Mother Love 1920

Max Weber made this small woodcut, called Mother Love, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. With a few swift cuts, the artist creates a monumental image that fills the small surface. The texture in this print reminds me of the kinds of experimental mark-making Picasso was doing at the time. Weber lets the grain of the wood show in his image, which gives it a feeling of warmth and history, like looking at an old photograph. See how the face of the mother is built up through a series of simple lines, and how the artist doesn’t quite close the form? There’s an openness, an ambiguity to the image that pulls you in. Like the German Expressionists, Weber is interested in an art of feeling, and in the power of abstraction to convey emotion. This piece, in its rough, raw beauty, anticipates the American Expressionists of the 1940s and 50s. It reminds us that art is always in conversation with itself, and that newness is often just a new take on something old.