SHort BIO

Idelle Feinberg received a full scholarship to Scripps College from the Scholastic Art Awards. However, after a year at Scripps, she transferred to UCLA where she completed her BA and MA in Fine Arts and Teaching. After graduation, she taught fine art at Hollywood High School and shared studio space with her former UCLA classmate Craig Kauffman. Walter Hopps {curator and founder of LA's Ferus Gallery) slept in the back of their studio.

In 1956, Weber's drawing Observation of Sound was included in an exhibit at MOMA. She visited New York to see the show and over the course of three days, 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. She married Julian and moved to New York in 1957, using Idelle Weber as her professional name from that point forward.

Upon moving to New York, Weber attempted to audit Robert Motherwell’s class at Hunter College. After complimenting her portfolio, Motherwell asked if she planned to have children. When Weber said she did, Motherwell refused her admittance to the class, commenting, “What's the point? Married women with children do not continue to paint.”

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.” She also began taking a class with Theodoros Stamos in which she began to develop her interest in the figure in silhouette, which would define her work in the 1960s.

As Weber developed her silhouette drawings and paintings, she began to look for gallery representation. With an infant son at home, Weber had to time studio visits during her son’s naps, so that visiting gallerists would not know she was a mother. In her search for a gallery, Weber met Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Karp and his wife, artist Marilyn Gelffman Karp, ultimately became lifelong friends. It was through Karp that Idelle also became friends with the artists who would go on to define the future of American art; Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Richard Artschwager, Claes and Patti Oldenberg, Lucas Samaras, and Yayoi Kusama.

“Then of course, everyone came to everyone's opening… everyone knew each other, so you'd go for Chinese afterward and whatever Chinese chef that Ivan (Karp) liked and he was following.” – Idelle Weber, Interview with Avis Berman, 2004

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), are what the name Idelle Weber frequently evokes. These works 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 and how the fluorescent light flattened the workers within into silhouettes, with dark suits and crisp white shirts.

However, the businessmen were only a part of her 60s output. She also explored women’s roles in a sexist society, as well as the tumultuous politics of the decade, especially the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam War protests.

Weber’s first two solo exhibits, at the Bertha Schaefer gallery in 1963 and 1964, established her as one the few women in the newly defined Pop Art movement. Curators Lawrence Alloway (who coined the term Pop Art) and Douglas MacAgy became early champions of Weber's work and she was exhibited alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselman, et al., in many of the groundbreaking Pop exhibits of the 60s.

However, despite the success she achieved with her Pop paintings, 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 model maker so she could begin to learn how to cut, mold and polish plastics. Weber would work for the model-maker during the day and draw and paint late into the evening after her two children had been put to bed.

Though she sketched many plans for large-scale sculptures and had numerous plans for exhibits, a lack of funds meant she was only ever able to complete four major sculptural projects, as well as a series of smaller silkscreened lucite "cubes." The larger pieces were never exhibited and were 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, another 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 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.

Although the figure had been the main focus of Weber's Pop work, she quickly dispensed with the figure 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, Idelle became a prominent figure in the Photorealist 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 two sold-out exhibits 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 ultimately travelled to formal gardens in France, including Versailles and Monet’s gardens, for source material, taking 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 offered nearly identical mirror displays of the flower beds.

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 the mid-80s, the Webers purchased a second home in Watermill, NY. Weber started to notice compositions of trash among the natural landscape and returned to trash paintings and watercolors. However, this time, instead of the gutters and rubble of New York streets, the backgrounds were the high grasses and waterways of rural Long Island. Weber might have gone farther with these new Photorealistic trash works, but the appointment teaching at Harvard abruptly shifted her focus.

In what Weber called “an accident of access,” she suddenly had a printing 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 Carpenter Center, Weber began a series of what she called “Imagined Landscapes”. These landscapes, with a new style of loose and spontaneous brushstrokes, became 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 then transitioned back to oil paintings staying with these imagined landscapes as the subject. 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 withinn 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. Its first (and only) iteration was an exhibit at the Nassau County Museum in 2004.

The gallery that had represented Weber for the better part of the 90s closed in 2002. For the first time since 1963, she had no gallery representation. 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. For the first time in a fifty-year career, Weber was not compelled to stay bound to her studio.

In the late 00s, 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, upon discovering that her long-time champion and friend, Lawrence Alloway, had not included her in a major survey of American Pop Art at the Whitney, Weber destroyed a large number of her Pop canvasses in anger. In fact, Alloway included no women in the exhibit.

And, in 1993, Weber had called out New York Observer critic Hilton Kramer for this very act. In a review of an exhibit at the Whitney, Kramer defiantly and incorrectly stated that “there were no women in the Pop Art movement, which was an exclusively male phenomena.” In a Letter to the Editor, Weber corrected Kramer and noted, “In addition to myself there was Marjorie Strider, Roslyn Drexler, and Marisol.”

As Sachs created what would become the traveling show, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-68, Weber returned to her interest in trash paintings. She 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 and after a lifelong distaste for working in acrylics, found a brand that satisfied her.

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 Idelle’s career.

However, Idelle began to show signs of dementia in the middle of the decade. The condition progressed and she was unable to work. In 2017, she moved away from New York for the first time in 60 years, returning ironically to the place she had so longed to escape. For the remaining three years she lived in assisted living in Los Angeles, close to her daughter and her family. Weber died in March of 2020 after contracting Covid.