Max was born in 1928 in Kassel, Germany. Faced with the impending outbreak of the Second World War his family fled Nazi Germany to Tel Aviv where he started to sell his paintings on the streets when he was just 13 years old. Weinberg studied at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Tel Aviv before returning to Frankfurt, Germany in 1959, where he had lived and worked for over 50 years.
Weinberg is famous for his large, brightly-colored paintings with abstract shapes. In his works the irrational met the rational, the impulsive met the calculating, chaos met order and the east met the west. The music of Ludwig van Beethoven – the perpetual leitmotif of Weinberg’s oeuvre – helped him translate this bipolarity into aesthetic unity.
Together with the artworks he produced, Weinberg also welcomed groups of school children, especially from Israel, to his workshop in Frankfurt.
Max Weinberg died on 18 April 2018 at the age of 90 years. The state of Hesse’s culture minister, Boris Rhein, said that Weinberg unlocked new worlds for others with his paintings. “His works were as extraordinary as his personality,” Rhein said. He “opened new worlds for us with his paintings and made us question what we are used to.” DW Article