Black Chair (Primary Title)
Max Weber, American (born Russia), 1881 - 1961 (Artist)
Hailed at his death as the “Dean of American Moderns,” Weber is widely regarded today as an influential figure in America’s first-generation avant-garde. Yet throughout most of his highly productive career, he struggled to find a distinctive voice. Black Chair, which fuses a bold painting style with a graphic exuberance, dates from a more settled and mature period in Weber’s life, when he was beginning to attract greater critical acclaim and popular attention.
Having experimented from his early years with different modernist styles, Weber returned to the artist who remained his touchstone – Paul Cézanne. The French painter’s “plasticity,” as Weber described it, and his theories of form and color inspired a generation of American modernists in the 1920s, a decade that witnessed a resurgence of interest in the French painter’s work.
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