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"Whither Now?" (1930s-40s)
Oil on Canvas
The Rose Art Museum
of Brandeis University,
Waltham, Massachusetts


 

 Anti-Semitism and War
 

 In a discussion with interviewer Carol Gruber in 1958 Weber explained:

"When I heard of Hitler (I knew a Hitler was coming several years before anybody heard the name) and when I heard that he was beginning to break Jewish shops in Berlin and all that, I walked around in the studio quite hurt, disturbed. I could see what an anti-Semite could do when he’s bloodthirsty and fanatic and crazy. I said, look, I’m doing abstract art. Nobody is bothering me. Nobody is shattering my windows, my house. Oh, where are the people going to go now?  What are these Jewish people in Germany going to do? And he is awakening an anti-Semitism that is going to be ruinous. So I said, Where to? And I painted a large canvas of two Jews called Whither Now? And another one, Refugees.

So I painted. Then I thought of my Chassidic rabbi and said Let me paint a picture of the gaiety, the happiness, and I painted this The Chassidic Dance." next...


 

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"Hasidic Dance" (1940)
Oil on Canvas, 32¼ x 40 inches
Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection
bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1991
(1992.24.6)

 

   

 

 

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