his early career, was to become the oldest among the American artists who responded to and explored Cubism. Even the statesmen of American modernism, Alfred Stieglitz and Arthur B. Davies, were his junior by eleven and nine years, re­ spectively. Unlike Stieglitz and Davies, however, Tay­ lor is little known . Early interest in theater found him an established member of Jo­ Marsden Hartley Still Life With Fan , oil on canvas, 1912 seph Jefferson's popular performing troupe. Jefferson, who was himself a painter, en­ century American art: The Armory Show. couraged Taylor to go to Paris. There, Taylor Nearly sixty, Taylor almost at once began enrolled in the Academie Julian and then , working again. At first producing Cezann­ in 1885, went to Barbizon to paint. esque still lifes, he painted his way rapidly He returned to the United States three "through" Cubism, producing canvases years later an accomplished painter in the which explored both the analytic and syn­ Impressionist manner. He showed success­ thetic phases of the style. fully in several juried shows, but then aban­ By 1914, he was represented by the doned the established New York art world. Montross Gallery, which also showed the Between 1898 and 1908, he resided in Cos work of the Frenchman , Albert Gleizes. Cob, Connecticut, painting little and show­ Gleizes was a member of a small group of ing never. Cos Cob was something of a col­ French Cubists (Duchamp was another) who ony for artists; among the frequent visitors were influenced by the philosophical ideas were Twachtman, Hassam and Willa Cather. of Henri Bergson. As Agee points out, Berg­ Less often, Davies, George Luks and Walt son saw change as the fundamental con­ Kuhn were there. These acquaintances were dition of life, with each new development to have a decisive role in Taylor's life as an emerging out of and being shaped by the artist. preceding one. William Agee, who is responsible for vir­ Almost immediately, Taylor responded to tually all we know of Taylor, reports that with the work of Gleizes, producing abstract ar­ Clara Potter Davidge (whom he was later to rangements of circular, rotating forms . In marry), the artist took up the direction of the 1915 as well, Taylor painted From Genera­ Madison Gallery in New York in 1908. Soon tion Unto Generation, a metaphorical image the gallery was showing progressive art. in which a pale and anonymous, yet rather Kuhn and others from Cos Cob joined Taylor traditionally rendered figure faces another in conversations which led to the formation executed in cubistic planes of a machine­ of the Association of American Painters and like character seated in compressed cubist Sculptors. Taylor was its first president. A space. The transformation of style clearly retiring personality, he perhaps gratefully symbolizes the transformation of the char­ surrendered that post to Davies in 1912, but acter of moden life. continued to serve as trustee and secretary. The Sheldon 's Cubist Still Life clearly pre­ Little more than a year later, the Association dates this final stage in the evolution of Tay­ was responsible for mounting the most im­ lor's own art, but it is a confident example portant single event in the history of 20th of his exploration of Synthetic Cubism. 6 In a manner which specifically suggests he helped organize the classes held by Henri Picasso's use of wall paper in his papier Matisse. Through Matisse, he came to know colle of 1912-13, Bottle and Glass on Table, the Steins and a number of the artists, critics Taylor employs a tile pattern which serves and poets who were a part of that remark­ simultaneously as a ground and as an im­ able circle of the avant-garde. plied wall in the space in which the still life By the end of 1908, however, his funds rests. The tile pattern, reaching from the top had run out. Henri Rousseau hosted his bon to the bottom of the picture on the right side, voyage party and he returned to his adopted seems a paper-thin plane which com­ native city of New York . presses the pictorial space. At the left, how­ Very quickly, he became a member of the ever, the same green tonality is not marked Stieglitz circle. An egoistic man, Weber's re­ by pattern. A horizontal line, from the central lationship with Stieglitz (who was equally composition to the framing left edge, seems egocentric) was not to last long. While it to mark a shift from a horizontal plane to a flourished , however, the owner of "The Little vertical one, suggesting floor and wall , with Galleries" at 291 Fifth Avenue offered im­ the red rectilinear shape taking on the iden­ poverished Weber a tiny room in which to tity of a rug or shadow. live, included the artist in his landmark ex­ In the central composition, the still life it­ hibition, "Younger American Painters," which self, there are a host of ambiguities. Planes introduced American modernism to New of color tip backward and fold forward in York, and offered Weber a solo exhibition in space. At the rear, a purple shape seems a February of 1911 . geometric bottle; in the foremost part of the During this period , Weber served as still life, a wine glass seems to rest on its something of a mentor for Stieglitz, provid­ side. Taylor uses color here in two ways, as ing insight and information regarding the new local color to describe a shape and , on the developments in art which were gaining no­ rectilinear mass over-lapping the "tiled" toriety in Europe. For Stieglitz's periodical, zone, to create shadow and hence a sense Camera Work, Weber wrote an article titled of volume. "The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point All of these characteristics, combined with a relatively wide range of color, suggest Max Weber Night, 19 15, oil on canvas clearly that Taylor's mastery of Synthetic Cubism was well established. This, in turn, suggests that the painting must date from the fall of 1913, at the ear- 1iest' to mid-1914, at the latest. In all , as an example of Cubism as practiced by an American artist past his sixtieth year, this work exemplifies a mastery hardly less ad­ venturous in its transformation of the subject from visual to painted reality than that being produced in the same years by Picasso and Braque.

Max Weber

Max Weber referred to many of his works as "form in the crystal ," hoping to avoid being linked with European art. Whatever label he might have chosen, however, it is clear that in the years 1913-15 Webfi! produced some of the most fully resolved Cubist paintings to come from an American hand. Weber came to the United States as a child of ten in 1891 . Raised in Brooklyn, he attended Pratt Institute, studying under the remarkable teacher Arthur Wesley Dow (also an early inspiration for Georgia O'Keeffe), and graduated in 1900. Weber taught on American campuses for several years before sailing for France in September of 1905. Like so many Ameri­ cans before him, he enrolled at the Aca­ demie Julian and studied life drawing, then moved on to open academies where an art­ ist could study without supervision by an instructor. In 1906, '07 and '08, his work was included in major exhibitions (each year, for instance, in the Salon d'Automme) . In 1908, with Patrick Henry Bruce and Sarah Stein, 7 of View," offering a theoritical basis for Cub­ series of planes seem to unfold to reveal a Check list of works ism. In several respects, this essay is re­ central composition made up of shapes not reproduced markable. Weber had left Paris on December which hint at high rise buildings, the sweep 19, 1908, many months before Braque and of metal stairs, and forms created by the Pablo Picasso: Picasso had taken up their definitive work play of dark and light in a city at night. In Bottle and Glass on in Analytic Cubism. Juan Gris had yet to join this work, to quote his Camera Work essay, Table, 1912-13 the Spanish and the French artists and to there is "an overwhelming sense of space charcoal, ink, and publish his careful explanation of this new magnitude" which seems to include collage on paper glimpses of the city "in all directions at one The Metropolitan style in art. Stieglitz's exhibition of Picasso's Museum of Art, New Analytic Cubism would not be held for an­ time." York, The Alfred other year. Weber's ideas, while of course As is true in the last works of Henry Fitch Stieglitz Collection given impetus and early shape during his Taylor, it appears that Weber, directly prompted by Duchamp, found in Cubism a Max Weber: European stay, were to a substantial extent Interior of the Fourth his own. Four years later, in his du Cubisme, style which would enable him to capture the Dimension, 1913 Guillaume Apollinaire was to draw heavily scale of New York and quality of life in the oil on canvas upon Weber's essay and thereby inserted vast, m.l3chanized city. Natalie Davis Spingarn an American influence into the flow of aes­ Not many years after his great canvases Collection, in memory thetic ideas on the continent. of 1915, Weber, like most American painters of Linda R. Miller Weber's view of the Fourth Dimension was of the avant-garde, turned increasingly con­ New York at Night, one influenced by developments in math­ servative. His role in the development of 1915 ematics. Objects and places were seen in modernism in this country was, however, fully The Archer M. time, and therefore time itself was a dimen­ recognized. During his lifetime there were Huntington Art Gallery, sion to be added to height, depth and width. retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art University of Texas at Weber asserted: (1930), at the Whitney (1949), at the Jewish Austin, The James and In plastic art, I believe there is a fourth Museum (1956), the Rose Gallery at Bran­ Mari Michener dimension which may be described deis University (1957) and the Newark Mu­ Collection as the consciousness of a great and seum (1959). He died, much honored, in Grand Central overwhelming sense of space mag­ 1961. Terminal, 1915 nitude in all directions at one time, and oil on canvas is brought into existence through the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, three known measurements. (Camera Switzerland Work, July, 1910, page 25). Three years later, Weber completed a ma­ Chinese Restaurant, 1915 jor oil, Interior of the Fourth Dimension. Suf­ oil on canvas fused with a sense of movement and Whitney Museum of structured by sequences of over-lapping American Art, New planes which evoke New York's towering York skyline, the work depicts a sailing craft en­ Rush Hour, New York, tering New York Harbor. 1915 Through 1915, Weber completed at least oil on canvas seven major works dealing with the city, in­ National Gallery of Art, cluding New York at Night, Grand Central Washington, D.C. Terminal, Chinese Restaurant and Rush Hour, Marcel Duchamp: New York. The title of this last work points Nude Descending a to the most immediate source of all of these Staircase, No.2, 1912 works: Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descend­ oil on canvas ing a Staircase, #2. Philadelphia Museum Duchamp's work had been the scandal of Art, Louise and of the Armory Show. A cartoon in the New Walter Arensberg York Sun bore the caption "The Rude De­ Collection scending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Sub­ way)." Weber actually fuade a sketch of Duchamp's work and then, seizing upon the sense of motion generated by the sequence of planes in the Duchamp canvas, made a serious painting of the singularly urban ex­ perience of rush hours. A series of planes which generate a Futurist sense of speed seem to spin around a sequence of shapes that evoke the sense of a subway car speed­ ing into an underground station. The elements of urban architecture, si­ dewalks, staircases and streetlights which are eliptically a part of this work recur in his other New York paintings. It is among these canvases that Night must be grouped. Like the title itself, the actual content of :C:-iIIIC:,c~ the work is obscure. It is, however, a work Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of great spatial complexity. Executed in a University of Nebraska-Lincoln palette very close to that employed by Du­ Lincoln, Nebraska 68588-0300 champ in Nude Descending a Staircase, a (402) 472-2461 8