Max Weber in Matisse's Studio.
How Matisse got big and I learned to stop worrying and love the cut-outs.
Max Weber, Figure Study with annotations from Henri Matisse, watercolor on paper, 1907, courtesy private collection, New York City.
Should I start by saying I never liked Matisse’s cut-outs? They’re colorful, big, joyous, and very popular, so . . . probably not! The standard gloss on the collages is that the poor man,1 separated from his studio practice by failing health and fascism, took up scissors and hand-colored paper. Certainly a heroic effort, but third-acts in the arts don’t merit applause solely on account of their geriatricity. These sexagenarian collages2 may have been effortful for the artist, but it’s easy on the eyes. I was probably first exposed to Matisse’s collages in fourth grade by Ms. Hotchkiss, elementary school art teacher, but by the time I had any sense of who Matisse was, I wanted something much heavier, darker, and more brooding from my mid-century masters. Matisse the painter is nearly without peer3; Matisse the paper-hanger is, you know, fine.
II. Matisse in America.
I wish I could say that Hilary Spurling’s definitive two-volume biography of Matisse won me over, but very few insights into Matisse the Artist are folded into Matisse the Master. But there are some biographical breadcrumbs that led me to appreciate the cut-outs—and both involve contact with Americans.
Max Weber was one of two Americans in Matisse’s studio—the other was Alfred Maurer—and he got Matisse at the height of his powers as a painter. (Maurer, for his part, seems to have absorbed, even appended Fauvism in his own work.4)
Born on April 18, 1881 in Białystok, Russia, Weber moved to the United States a decade later. He enrolled at Pratt Institute in 1898, taking lessons from Arthur Wesley Dow until 1900, when he saved enough money to travel to Europe. In 1906 his work was accepted into the Parisian Salon d’Automne where he was exposed to Paul Cézanne and met Henri Rousseau, a lifelong friend.5 In 1908 Weber joined Henri Matisse’s atelier—prime Matisse days. We can see from drawings made in Matisse’s studio—see above!—that he was studying all the things that were firing in Matisse’s brain: eye-splitting color, lyric form—all the things that painting could be, all at once.
In 1911, a 40-year-old pharmaceutical millionaire from Philadelphia touched base with his old schoolmate, and asked him what paintings to buy from Europe. The schoolmate being William Glackens, he told him to consult with Gertrude Stein and buy Fauvists; the millionaire being Albert Barnes, he did just that—and within a few years, he had a lot of Matisses. Like, sixty.
By 1930, Barnes had the largest private collection of Matisses anywhere, and when Matisse was invited to the US to judge the annual Carnegie Prize, Barnes maneuvered to meet the man. Matisse couldn’t say no—and by the end of the visit, the painter had been commissioned to make a giant mural to decorate Barnes’s mansion. Nice pay for a badly damaged Depression art market, but Matisse was more buoyed by the invitation to work big. He later reminisced that he’d always wanted to make murals, but no one had ever asked him before! Poor man.
Meanwhile, Weber took a teaching post at the Art Students League of New York in the 1920s, where he pushed his own view of modernism. Matisse, Cézanne, Rousseau: this holy trinity was conducted through the American master, and the rising generation absorbed new lessons of what art could be. His star pupil? One M. Rothkowitz. Rothkowitz would summarize his lexicon of forms into his famously hovering rectangles after shortening his name, in 1940, to Rothko.
The registration card for M. Rothkowitz—later Mark Rothko—with notes of his study under Max Weber in 1925-26.
Matisse arrived at the same place by a different route: vast flat panels of color, untamed forms, plasticity of space without boundary. If you fail to see any commonality between Rothko’s floating rectangles and Matisse’s cut-outs, think about Max Weber as the middle term.
III. Matisse to Rothko.
Jazz is a beautiful book—but even the large-format of its pages doesn’t hint at the wonder of the large-scale cut-outs. See the right one and it can be transformative—but MoMA’s current exhibition carefully dodges the peril of seeing too much. The right works given room to breathe feel expansive, exhilarating, and inevitable. The shapes escape the confines of their squares, and what would otherwise and otherwhere appear clumsy feels bold, stately, and buoyant. There is an episodic quality to the forms that suggests that they could be nearly anything but happen to be this—you want less to correct them than to see them extrapolated. And what higher feeling can a work of art engender than to want to continue?
Hurry in to MoMA before the cutouts come down on January 20th; Weber is featured in Lincoln Glenn’s historical survey of Art Students League instructors opening this Thursday, January 16.
Department of Mild Correctives:
Lemuel Wilmarth, oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches, courtesy Peter Jung Fine Art.
Last week’s article on Lemuel Wilmarth was heavy on his organizing and light on his artwork; to be honest, I don’t love his “greatest hit,” but when a reader mentioned this stunning genre scene, I thought it only decent to share with you. This moving portrait of an art student nicely summarizes Wilmarth’s passions. Socially progressive, Wilmarth insisted on teaching women—a thorny issue at the time!—and here we see her mastering that other bone of contention: the plaster model.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Matisse was sixty in 1939, when his wife of four decades left him, suspecting an affair. His son Pierre was in New York, and while he could have found passage to join him, Matisse the elder felt “it seemed . . . as if I would be deserting. If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?”
The breathlessness with which we treat the work is richest in the nomenclature—a mild case, from MoMA, here—these are not “collages,” but “cut-outs”—because, you see, Matisse was working towards an expansive, plastic space, so it’s not a collage like what a child makes, but a serious metaphysical project that took a master decades of struggle. Or whatever. It’s a collage.
When Weber returned to New York in 1909, he organized the first solo show for Henri Rousseau in America. Alfred Stieglitz put him in Young American Painters and in 1911, he gave Weber his first solo show at his New York 291 gallery.