NEW YORK, NY.- Continuing at Forum Gallery is Summer of Love, an exhibition presenting more than twenty modern and contemporary paintings, works on paper, quilts, and sculpture by seventeen artists. Physical connections flourish in works by Max Weber (1881-1961), Raphael Soyer (1899-1987), Chaim Gross (1902-1991) and Clio Newton (b. 1989).

Following his immersion in the Parisian avant-garde between 1905 and 1909, Max Weber returned to the United States brimming with ideas that launched a pivotal early period of creative experimentation, ultimately spawning his own original, hybrid Cubism. Max Weber is widely regarded as the first American Cubist.

At the height of this period in 1917, Weber painted The Sisters. He described the work as “an expression of withheld emotion or ecstasy – a subconscious state of the spirit." The Artist portrays the bond between siblings as primitive and complex. Situated in an ambiguous domestic setting, his subjects, with their matching features and subtly intertwined bodies, are profoundly close.

The Sisters was exhibited in the retrospective exhibition given to Max Weber by The Museum of Modern Art in 1930. That same decade, the painting was shown in Weber's solo exhibition at The Downtown Gallery.

Featured in Summer of Love is an endearing, intimately scaled painting by Raphael Soyer, Lovers in the Park, c.1945. Humanity was Soyer's subject, and in this painting, he captures the rapture of a couple in a passionate embrace. From within the park - skillfully conjured by way of a single distant tree amid a delicious wash of green hues - the affectionate couple find comfort in one another; they are oblivious to the external world.





Writing in The Washington Post in 1982, Abram Lerner, first Director of the Hirshhorn Museum asserted, "Since Edward Hopper's death, Raphael has been the dean of American realist painters. If I had to label him, I'd call him a 'romantic realist,' 'romantic' as we use to term to disassociate a work of art from the formal, the impersonal, the classical, and the cold."

As a young man in 1927, Chaim Gross learned the technique of direct carving (taille directe) from the immigrant French master Robert Laurent at the Art Students League. In the years to follow, Gross displayed great ingenuity in direct carving, applying his skills to marble, both white and pink, as well as to serpentine and lithium stone.

Carved in milky pink alabaster in 1951, Embrace is a lyrical composition of two figures floating together in a mid-air arabesque. It is a wonderful example of the acrobatic performers for which the Artist is well-known. For Chaim Gross, the subject was a metaphor for the human interconnectedness, and it remained a central theme in his work throughout his life. Gross drew inspiration from his childhood memories of the circus in Austria, during happier times before the war tore apart Europe and drove him with his family to New York City in 1921.

Clio Newton's The Lovers, 2024, is a larger-than-life drawing in charcoal of two figures merging to create a serene and nearly abstract graphic composition of their union. Wrinkles, pores and individual strands of hair imbue this work with a striking intimacy and honesty. With both faces concealed by their embrace, the subject is not of two individuals but the couple as an entity.

Describing Newton's work, Eleanor Heartney, Art Scholar and Author, writes, "These drawings short-circuit our normal ways to seeing. Newton renders her figures with a delicate precision that conjures such often denigrated styles such as academic drawing, illustration or photorealism. In doing so she draws on modes of representation that blur the boundaries between the ideal and the real."

Summer of Love is on view through August 28, 2026 at Forum Gallery.