The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream

“S many, I had not thought death had undone so many.” These words about the precariousness of the early years of the 20th century referred to lives lost in war. T.S. Eliot and other poets and writers, along with many in the arts and sciences, were grappling with growing cities and their beleaguered populations and with technological advancements that allowed the killing of unprecedented numbers of soldiers in battle. At the same time, they were swept in a wave of creativity and change centered in Paris and spreading all over the world. These were the times of Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Diego Rivera, Igor Stravinsky, and many others, who were leading scientifi c, literary, and artistic trends under the broad umbrella of modernism as they tried to “make it new” with outlandish forms and styles. In the United States, the effects of modernism also permeated technology, photography, fi lm, and dance. American painters, many of whom had gone to Europe, were familiar with modern styles, which they absorbed and carried to their own continent. Max Weber, along with Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keefe, and others, was part of this avant garde. Born in Bialystok, then Russia, Weber immigrated to the United States with his family, which settled in New York City when he was 10. He attended public schools and studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He apprenticed with painter and printer Arthur Wesley Dow, who ahead of his time advocated examining visual relationships between forms rather than working solely with objects and believed in “fi lling a space in a beautiful way” rather than recreating nature. Weber went off to teach in Virginia and Minnesota to fi nance travel to Paris, where for a time he studied at the Académie Julian and received classical training under painter Jean-Paul Laurens. While abroad, the artist also traveled to Italy, Holland, and Spain. In Paris, he made the right connections. He knew Cézanne; Gauguin; and Picasso, who along with Braque pioneered cubism, a movement that quickly spread into sculpture, architecture, literature, and music, moving beyond single point perspective to capture objects from many angles at once, forever changing the way we view the world. He became close friends with Henri Rousseau and was involved in organizing a course led by Matisse, a transformative experience in his handling of color. He exhibited in major Salons. In cubism objects are broken into parts, analyzed, and reassembled, their form enriched in the process. Surfaces often intersect at unusual angles and with the background,