Max Weber Scholarship

The Max Weber Scholarship is created for students who have declared a major in WSU’s Art program. Students must have shown outstanding ability in and enthusiasm for art.

Criteria

1. Each recipient must be an undergraduate student enrolled full-time at WSU.
2. Each recipient must be classified as a junior and be in good standing at WSU with a minimum grade point average (g.p.a.) of 2.5 (4.0=A)
3. Each recipient must be a declared major in WSU’s Art program.
4. Each recipient must have shown outstanding ability in and enthusiasm for art

Biography/Motivation

Max Weber (1881-1961)

Max Weber was the second son born to Morris and Julia Weber on April 18, 1881 in Bialystok, Russia. Ten years later, he immigrated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York with his mother and brother to join his father who had settled there five years earlier.
From 1898-1900 Max attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he studied under Arthur Wesley Dow, who had an extensive knowledge of European and Far Eastern art history. In 1905 at the age of 24, he traveled to Paris where he studied at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens until 1908. While in Europe, Max also traveled to Spain, Italy, Belgium, England, and Holland. Max also earned an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1957.
Max returned to New York City and had his first solo exhibition at the Haas Gallery in 1909. He would move several times to different places in the New York area in the next 20 years. In 1912-1913 he became the first American modernist painter to be given a solo museum show, which was held at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.
From 1914-1918, Max began teaching at and was a founding member of the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. He would later teach at the Art Students League in New York in 1920-21, the University of Minnesota-Duluth in 1931 and the University of Minnesota in 1950-51.
Max married Frances Abrams on June 27, 1916 and had two children Maynard Jay and Joy Sarah. Maynard “Mo” Weber, is a 1950 graduate of Winona State with a bachelor’s degree in history and a minor in geography.
In 1918, Max became the director of the Society of Independent Artists and in 1955 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letter in New York.
In 1958, Max began working primarily in sculpture until his death at the age of 80 on October 4, 1961.
In his lifetime, Max had dozens of solo exhibitions all over the world including New York, Paris, Washington D.C., Venice, Tel Aviv, Israel; Philadelphia, Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Chicago, and even after his death, his works are displayed across the country in a traveling exhibition that reaches locations including Los Angeles, Houston, Santa Fe, West Palm Beach, Omaha, San Antonio, and Atlanta.