Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 opened Drawings and paintings by Max Weber, scheduled from January 11 to January 31, 1911. The exhibition belongs to the short period when 291 shifted from Photo-Secession photography toward modern painting, sculpture, and works on paper, making the small Fifth Avenue gallery a pre-Armory Show testing ground for American encounters with European-inflected modernism. Weber, recently returned from Paris and deeply marked by Cezanne, Matisse, and Cubism, became one of the first American painters to absorb and publicly risk that vocabulary. Contemporary reaction to Weber's 1911 work was famously hostile, but the show helped define the press and public resistance that modernism would soon meet on a larger scale.
The show made Weber an early American target for anti-modernist criticism before the 1913 Armory Show.
