Idelle Weber
American, 1932–2020
Born in Chicago in 1932, Weber was adopted in 1933. Her family moved to Los Angeles in 1941. She received a full scholarship to study Art at Scripps College, then transferred to UCLA and received her BA. in 1955, and an MA in 1956. An extraordinary and under-recognised figure in the world of Post-war American art Weber was a major contributor to two art movements, Pop Art and Photorealism. Weber first came to prominence in the early 1960s with works featuring silhouetted figures, including images depicting businessmen that were later appropriated for the title sequence and ad campaign of TV series Mad Men. She was frequently exhibited alongside her peers Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein and was included in seminal exhibitions such as Pop Art U.S.A. (1963) at the Oakland Museum; Pop Goes the Easel (1963) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston: and The Box Show (1964) at DWAN Gallery in Los Angeles, where Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were first shown. Weber would radically change both her subject matter and stylistic approach throughout her career. The first shift came in the 1970s with her Photorealist paintings of NYC storefronts and urban trash. In the 1980s, Weber painted large-scale geometric studies of the gardens of Giverny and Versailles. The 1990s brought a series of imagined landscapes with a loosened, improvisational brushwork that was a break from her tightly-controlled and technically-sharp practice of the previous 30 years. Works from across all periods of her career are held by museums such as MoMA, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Whitney, NY; LACMA, Los Angeles; The Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. In 2010, Sid Sachs curated the landmark exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-68, which brought long overdue recognition to Weber and the other women artists. Organised by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia it toured to the Brooklyn Museum, NY in 2011. Other recent exhibitions include: Photorealism in Focus, Rose Art Gallery, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. (2026); Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art Since 1968, MOCA, Los Angeles (2025) and In Focus: A Closer Look at Photorealism, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, NL (2024) and Draw Like A Machine: Pop Art 1952-1975, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX (2021-2022).
