SHort BIO

After winning numerous Scholastic Art Awards in High School, Weber received a full scholarship to Scripps College from Scholastic in 1950. However, feeling that the training was not as rigorous as she had hoped, Weber transferred to UCLA after her freshman year. There her instructors included Millard Sheets and Stanton MacDonald-Wight. Her classmates included Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, and James McGarrell. Weber received her B.A. from UCLA in 1955, as well as an M.A. in 1956.

From 1953 until her graduation, Weber and her classmate Craig Kauffman rented a shared studio space on San Vicente Blvd. Kauffman’s friend, Walter Hopps, often slept in the back of their studio. Hopps later founded and ran L.A.’s Ferus Gallery in that very building.

While finishing her final year at UCLA, Weber’s 1955 charcoal drawing, Observation of Sound was selected for inclusion in MOMA’s juried exhibit, Recent Drawings USA. After graduation, Weber traveled to New York to see the exhibit. During the visit Weber saw her work exhibited alongside one of her heroes, Josef Albers, babysat for Mark Rothko's daughter, and met her future husband, Julian Weber. The drawing was purchased by noted collector Gertrude Mellon and was eventually was donated to MOMA and is now part of their permanent collection.

As Weber embarked on her professional career, she began to experience the sexism that defined the art world of the time. She tried to audit Robert Motherwell’s class at Hunter College, but after praising her portfolio Motherwell asked if Weber planned to have children. When she replied yes, Motherwell responded, “It’s too bad. Married women with children don’t continue to paint,” and rejected her. It was 1957, the same year he married painter, Helen Frankenthaler.

The next year Weber gave birth to her son, Todd. While very few galleries were interested in representing women artists, for the few who would come for a studio visit, Weber ensured that she always scheduled them during her son’s nap, for fear of repeating her experience with Motherwell.

Weber’s work in the 50s primarily consisted of figurative painting and drawing. But, as with many artists of the period, she briefly experimented with Abstract Expressionism, resulting in a series of “all-over grey paintings.” After the Motherwell rejection, Weber began studying with Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League. It was in these classes that Weber began to experiment with the hard-edge silhouettes that would define her work for the next decade.

As Weber developed her silhouette drawings and paintings, she continued to look for gallery representation. One of her early champions was the director of the Castelli Gallery, Ivan Karp. Though Karp would not represent Weber until the 1970s, he was instrumental in introducing her to many key players in the New York art world. It was thanks to Karp that Lawrence Alloway, coiner of the term “Pop Art” and then head of the Guggenheim, became aware of Weber. Karp also introduced Weber to many of the artists who would go on to define this decade of American art; Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Richard Artschwager, Claes and Patti Oldenberg, Lucas Samaras, and Yayoi Kusama.

Weber's series of silhouettes, dominated by business men (appropriated without credit by the opening sequence and advertising campaign of the AMC TV series, Mad Men), were inspired by evening visits to pick up her husband for dinner at his corporate law offices. Weber was compelled by the large expanses of windows in the modernist office buildings like the newly constructed Lever Building. She was struck by how the fluorescent office light flattened the workers within, with their dark suits and crisp white shirts.

Through the strength of this work, from 1960-62 Weber began getting more and more attention. However, despite these positive responses, the prominent galleries of the day, Castelli, Stable, Green, Martha Jackson et al., either would not represent women or kept scheduling her male peers' debuts so that the movement that would be known as Pop Art was in danger of passing her by. After being told in 1962 by Ralph Bellamy that she would have to wait at least a year for an exhibit at the Green Gallery, Weber followed the advice of Danny Robbins, Alloway’s number two at the Guggenheim, to “show now” or be viewed as derivative, Weber agreed to a January 1963 solo exhibit at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, which represented lesser known Ab-Ex painters and none of her peers.

Weber second solo exhibition opened there in 1964, a mere two months after the birth of her second child, Suzanne. Weber finished many of the works for this exhibit with her newborn daughter in a stroller by her side. Despite the gallery’s standing, these two exhibits established Weber as one the few women in the newly named Pop Art movement. Alloway and Douglas MacAgy championed Weber's work and she was exhibited alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselman, et al., in many of the groundbreaking Pop exhibits of the 60s. Regardless of this support and exposure however, Weber’s gallery was in no way positioned to overcome collectors’ bias against purchasing work by women artists no matter how celebrated.

After the second exhibit, Weber (in what would become a familiar pattern in her career) pivoted. She saw the natural progression of her Pop paintings in three dimensions. Ever the eager student, she apprenticed herself to a commercial model maker so she could begin to learn how to cut, mold, and polish plastics. Weber would assist the model-maker and in return he allowed her an hour each day to work on her own projects.

Though she sketched many plans for large-scale sculptures and had numerous plans for exhibits, a lack of time and funds meant she was only ever able to complete three major sculptural projects, as well as a series of smaller hand-painted lucite cubes and cut-plastic pieces. The works were never exhibited and most were placed in storage for the duration of Weber's career. Fortunately, the works have been re-discovered and are in the collections of major institutions. These include Jump Rope (1967-68) at LACMA, Ben Casey (1967-69) at the Brooklyn Museum, and a selection of the cubes (1967-70) at MOMA.

The obstacles she encountered with the execution of her sculptural work once again resulted in a major shift in her focus. This shift, however, would result in Weber's biggest success to date.

As Weber continued to hit roadblocks in her sculpture work of the late 60s, she found that she missed easel painting. Perhaps in a bid to recapture the excitement she felt upon moving to New York in 1957, she started a series of paintings of storefronts from photographs she had taken on those first days in the city. The paintings clearly show the influence of Edward Hopper, an early hero of Weber's. Unbeknownst to her they also represented something other artists were beginning to explore, a reliance on the photograph as source material.

The work caught the eye of both Louis Meisel and Ivan Karp, both of whom would go on to represent the majority of artists that came be known as the Photorealists. Weber, again one of the few women recognized in a major arts movement, chose Karp over Meisel and would exhibit at his Hundred Acres and OK Harris galleries for the next decade. The snub would result in Weber being placed in a small section at the back of Meisel’s genre defining book, Photorealism, as part of the “Artists Related to Photorealism” section.

Although the figure had been the main focus of Weber's Pop work, she quickly dispensed with it in her new series of paintings. Instead, she started focusing exclusively on the fruit stands that stood outside small mom-and-pop shops on the streets of New York. Weber took hundreds of photos of storefront assemblages that she found compositionally dynamic and which told a “compelling color story.” Weber worked in both watercolor and oil. The large scale oil paintings from this series took hundreds of hours to complete.

From her first exhibition at Hundred Acres, Weber became a prominent figure in the new movement. But she differed from her peers in that she never used used grids, hard edges or airbrushes in her work, which moved critic Ellen Lubell to describe Weber as “the most painterly of the Photorealists.”

After a sold-out exhibit of storefronts, Weber again made a bold move and became focused on the trash left behind from all this commerce. She furthered her exploration of the streets of New York, going to dilapidated industrial sites in Brooklyn and vacant lots in Harlem, endlessly photographing on “perfect F-22 days” in search of a “hot subject.” These paintings and watercolors of New York City trash proved even more popular than her fruit stand series and she continued with them until 1981 when another decade brought another radical shift in focus.

By the time Weber completed her last trash painting of the era (Sunkist on I-Beam - 1981), she felt she could go no further with the subject without repeating herself. Through her representation at OK Harris, the Webers had become close friends with painter John Clem Clarke and his wife Jane. Trips to visit them at their island home on Tortola provided the inspiration for her next exhibit.

The resulting resort paintings and drawings were still extremely realistic and reliant on photos taken during these trips, but the drawing and painting had a slightly looser style. Weber played with more extremes of light and shadow and her charcoal drawings sometimes verged on silhouette. Also, figures appeared in her work for the first time since the early 70s.

As she completed this series, Weber found herself drawn to the flowers and foliage surrounding these figures. She decided to travel to formal gardens in France, including Versailles and Monet’s Giverny, for source material. On these trips she took thousands of photographs. The resulting paintings were unique in the art world of the 1980s. Large-scale works that showed not only the riots of color from formally planted flower beds, but that also accentuated the man-made structures that contained this flora. The effect was often highlighted by diptychs whose panels mirrored each other to heighten the manually imposed symmetry.

As the decade progressed, Weber moved closer to her subject matter, with macro-lensed paintings of grass and hedges, whose borders were now defined by the canvas itself. She often constructed these as trapezoids or parallelograms. When commenting on these works, Weber cited the writing of Emile Zola on the lawns in Paris Squares. Zola wrote that they “recall(ed) nature for consumptive city dwellers… It looks like a bit of nature that did something wrong and was put into prison.”

At the end of the decade, after having taught in the Master’s program at NYU for over a decade, Weber accepted an associate professor position at Harvard, which inspired another major shift in her work.

In what Weber called “an accident of access,” she suddenly had a press at her disposal for the first time in her career. The Harvard Art Department faculty began a practice of weekly figure drawing sessions for themselves. Instead of using a sketchpad, Weber rolled plexiglass plates with ink and "drew" the figures using a brush dipped in turpentine, quickly pulling prints from these "drawings."

Outside of the faculty sessions, inspired by the 360° views from the top floor of Harvard’s Corbusier designed, Carpenter Center, Weber began a series of what she called “Imagined Landscapes”. These landscapes, with a new style of loose and spontaneous brushstrokes, became the focus of her next major period. She completed hundreds of landscape prints while at Harvard. When her Harvard appointment ended, she completed a run of prints with master printmaker Garner Tullis. She also started painting the imagined landscapes in oil. These works again highlighted Weber's fascination with light and color, merging her lifelong appreciation of the color theory of Josef Albers with her rigorous study of the landscape paintings of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

Unfortunately and suddenly, Idelle developed a severe allergy to the solvents used in oil paint and had to immediately cease working in the medium. This, and another teaching appointment in Australia, led to other explorations of the natural world, with a series of pastels of shells (a fascination since childhood) and the trees surrounding her home in Long Island.  However, despite approaching a new millennium and her 70th birthday, Weber was not done exploring new approaches to her work.

While almost exclusively exhibiting paintings and watercolors throughout her career, drawing was always a fundamental component of Weber's practice. When she moved to New York in the late 50s Weber said she, “…realized that I was drawing my paintings.” In the ensuing forty years Weber would become a master of various painting techniques. However, during all of this time drawing remained a nearly compulsive activity for Weber.

Weber almost constantly had a sketchbook in hand, whether on the subway, seeing a play, or watching television. On the rare occasions when her sketchbook was not within reach, she would draw on whatever material was available. Often these were quick sketches done on Post-It Notes. When one of Weber's studio assistants questioned why she threw these drawings away, Weber began keeping and arranging them, oftentimes attaching them to heavily notated appointment calendars. 

This practice led Weber to look back over all of her past figurative work. She began lining the walls of her studio with arrangements of these works which resulted in her next major project. Head Room was an installation composed of over 900 figurative works from 1946 to the present day. It was conceived so that each installation could be a unique arrangement of the works, utilizing as many pieces as necessary to fill the given exhibition space. 

But, the gallery that had represented Weber for the better part of the 1990s closed in 2002 and for the first time since 1963, she had no gallery representation. While Weber was able to exhibit Head Room at the Nassau County Museum in 2004, her numerous solo efforts to secure other venues fell on deaf ears. At the same time, her husband, Julian, was in ill health (he would pass away in 2007), and she now had three small grandchildren, to whom she was delighted to devote her time. This resulted in a series of pastels that paid homage to Mary Cassat, one of her early heroes.For the first time in a fifty-year career, Weber was not compelled to stay bound to her studio.

In the late aughts, Weber was contacted by curator and art historian, Sid Sachs, about an upcoming exhibit he had conceived. It was a survey of the women artists of the Pop Era. Sachs recognized that a group of groundbreaking women had been entirely written out of the history of Pop. By the 2000s, Weber had dissociated herself with Pop so fully that when she produced a limited edition survey of her work to attract gallery representation, she did not even include a section on her Pop works.

It was likely the dismissive treatment of women artists in the Pop era that led Weber to put that part of her career on the sidelines. At the beginning of the 1970s, Weber learned that her long-time champion and friend, Lawrence Alloway, would not be including her in a major survey of American Pop Art at the Whitney Museum. In fact, Alloway included no women in the exhibit. Weber reacted by destroying a large number of her Pop canvasses and fully committing herself to her new, Photorealist, work.

In 1993, Weber called out New York Observer critic Hilton Kramer for continuing the legacy of omitting women from the Pop Art canon. In response to Kramer’s review of yet another Pop exhibit at the Whitney, Weber’s Letter to the Editor was published. Weber wrote, “I disagree with the statement that ‘there were no women in the Pop Art movement, which was an exclusively male phenomena.’ In addition to myself there was Marjorie Strider, Marisol, and Rosalyn Drexler.”

As Sachs created what would become the traveling show, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-68, Weber looked back for the first time in her career. She created a limited amount of digital prints of her Pop work and renewed her interest in trash paintings. Weber had noticed a change in the accumulated garbage in New York brought about mostly by the preponderance of plastics. She wanted to capture this new accumulation in a new series of paintings.

The Sachs exhibit brought a re-discovery of Weber's work of the Pop era. And 2013, after having no gallery representation for over a decade, Weber had simultaneous solo exhibits in New York, one a retrospective of her Pop work and the other of her new series of trash paintings. Major museums (MOMA, LACMA, the Whitney) started acquiring Pop works that had sat in storage for decades and it seemed that a new stage might begin Weber's career.

However, Weber began to show signs of dementia in the middle of the decade. The condition progressed and she became unable to work. In 2017, she moved away from New York and returned to the place she had left to begin her professional career in 1957. She moved into assisted living in Los Angeles, where she could be close to her daughter and her family. Weber died there in March of 2020 after contracting Covid.

Weber once wrote, “Art historians, art critics, and art dealers sometimes make it sound like an artist’s development is a single thread. More often it is like a rope with several strands twined round one another. That is, the artist is really doing several things at once to make up a whole body of work. This certainly has been the case in my work.” It is also the case for the work the Estate of Idelle Weber. Whether it be the interest in female artists of the Pop Era,a renewed examination of Photorealism currently sparked by group exhibitions around the world, increased respect for legacy work, or a new generation of scholars and curators who are committed to questioning accepted narratives of art history — we are committed to following all of these threads to help secure Idelle Weber’s proper place in the history of American Art.