"The Greater Mystery of Things"
JANUARY 8, 2008 TAGS:
By Phyllis Tuchman
Photographer Edward Weston should be a household name by now. When he died 50 years ago on New Year’s Day in Carmel, California, his black-and-white portraits, nudes, still-lifes, and landscapes had earned the 71-year-old a reputation as one of the great artists of the 20th century. His compositions, the way he treated light, texture, and shape, as well as his technical prowess were always admired. The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective comprising 250 prints in 1946, and Paris’s Musee d’Art Moderne organized another in 1950. These were, however, bittersweet exhibitions. When Weston succumbed to Parkinson’s disease, he hadn’t taken a picture for 10 years.
These days, now that photography is no longer a handmaiden to painting and sculpture, Weston has become a giant in ways he never could have imagined. For one, he’s a member of the million-dollar club. At an auction last October, Sotheby’s sold Nautilus, an image from the artist’s shell series measuring a mere 9 3/8-by-6 5/8, for $1,105,000. Talk about mark-ups! You probably could have bought this haunting semi-abstraction for $7 when it was printed in 1927 or for as little as $500 during the 1970s. As it was, six of the top 10 lots at Sotheby’s that autumn evening were by Weston.
American art history books need to be revised to give Weston his due. Right now, artists of the Ash Can school and the slightly later Regionalists are praised where he is ignored. Yet for the most part, they were backwater talents. As his subject matter, Weston took the tried and true -- people, places and things -- and transformed them into personal triumphs. His portraits of novelist D.H. Lawrence, muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and poet Robinson Jeffers are as memorable as the efforts of these creative personalities themselves. Whether he was taking pictures of eroded rock and pebbles at Point Lobos in 1930 or the sand dunes at Oceano in 1936 or dried kelp and driftwood again at Point Lobos in 1944, Weston revealed the world he saw upside down through his tripod-mounted Grayflex as a place full of mystery that intrigues us still.
Born on March 24, 1886, outside Chicago, in Highland Park, Illinois, Weston began to take photographs the way lots of kids get started. In 1902, his dad gave him a present, a Kodak No. 2 Bulls-Eye camera. As Pictorialism, a dreamy, sentimental style, reigned supreme, the teenager made pictures outdoors. When he turned 17, he quit school and got a job at Marshall Field, the department store near the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s where he saw his first photography exhibition. By 1906, he’d published his print, Spring, Chicago, in a camera magazine.
That same year, Weston traveled to California to visit his married sister. He decided to stay in Tropico, a small town outside Los Angeles, where she resided. He told her, “Sis, I’m going to make my name so famous that it won’t matter where I live.” Then he returned to Chicago for six months to study at the Illinois College of Photography.
Back in California, Weston, in 1909, married Flora Chandler, his sister’s best friend and a schoolteacher seven years his elder. The mother of his four sons, she supported him financially and emotionally through thick and thin, especially thin, since he was quite a lothario. The couple had long been separated by the time they divorced in 1937.
Weston opened a conventional portrait studio, though he met critical success with his soft-focus, avant-garde prints. Even as a practitioner of Pictoralism, he’d be noticed today. His shadowy portraits are especially memorable.
In 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Weston, a bronze-medal winner, discovered Modern Art. After that, he photographed friends and family in plainer, simpler shadowy settings. Muted angles and geometric shapes are striking in a series in which friends pose in their attics.
After his sister moved to Ohio, Weston visited her there in 1922. He also went to New York and met the inestimable Alfred Steiglitz, who showed him his latest photographs as well as work by other leading modernists. Stieglitz advised Weston to “work, seek, experiment.”
Back home, Weston didn’t stay long in California. With his latest model and paramour, the political activist Tina Modotti, he left for Mexico for a few years. He taught Modotti, who became an acclaimed photographer, how to take pictures. And such artists as muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, befriended the couple. Weston’s photographs become more driven by shape. Round native baskets and ollas fill the frame of riveting still-lifes. Diagonals — a nude Modotti, a circus tent, a pyramid in Cuernavaca — become prominent, too.
Back in California for good by the end of 1926, Weston began his great series of still-lifes of shells, peppers, and bananas. The close-up compositions and finely balanced objects reveal what he had absorbed in Mexico. After photographing the dancer Bertha Wardell, his latest lover, in the nude, the twosome moved to Carmel in 1928. With his cumbersome camera, he began to make views at Point Lobos.
At 46, Weston, in 1934, met Charis Wilson, a 20-year-old who would become his lover, then his second wife, and the subject of many spectacular nudes. During his years with Wilson, Weston also was preoccupied with dramatic views of Oceano’s sand dunes. These elegant prints, more abstract than typical landscape scenes, are masterful studies of darks and light.
As the first photographer to be awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Weston, with Wilson, traveled throughout the West during the late 1930s. When the grant was renewed, they traveled some more but mostly used the money to tide them over as Weston developed the negatives he’d accumulated. The couple also made a cross-country trip after the photographer was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
In the early days of World War II, Weston’s images grew darker and more chaotic. Some prefigure imagery associated with Abstract Expressionism. Weston began to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, and as his health declined, he kept busy overseeing books devoted to his photographs and prints being developed for his last retrospectives.
“I want the greater mystery of things revealed more clearly than the eyes see…,” Weston once said. “Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.”
Phyllis Tuchman writes about art and artists for Obit.
Photographer Edward Weston should be a household name by now. When he died 50 years ago on New Year’s Day in Carmel, California, his black-and-white portraits, nudes, still-lifes, and landscapes had earned the 71-year-old a reputation as one of the great artists of the 20th century. His compositions, the way he treated light, texture, and shape, as well as his technical prowess were always admired. The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective comprising 250 prints in 1946, and Paris’s Musee d’Art Moderne organized another in 1950. These were, however, bittersweet exhibitions. When Weston succumbed to Parkinson’s disease, he hadn’t taken a picture for 10 years.
These days, now that photography is no longer a handmaiden to painting and sculpture, Weston has become a giant in ways he never could have imagined. For one, he’s a member of the million-dollar club. At an auction last October, Sotheby’s sold Nautilus, an image from the artist’s shell series measuring a mere 9 3/8-by-6 5/8, for $1,105,000. Talk about mark-ups! You probably could have bought this haunting semi-abstraction for $7 when it was printed in 1927 or for as little as $500 during the 1970s. As it was, six of the top 10 lots at Sotheby’s that autumn evening were by Weston.
American art history books need to be revised to give Weston his due. Right now, artists of the Ash Can school and the slightly later Regionalists are praised where he is ignored. Yet for the most part, they were backwater talents. As his subject matter, Weston took the tried and true -- people, places and things -- and transformed them into personal triumphs. His portraits of novelist D.H. Lawrence, muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and poet Robinson Jeffers are as memorable as the efforts of these creative personalities themselves. Whether he was taking pictures of eroded rock and pebbles at Point Lobos in 1930 or the sand dunes at Oceano in 1936 or dried kelp and driftwood again at Point Lobos in 1944, Weston revealed the world he saw upside down through his tripod-mounted Grayflex as a place full of mystery that intrigues us still.Born on March 24, 1886, outside Chicago, in Highland Park, Illinois, Weston began to take photographs the way lots of kids get started. In 1902, his dad gave him a present, a Kodak No. 2 Bulls-Eye camera. As Pictorialism, a dreamy, sentimental style, reigned supreme, the teenager made pictures outdoors. When he turned 17, he quit school and got a job at Marshall Field, the department store near the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s where he saw his first photography exhibition. By 1906, he’d published his print, Spring, Chicago, in a camera magazine.
That same year, Weston traveled to California to visit his married sister. He decided to stay in Tropico, a small town outside Los Angeles, where she resided. He told her, “Sis, I’m going to make my name so famous that it won’t matter where I live.” Then he returned to Chicago for six months to study at the Illinois College of Photography.
Back in California, Weston, in 1909, married Flora Chandler, his sister’s best friend and a schoolteacher seven years his elder. The mother of his four sons, she supported him financially and emotionally through thick and thin, especially thin, since he was quite a lothario. The couple had long been separated by the time they divorced in 1937.
Weston opened a conventional portrait studio, though he met critical success with his soft-focus, avant-garde prints. Even as a practitioner of Pictoralism, he’d be noticed today. His shadowy portraits are especially memorable. In 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Weston, a bronze-medal winner, discovered Modern Art. After that, he photographed friends and family in plainer, simpler shadowy settings. Muted angles and geometric shapes are striking in a series in which friends pose in their attics.
After his sister moved to Ohio, Weston visited her there in 1922. He also went to New York and met the inestimable Alfred Steiglitz, who showed him his latest photographs as well as work by other leading modernists. Stieglitz advised Weston to “work, seek, experiment.”
Back home, Weston didn’t stay long in California. With his latest model and paramour, the political activist Tina Modotti, he left for Mexico for a few years. He taught Modotti, who became an acclaimed photographer, how to take pictures. And such artists as muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, befriended the couple. Weston’s photographs become more driven by shape. Round native baskets and ollas fill the frame of riveting still-lifes. Diagonals — a nude Modotti, a circus tent, a pyramid in Cuernavaca — become prominent, too.
Back in California for good by the end of 1926, Weston began his great series of still-lifes of shells, peppers, and bananas. The close-up compositions and finely balanced objects reveal what he had absorbed in Mexico. After photographing the dancer Bertha Wardell, his latest lover, in the nude, the twosome moved to Carmel in 1928. With his cumbersome camera, he began to make views at Point Lobos.
At 46, Weston, in 1934, met Charis Wilson, a 20-year-old who would become his lover, then his second wife, and the subject of many spectacular nudes. During his years with Wilson, Weston also was preoccupied with dramatic views of Oceano’s sand dunes. These elegant prints, more abstract than typical landscape scenes, are masterful studies of darks and light.
As the first photographer to be awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Weston, with Wilson, traveled throughout the West during the late 1930s. When the grant was renewed, they traveled some more but mostly used the money to tide them over as Weston developed the negatives he’d accumulated. The couple also made a cross-country trip after the photographer was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.In the early days of World War II, Weston’s images grew darker and more chaotic. Some prefigure imagery associated with Abstract Expressionism. Weston began to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, and as his health declined, he kept busy overseeing books devoted to his photographs and prints being developed for his last retrospectives.
“I want the greater mystery of things revealed more clearly than the eyes see…,” Weston once said. “Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.”
Phyllis Tuchman writes about art and artists for Obit.
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