Repose No. 2

Max Weber immigrated to the United States when he was ten and settled with his family in Brooklyn. He lived in Paris from 1905 to 1908 and experienced firsthand the debates and innovations that accompanied the births of Fauvism and Cubism, two seminal art movements of that time. After returning to New York in 1909, Weber introduced American audiences to European modernist theories through his essays in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work, and conveyed the fragmented spaces and sensations of urban life in paintings that often verged on abstraction. In his later career, Weber focused on genre subjects and narrative themes derived from his Jewish heritage. The compressed space and depiction of the reclining woman’s face both frontally and in profile seen here reflect Weber’s return to a cubist approach to the figure in his final decades.