Portrait (1919–20): Art, History and Details

Portrait (1919–20) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Max Weber (American, born Kingdom of Prussia [now Poland], 1881–1961).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The American artist Max Weber was deeply influenced by non-Western art, including African masks that he viewed at Parisian museums and Japanese prints, which he learned about as a student. Around 1919, he began to combine these interests in a series of relief prints, such as the one seen here. Weber deconstructed the human figure into component parts, emphasizing its simplicity and geometry.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait
• Date: 1919–20
• Creator attribution: Max Weber (American, born Kingdom of Prussia [now Poland], 1881–1961)
• Culture: America
• Type: Print
• Technique: color woodcut on Chinese paper
• Dimensions: Image: 10.5 x 4.7 cm (4 1/8 x 1 7/8 in.); Sheet: 23.6 x 15.9 cm (9 5/16 x 6 1/4 in.)
• Collection: PR - Woodcut
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2018.1072

A detail from the museum

This print was reproduced as an illustration for a short story published in a 1922 issue of the avant-garde journal Broom.

Collection credit

Gift of James and Hanna Bartlett

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pilniak, Boris. “At the Doors,” Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts 3, no. 1 (August 1922)
• Rubenstein, Daryl R., Max Weber, Alan Hyman, and Alan Maxwell Fern. Max Weber: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Graphic Work. 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.