Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism

January 25, 2002 - May 12, 2002

Photography and Modernism

In 1927, a noted critic proclaimed photography “the new art of the twentieth century” and Edward Weston among its “few unquestioned masters.” Weston (1886–1958) is best known for his images of peppers and shells, his heroic portraits, and his abstracted close-ups of nudes, rocks, and trees. More than a great photographer, though, Weston was a pioneering modernist, one whose work evolved in response to contemporary movements in all the arts. The defining qualities of Weston’s mature work—abstraction resulting from a commitment to a reductive vision and to simplification of form, truth to materials, and interest in the formal qualities of everyday subjects—are also hallmarks of early twentieth-century modernism.

Weston was keenly aware of current developments in all media; he once said: “I feel that I have been more deeply moved by music, literature, sculpture, painting, than I have by photography.” He was inspired by painters and sculptors from Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi to Henrietta Shore, by Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists, and later by practitioners of Dada and surrealism, as well as by such photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, Tina Modotti, Charles Sheeler, and Imogen Cunningham.

This exhibition demonstrates the extraordinary strength and variety of Weston’s work, from his first experiments with modernism, about 1920, until Parkinson’s disease forced him to stop photographing, in 1948. The vintage Weston photographs in this exhibition demonstrate the photographer as an artist who made a major contribution to the art of his time.

Weston Introduced to Modernism

In 1911, Weston opened a portrait studio in Tropico (now Glendale), a suburb of Los Angeles. Working in the popular soft-focus, romantic style known as Pictorialism, Weston exhibited figurative compositions, including portraits and nudes, to international acclaim. In spite of his professional success, however, Weston slowly began to move away from this conservative approach.

Modernism, in many forms, reached California just at this time. Weston probably first came in contact with modernism through publications such as Camera Work, Broom, and The Little Review. In addition, his friends—including photographers Margrethe Mather and Johan Hagemeyer and actress Tina Modotti—moved in Los Angeles avant-garde circles. As a result, Weston's work by 1918 became increasingly concerned with abstraction and flatness, and he began to produce his first sharp-focus photographs.

In 1920, the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art (the present Los Angeles County Museum of Art) hosted the Exhibition of Paintings by American Modernists, organized by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, which included recent abstract works by Arthur G. Dove, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Man Ray. That same year, the first important modernist building in Los Angeles was erected: Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and furnished by Rudolph Schindler.

In 1922, Weston traveled to New York to meet the powerful Alfred Stieglitz, whom he called “a Napoleon of art.” Weston greatly admired Stieglitz both as a photographer who firmly believed in photography as fine art, and as a promoter—through exhibitions in his New York galleries—of the most advanced European and American art. Through Stieglitz, Weston also came to know firsthand the work of such modernist artists as painters Arthur G. Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe and photographers Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.

Mexico: 1923–1926

In July 1923, Weston left for Mexico, accompanied by actress Tina Modotti. It was the only place Weston ever visited outside the United States. He spent two long periods in Mexico, separated by an eight-month return to California. Weston chose to visit Mexico on the recommendation of Modotti and her late husband, Robo de Richéy, who had called it an “artist’s paradise.”

Mexico, as one historian put it, was “Weston’s Paris.” There he continued to hone his modern style, working toward greater clarity, simplification, and abstraction in portrait heads and nudes and in such new subjects as toys, toilets, and tree trunks. “How ridiculous a ‘soft focus’ lens is,” he wrote, “in this country of brilliant light, of clean cut lines and outlines.”

Weston was in Mexico at the height of the cultural revolution known as the Mexican Renaissance, when artists including Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and José Clemente Orozco—all of whom Weston came to know—were working on large-scale mural projects inspired by pre-Hispanic and contemporary indigenous art forms, as well as by European modernism.

Weston and Modernism After 1927

Returning to California late in 1926, Weston embarked on an extraordinary two decades of work that placed him at the center of American modernism. Through the early 1930s, Weston continued the exploration of abstraction that culminated in his classic, high-modernist images of sculptural shells, peppers, and nudes. His work was spurred on by his earlier contacts with the art of Georgia O’Keeffe, Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and Constantin Brancusi and by new ones with West Coast artists Henrietta Shore, Peter Krasnow, and Imogen Cunningham.

At about the same time, Weston also began to experiment with flat patterns and texture—first with trees, rocks, and kelp at Point Lobos, near Carmel, and then back in the studio with vegetables and nudes. These compositions relate to the contemporary photography of Paul Strand and Cunningham as well as to the organic abstraction in the paintings of O’Keeffe and Arthur G. Dove and the work of such European artists as Jean Arp and Joan Miró.

By 1931, hints of a new element—surrealism—began to enter Weston’s work. For a number of years he explored the unexpected juxtapositions of incompatible objects; ironic, dreamlike scenes; and abrupt changes of scale. In addition to reproductions and articles in avant-garde publications, Weston could have seen examples of both Dada and surrealism in the important Los Angeles collection of Walter and Louise Arensberg, whom he met in 1930. Surrealism also provided Weston with some of the tools he needed to develop his vastly different last style, in which formal clarity and symmetry were replaced by looser, more gestural compositions that foreshadow the paintings of the abstract expressionists.

The Lane Collection

Most of the Weston photographs in this exhibition are drawn from the renowned Lane Collection, on long-term loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Since 1987, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has organized numerous photography exhibitions drawn from The Lane Collection. This exhibition was the third dedicated to the work of Edward Weston.