Editor's note: The Phillips Collection provided
source material to Resource Library Magazine for the following article
or essay. If you have questions or comments regarding the source material,
please contact The Phillips Collection directly through either this phone
number or web address:
Edward Weston: Photography
and Modernism
"Edward
Weston: Photography and Modernism" features over 140 rare vintage prints
demonstrating the great originality and strength of the artist's mature
work from his first experiments with modernism around 1920 through his last
works completed in 1948. This exhibition has been created to pay tribute
to his role within the context of the modernist movement, which inspired
artists, architects, musicians, writers, and photographers in the early
decades of the 20th century. Weston's photographs are shown alongside some
of the most important modern masters. Included are telling examples by photographers
Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, and his
son Brett Weston and by painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Charles
Sheeler, and Willem de Kooning. Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism
will be on view at The Phillips Collection from June 1 through August 18,
2002. (left: Edward Weston, "Hot Coffee," Mojave Desert,
1937, silver print, 7 7/16 x 9 7/16 inches, The Lane Collection, Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston)
"Edward Weston saw himself as an artist, not only
a photographer -- yet he was deeply committed to his medium and proud of
his exploration within it," said Stephen Bennett Phillips, Associate
Curator at The Phillips Collection. "In this exhibition, Weston's photographs
are juxtaposed with paintings and photographs by other modern artists of
the period that Weston knew and admired. By demonstrating connections to
his contemporaries, Weston's work inspires an even more profound appreciation
of his original and memorable prints."
Exhibition Overview
Called "the quintessential American photographer of
his time," Edward Weston (1886-1958) is best known for his still lifes
of peppers and shells, his heroic portraits, and abstract close-ups of nudes,
rocks, and trees. The hallmarks of Weston's best known work -- a commitment
to clarity and simplification, truth to materials, and interest in the purely
formal qualities of mundane objects and everyday subjects -- all defined
his work as modern. The modernist works he created from 1920 until he gave
up photography in 1948, due to ill health, forever changed photography.
Introduction to Modernism
Weston's early experimentation with modernism begins with
the soft-focus, romantic pictorialist portraits he took of friends and models
and culminates with a much different series of nudes taken in 1936. The
artist's experimental mood begins to reveal itself around 1920, as seen
in a pair of portraits -- Johan Hagemeyer (1920) and Ruth Shaw
- A Portrait (1922). The first composition features Weston's friend
and fellow photographer, Johan Hagemeyer, where the image is divided by
a strong vertical at the exact center and then balanced by a nearly white
parallelogram at left with a flat, dark shape containing the portrait on
the right. With this work, Weston has successfully created an essentially
flat, nonobjective image. The second, a portrait of Ruth Shaw, features
only the eye, forehead, and hair of the model, yet has three dark triangles
at the corners and a geometric white shape at the center that overpowers
the sitter. Both Johan Hagemeyer and Ruth Shaw - A Portrait
signify Weston's acceptance of the fact that portraiture could be arbitrary
and that abstraction was as important as capturing a likeness.
In 1922, Weston traveled from his California studio to
New York City where he met Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe,
and Charles Sheeler among others. Meeting these artists encouraged Weston
to continue his exploration of modernism. Armco Steel (1922) -- created
just before Weston's arrival in New York -- was taken at the American Rolling
Mill Company in Ohio. This bold vertical composition of seven tall smokestacks
that appear as one giant, stepped tower demonstrates Weston's complete move
away from the pictorialist style. Weston's treatment of the human body also
underwent significant changes as he ventured deeper into modernism. A series
of nudes taken in 1934 features sharply focused images that address the
female body -- and specific parts of the body -- both abstract and sensual.
Mexico: 1923-1926
Weston spent two long periods in Mexico between 1923 and
1926, immersing himself in a culture he felt was spiritually and aesthetically
richer than his own. He was accompanied to Mexico by Italian-born actress
Tina Modotti -- his lover, model, studio assistant, and liaison with the
Mexican avant-garde -- who volunteered to work as his apprentice in order
to learn photography herself. His time in Mexico represents a pivotal period
in his career, during which he developed the spare, modernist vision that
marks his mature style. As historian Nancy Newhall put it, Mexico was "Weston's
Paris." There he had intensive exposure to the Mexican avant-garde
movement artists such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and José Clemente
Orozco, access to ancient monuments and the Mexican landscape, and an introduction
to indigenous art forms. His Mexican photographs fall into several interrelated
series: monumental portraits made with a hand-held camera; crisp images
of clouds, landscapes, and buildings; and boldly geometric still lifes and
nudes.
Palma Cuernavaca (1925), a
stark image of the trunk of a palm tree rising through the center of the
composition, captures Weston's growing fascination with geometry and symmetry.
The rings of the cultivated palm -- parallel and even -- are almost factory-made
in their precision, and the composition echoes his earlier photograph, Armco
Steel. San Pedro Y San Pablo (1924), a view of an interior court,
shows Weston flattening space and compressing form as his work again approaches
geometric abstraction. Weston's bold experiments in Mexico reach a high
point in the sculptural Excusado (1925). This still life of a porcelain
toilet, perhaps an homage to Marcel Duchamp, is powerful yet sensuous as
Weston divorces the toilet's function from its form. Regarding this work,
Weston wrote in his daybook, "Never did the Greeks reach a more significant
consummation to their culture...."
After 1927: "High Modernism"
Returning to California late in 1926 and
opening a studio in San Francisco, Weston embarked on an extraordinary two
decades of work that placed him at the center of American modernism. Accelerating
his exploration of abstraction, Weston sought sculptural beauty in the natural
world. In the next few years, he produced some of his most memorable nudes,
as well as a remarkable series of close-ups of organic forms including shells,
peppers, onions, eggplants, artichokes, and cabbages. The artistic breakthrough
that resulted in the earlier Excusado was brought to a new level
as Weston produced works such as Chambered Nautilus (1927) and Pepper
(1930). The first captures the symmetrical, luminous curved form of the
shell against a dark background. In Pepper, one of the photographer's
best-known works, a simple vegetable is transformed into a massive form,
one with the muscularity of a human torso and the modeling of a great work
of sculpture. Much of Weston's work in this period is sculptural in effect,
influenced by Constantin Brancusi's way of transforming organic shapes into
simplified, iconic imagery. (left: Edward Weston, Pepper,
1930, silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 inches, The Lane Collection, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston)
In 1929, Weston moved to Carmel where he would spend the
rest of his life. At the nearby Point Lobos nature preserve, he made direct
studies of rocks, gnarled cypress trees, and kelp by experimenting with
flat patterns and texture. Close-up, these common objects are removed from
their everyday context and their scale rendered ambiguous. Weston found
a purity of form that embodied the modernist credo, "nothing but the
essential." These compositions relate the organic abstraction in the
paintings of O'Keeffe and Dove.
Late Modernism
While his earlier work emphasized magnification and fragmentation,
in the 1930s and 1940s Weston often stressed the wholeness and interrelatedness
of things. This new attitude resulted, in part, from the sheer variety of
his subjects. As the first photographer to receive Guggenheim Fellowships
(in 1937 and 1938), Weston traveled across the western United States, recording
anything that stirred his interest. The fruits of this labor were featured
in the book California and the West (1940), which was the basis for
the 1996 exhibition at The Phillips Collection, Weston's Westons: California
and the West.
Weston's late work is bittersweet in mood
and majestic in spirit. In the late 1930s, he responded to surrealism and
Dada in his experimentation with unexpected juxtapositions of incompatible
objects in dreamlike, often ironic images. Without manipulating subject
or medium as his contemporaries often did, Weston explored surrealism to
move beyond the high-modernist formalism that had dominated his work up
to this time. Photographs such as "Hot Coffee," Mojave Desert
(1937), an image of a huge coffee mug shaped sign advertising the one beverage
that would be unbearable to drink in the desert, is situated against the
backdrop of the desert demonstrating the new direction of Weston's work.
The irony continues with the dislocations of scale of cup and background,
paralleling one of the techniques of surrealism. (left: Edward Weston,
Driftwood and Auto, Crescent Beach, 1939, silver print, 7 11/16 x
9 5/8 inches, The Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
The exhibition will also include a section on his photographs
that verge on abstraction. Weston's images of graffiti, Wall Scrawls,
Hornitos (1940), of spilled tar at the shore, Tar on Rock, Point
Lobos (1939), and of cracks in a car roof, Burned Car, Mojave Desert
(1937) all evoke the "automatic writing" and emphasis on accident
that would become hallmarks of abstract expressionism by the mid 1940s.
During this time, his style had evolved toward looser compositions, focusing
on pattern, texture, and line. These works reflect Weston's continuing sensitivity
to contemporary art by foreshadowing the spatially indecipherable and gestural
characteristics of abstract expressionism.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
Read related articles in this publication:
Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional
source by visiting the sub-index page for the Phillips
Collection in Resource Library
Magazine.
Search for more
articles and essays on American art in Resource Library. See America's Distinguished Artists for biographical information on historic artists.
This page was originally published in 2002 in Resource
Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for
more information.
Copyright 2012 Traditional
Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit
corporation. All rights reserved.