Max Weinberg´s Early Life – Before 1959
Max Weinberg was born Max Moshe Weinberg on the 19th of January 1928 in Kassel, State of Hessen, Germany. The son of a Jewish merchant, he flew with his family from the Nazi Germany to Palestine/Israel in 1935, where he grew up in Tel Aviv. His passion and true love for the Art was clear since his early age. As a small child, he loved to hear the music of Beethoven playing loud in the house of his parents, while painting on his school notebook the blue of the sky and the many cute small animals and fishes he used to watch during his walks along the sunny sandy beaches of Tel Aviv. With only 13 years, he built up his own small shack on the beaches of Tel Aviv and started selling his first paintings there.
Once he reached the age of 18th, he had to serve in the Army as any other young of his age, but he decided he would dedicate his life to painting. From 1954 to 1959 he studied at the State Academy of Art of Tel Aviv with Professors Mokady, Stimatzky and Streichmann. Because of his exceptional painting skills, he soon started working for an art gallery in the centre of Tel Aviv, which he left soon after, to move back to his Land of birth in Frankfurt Main.
Unfortunately, almost nothing remains of these yearly years of his artistic career in Tel Aviv, but the creatures and colors of his youth accompanied Max Weinberg throughout his entire artistic life.
Max Weinberg moves to Frankfurt Main and falls in love with “Mainhattan”– The 70s
Max Weinberg was fascinated by the lively, eclectic, international Frankfurt, which will soon become his second home, his “Mainhattan”! Keen to improve his skills and expand his artistic knowledge, he started to take evening classes at the State College for Visual Arts in Frankfurt. His impatience with the rules and schemes of study, as well as the continuous differences of opinions with his professors, motivated his decision to drop his studies. It marked the beginning of a brilliant and successful career of one of the most beloved independent graphic artists and painter of Frankfurt in the last 60 years. Max Weinberg started experimenting with new innovative techniques in lithography printing and mixed technique coloring on paper. Near the colorful world of tiny creatures, monsters, animals and aliens that crowded his lithographies in memory of his early life on the beautiful coast of Tel Aviv, new models with a sort of human liquid forms started appearing in his artworks. Shape and colors were assembled in a sort of new harmony where no rule applied with reference to fantasy and imagination.
The nightmare of Evil in his artworks on the Holocaust and the love for Pink – The 80´s
The nasty, terrible memories of his run from the Nazi era during his early childhood, came out like a new explosion of forms and bold brushes on the paintings that Max Weinberg produced in those years on the theme of Holocaust. Evil is depicted as one-eyed creatures with triangular faces, curly huge hair and creepy grim.
Displayed in national and international exhibitions, the Experience of Evil will be from now on depicted as a strong body with a huge cone shaped one-eyed head, and a grim laugh. Bold stroke of black brush on white paper and strike presence of pink, will be from now on a lasting component of Max Weinberg´s artworks. Not happy of the version of pink offered on the market, Max Weinberg will from now on mix up his own signature “pink”, to be found in each of his signature artworks.
Experimenting with new techniques to reach new challenges – The 90s
The production of paintings of the Holocaust reached a new level, with the addition of new colors and new shapes of paintings. Max Weinberg starts experimenting with new mixed techniques of Pastel, Oil, Acrylic, Tempera and Airbrush, used in new abstract painting. Dots, brushes, pink points, red, green, yellow and black are used in his new “naked portrait”, where extreme erotic scenes seem to picture-paint a specific lifetime of the Bahnhof Viertel in Frankfurt Main. “Painter with model” is added to his already very crowded and shrill artistic production. Like a sort of culmination of his unrest experimenting with any instrument, technique and color in visual art, Max Weinberg´s one and only sculpture was created in these extremely productive years.
The ”extraterrestrial woman”, an almost three-meter-high huge sculpture, consisting of a metal structure and mixed material filling and thick painted couverture, would remain the only plastic work of Max Weinberg.
The introduction of Polyurethan Isolation Foam for painting and the 3D effect – the 2000s Years
In these years Max Weinberg keeps experimenting with a new technique of colors mixed with Polyurethan Isolation Foam, which he used for building the “Extraterrestrial Woman” and which was able to give his painting a graffiti and 3D visual effect.
Most of his previous productions underwent a refreshing with his new graffiti signature style and shape. Thick layers of colors in any form and mix, landed on his old paintings and lithography. Even some of the old Holocaust production got a new graffiti style, to capture the interest of the new generation and avoid the oblivion of the worst time of the human history.
The “extraterrestrial woman”, the only sculpture of Max Weinberg, was shown at the Hannover Universal Expo 2000, like a true majestic glimpse of the deep and crowded universe of the German artist Max Weinberg.
Max Weinberg´s Final Years – 2018 The death at 90 and the big sense of emptiness he left behind him
Tireless at work for the only love of his life: Art. Until his very last days at the hospital, Max Weinberg kept painting even in the Intensive Care Unit. His colors and paper kept him able to breathe, even more than the same oxygen. His dead, April 18th, 2018, marked a very sad day for the city of Frankfurt where the “eccentric German-Israeli Artist”, was grieved by his fellow citizens as an extraordinary human being, which used his creativity as an instrument against violence and hatred.
Every and each one of Max Weinberg´s artworks, are not only masterworks of graphic, painting, drawing and plastic, but most of all, an important monumental memory of the Art-scene in Frankfurt Main from 1959 to 2018. Each of his paintings is a tiny piece of the monumental puzzle of Max Weinberg´s long life of emotions, vibrant art, free speech, provocative messages, supportive master for many young artists who found in him a friend for life. With the posthumous granting of the Goethe-PlacketteStadt Frankfurt, Max Weinberg was given a great recognition for his long life entirely dedicated to Art, but the dream of his life of being on exhibition at the MMK, has never been fulfilled…