Slide Lecture at the Metropolitan Museum
Weber is considered one of America's earliest modernists, and his long career witnessed many stylistic changes. Through the 1920s his work paid homage to such European artists as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau as well as to tribal African art. After 1930, when he developed a consistently identifiable style, one that was lyrical and Expressionistic, his imagery focused on romanticized landscapes, docile domestic scenes, and emotional religious themes. Throughout his career Weber exhibited consistently at galleries and museums, and in 1930 he was honored with a retrospective at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art.
From 1914 to 1918 Weber taught classes in art history, art appreciation, and design at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. The experience of sitting in a darkened auditorium during a slide talk is amply conveyed in this pastel, about which he wrote: "A lecture on Giotto was given at the Metropolitan Museum. The late hastening visitor finds himself in an interior of plum-colored darkness . . . upon which one discerns the focusing spray-like yellowish-white light, the concentric, circular rows of seats, [and] a portion of the screen." In other paintings and drawings of the period, he evoked the illuminated stages at music and dance performances and the shimmering screens of the cinema. In a 1915 newspaper article he stated that his aim at the time was to express "not what I see with my eye but with my consciousness . . . mental impressions, not mere literal matter-of-fact copying of line and form. I want to put the abstract into concrete terms."
From 1914 to 1918 Weber taught classes in art history, art appreciation, and design at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. The experience of sitting in a darkened auditorium during a slide talk is amply conveyed in this pastel, about which he wrote: "A lecture on Giotto was given at the Metropolitan Museum. The late hastening visitor finds himself in an interior of plum-colored darkness . . . upon which one discerns the focusing spray-like yellowish-white light, the concentric, circular rows of seats, [and] a portion of the screen." In other paintings and drawings of the period, he evoked the illuminated stages at music and dance performances and the shimmering screens of the cinema. In a 1915 newspaper article he stated that his aim at the time was to express "not what I see with my eye but with my consciousness . . . mental impressions, not mere literal matter-of-fact copying of line and form. I want to put the abstract into concrete terms."
Artwork Details
- Title: Slide Lecture at the Metropolitan Museum
- Artist: Max Weber (American (born former Russian Empire, now Poland), Bialystok 1881–1961 Great Neck, New York)
- Date: 1916
- Medium: Pastel on paper
- Dimensions: 24 7/16 × 18 1/2 in. (62 × 47 cm)
- Classification: Drawings
- Credit Line: Gift of Dr. Irving F. Burton, 1975
- Object Number: 1975.321
- Rights and Reproduction: © Estate of Max Weber
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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