“Following Weston’s twists and turns” (Phillips Collection), The Baltimore Sun, July 7, 2002, p. 1E.

Edward Weston and Modernism at the Phillips

by Jason Edward Kaufman

WASHINGTON, DC. If you’ve ever hung a camera around your neck and gone searching of interesting motifs in nature, you’ve followed in the footsteps of Edward Weston (1886-1958). One of the great pioneering American “art photographers” of the second quarter of the twentieth century, he created those sensuously sculptural close-ups of peppers, nautilus shells, and nudes that have become paradigms of 20th-century photographic art. You may not have used a fancy view camera with large negatives, and probably didn’t get such silky, sexy results, but you had the general idea.

An exhibition at the Phillips Collection, “Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism,” is the first that considers Weston’s achievement within the broader context of 20th-century art. A beautiful display of 140 ravishing vintage black-and-white prints, it was organized by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts which owns the peerless collection donated by Saundra and William Lane who, in 1967, purchased from Weston's heirs more than 2,000 items.

Laid out chronologically, the show picks up Weston in 1920, when the 34-year-old Chicago native had hung up his shingle as a portrait photographer in California, where he would remain most of his life, and follows him as his work evolves into hard-edged constructivist architectural studies, curvilinear close-up still-lifes and nudes, and surreal landscapes and genre scenes -- at each phase echoing the achievements of artists working in other media.

Ostensibly, the point of the exhibition is to underline the inter-relationships with these other artists. But unlike its inaugural display in Boston, which juxtaposed the photographs with paintings and sculptures by some 25 of Weston’s modernist contemporaries, in Washington, the focus is more strictly on the prints themselves, with just a handful of paintings and no sculpture interspersed. As a result, Weston’s ties to other modernists are only cursorily examined in the galleries, though the superbly illustrated catalogue fleshes out the influences and attitudes that shaped his vision.

For example, there are parallels with the botanical and biological imagery of painter Arthur Dove, another modernist interested in culling essences from nature, and affinities also with the reductive abstraction of Georgia O’Keeffe, though the lone example in the Phillips is not the best illustration. Comparisons with Abstract Expressionists are visually less persuasive and conceptually less well founded. For instance, Weston’s tar-splattered rocks suggest the energetic brushwork of Willem de Kooning, his tuft of swamp grass vaguely resembles a starburst motif in a Franz Kline canvas, and his calligraphic studies of tangled seaweed seem similar to the linear drips of Jackson Pollock (like Brancusi, sorely missed in the Phillips show). But the relationships are really forced. Whereas the New York School painters sought to register their temperaments through the gestural handling of paint, Weston sought “to record the quintessence of the object...rather than an interpretation.” He was an empiricist, not an expressionist.

Besides, Weston was an exponent of “straight photography” -- the guiding doctrine of the “f64" group he founded in 1932 with Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham -- which held that a photographer should capture reality without manipulating the subject or altering the image in the darkroom. His abstraction was something discovered in nature rather than invented – altogether different from abstract painting or sculpture that drew its imagery from the unconscious or the imagination. Weston noted that a Brancusi sculpture was “curiously like one of my peppers,” but explained, “With my camera I go directly to Brancusi’s source [and] I find ready to use, select, and isolate what he has to ‘create.’” Nevertheless, one can imagine the sculptor’s appreciation of the photographer’s smooth undulating reductive nudes.

Weston’s nudes imply an exquisite sensuality, but lack the emotional power and pictorial delicacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe. Evenly lit, often monumental in form, they record breasts, arms, hips, thighs, or buttocks bursting with sexual potential, but seem less interested in eroticism than in the abstract potential of the body's geometric structure. The perfect half globes of a woman’s buttocks viewed from the side suggest a pair of fruits or eggs side by side. A seated nude’s compact bundles of soft curves neatly rhyme with the muscularly contorted pepper images. In both cases, Weston addresses his subjects' smooth surfaces and voluptuous form with a mixture of literalness, sensuality, and abstraction. And just as he found visual analogies in the human body, he also discovered allusions to the human body in vegetables and even rocks. The controversial Robert Mapplethorpe would later bring a similarly anthropomorphizing eye to flowers in which he uncovered an almost pornographic sexuality.

Weston denied this associative aspect of his nature studies, but I believe he often chose his motifs because they suggested alternate readings: a soft v-shaped recess in stone reads as a folded knee, a rounded mineral deposit as embracing figures, a cabbage leaf as a curling wave, a supple serpentine juniper tree evokes the torso of a woman, and a weathered stump silhouetted against the sky appears like a windblown wisp of diaphanous drapery. This visual rhyming is fundamental to Weston’s aesthetic sensibility, and its discovery is crucial to the visitor’s enjoyment of the work.

Among the highlights of the show are the famous 1936 studies of Weston’s young model Charis Wilson sprawled on the California dunes. Floating within the frame, without any footprints around her in the sand, she is seen strictly in terms of line, tone, and form. On the back of one print, the precisionist painter Charles Sheeler wrote to his friend, "If there is a more beautiful photograph of the human figure anywhere I haven't seen it. One associates it with a quality of drawing such as Ingres set forth in the Odalisque." To see what he means, go downstairs to see the Ingres nude that belongs to the Phillips.

Despite his high-art bona fides, Weston earned his living primarily as a commercial portrait photographer. He made more portraits than all of his other subjects combined, including heroic likenesses of Igor Stravinsky, E.E. Cummings, Isamu Noguchi, and during his 1920s sojourn in Mexico, the Communist muralist Diego Rivera. One of my favorites is the 1937 portrait of Charis seated against a granite wall, with her legs provocatively drawn up, her head wrapped in a scarf, her eyes staring plaintively and somewhat sadly at the camera. Despite the austerity of the Yosemite terrain and her rugged attire, Weston’s second wife becomes an ode to fragile, feminine beauty.

Towards the end of his career, Weston trained a quasi-surreal eye on roadside America’s weird sculptures and signs, and then abandoned straight-photography altogether by staging hokey satires such as the 1942 nude of Charis wearing a gas mask, a slapstick token of the inhumanity of war. Two years later, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, for which no effective treatment had yet been developed. Incapacitated by the disease, Weston would take his last photos in 1948, a decade before his death.

The Phillips retrospective is a feast for the eyes, and alone worth the trip to DC. But for photobuffs, there are many more incentives at the moment, including the Steiglitz show at the National Gallery, street photography since 1950 at the Hirshhorn, and award-winning work by the White House Press Photographers at the Corcoran.

“Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism” is on view at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street NW, in Washington, DC, through August 18. For information call (202) 387-2151.

In addition to lunchtime talks July 18, Aug.1 and 15 at 12:30 PM, there will be “Artful Evening” lectures about Weston in Mexico (July 18), Weston and his daybooks (Aug. 1), and Weston and modernism (Aug. 15) all at 6 & 7 PM, a tutorial on how to do a Weston pepper with your digital camera (Aug. 1), plus a California wine tasting (July 11), both at 6 PM. All events are free with admission.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©