The photographs of Edward Weston [by] Nancy Newhall Author Weston, Edward, 1886-1958 Date 1946 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2374 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art " __ - LIBRAHY THE MUSEUSVf OF MODERN ART Received: ! MCHW£ EDWARD WESTON THE PHOTOGRAPHSOF PORTRAIT OF EDWARD WESTON BY ANSEL ADAMS, 1945 EDWARD WESTON NANCY NEWH THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish especially to thank Edward Weston for the many months of work and the understanding collabora tion, maintained across a continent, which he has contributed to every stage of this book and the exhibition it accompanies. To Beaumont Newhall, for his invaluable aid in preparing the text and the bibliography, to Charis Wilson Weston, to whose writings and suggestions I am much indebted, and to Jean Chariot for permission to quote from his manuscript, I am particularly grateful. I wish also to thank Mrs. Gladys C. Bolt, Mrs. Gladys Bronson Hart, Mrs. Rae Davis Knight, Mrs. Mary Weston Seaman and Mrs. Flora Chandler Weston for lending the chloride, platinum, and palladio prints which represent Weston's earliest work. Nancy Newhall TRUSTEESOF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Stephen C. Clark, Chairman of the Board; Henry Allen Moe, 1st Vice-Chairman; Sam A. Lewisohn, 2nd Vice- chairman; John Hay Whitney, President; Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1st Vice-President; John E. Abbott, Executive Vice-President; Ranald H. Macdonald, Treasurer; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, William A. M. Burden, Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Walt Disney, Marshall Field, Philip L. Goodwin, A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, Wallace K. Harrison, James W. Husted, Mrs. David M. Levy, Henry R. Luce, David H. McAlpin, William S. Paley, Mrs. E. B. Parkinson, Mrs. Charles S. Payson, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Beardsley Ruml, James Thrall Soby, Edward M. M. Warburg, Mrs. George Henry Warren, Monroe Wheeler. HONORARY TRUSTEES: Frederic Clay Bartlett, Frank Crowninshield, Duncan Phillips, Paul J. Sachs, Mrs. John S. Sheppard. COPYRIGHT 1946, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 11 WEST 53 STREET,NEW YORK 19, N. Y., PRINTEDIN U.S.A. MM A EDWARD WESTON In 1902 two letters passed between Dr. Edward carrying the level rod on the Old Salt Lake Rail Burbank Weston and his sixteen-year-old son road, he found mathematics in the hot desert sun Edward Henry, who was spending the summer on overpowering. Returning to Tropico he set up as a a farm. The first, from Dr. Weston, accompanied a photographer. With a postcard camera he went Bullseye camera and contained instructions on from house to house, photographing babies, pets, loading, standing with the light over one shoulder, family groups, funerals, anything for a dollar a and so on. The second, full of Edward's thanks, ex dozen. He fell in love and, full of responsibility, citedly discussed his failures and a first success—a began seriously studying his profession. He at photograph of the chickens. tended a "college of photography," learning a From then on photography absorbed young solid darkroom technique and how not to pose a Edward; his interest in school dwindled. When a sitter. For a year or two he held jobs with commer magazine reproduced one of his sensitive little cial portraitists, learning to make exact duplicate landscapes, such ambitions as wanting to be a prints even from the poorly exposed and lighted painter or prizefighter vanished; he was definitely negatives of his bosses. a photographer. In 1909 he married. Four sons were born: A livelihood, however, was something else. He Chandler, 1910; Brett, 1911; Neil, 1914; and Cole, came of generations of New England professional 1919. men. Edward, born in Highland Park, Illinois, in In 1911 Weston built his own studio at Tropico. 1886, and his beloved sister Mary, were the first The customers who drifted in were delighted; even children born out of Maine for more than two cen with his 11 x 14 studio camera, he was often able turies. His grandfather taught at Bowdoin College to make several exposures before they were before moving to the Midwest to head a female aware of it. Posing by suggestion, he hid ungainly seminary. His father, a general practitioner, found shapes in chiffon scarves or vignetted them away. time during his rounds to teach in a local college. His The soft-focus Verito lens helped, and he retouched mother, rebelling at the family tradition, left it as so deftly and with such regard for actual modeling her dying wish that Edward should escape and that his patrons, unconscious of any change, were become a business man. convinced they looked that well. After three dull years as an errand boy in Chi He was particularly successful with children. Try cago, Edward went on a two-week holiday to visit ing to capture their activity, he bought, around Mary, now married and living in Tropico, Cali 1912, a 3 Va x4'/4 Graflex. The curtains obscuring fornia. Enchanted by the place, he decided to stay, his skylight and sunny windows came down; the and immediately got a job with some surveyors, subtleties of natural light absorbed him. "I have a punching stakes in orange groves for a boom- room full of corners — bright corners, dark corners, town railroad nobody intended to build. Later, alcoves! An endless change takes place daily as 5 > the sun shifts from one window to another ... All ence for Weston. He decided he would go to live in backgrounds have been discarded except those Mexico. for special decorative effects, which are brought In November he went East to say goodby to 1* out when needed." Mary, whose husband was now with the steel in He worked outdoors as well — his baby sons in dustry in Ohio. The Armco plant, with its rows of the garden, Ruth St. Denis in Japanese costume giant smoke stacks, excited Weston to a series of standing in a shimmer of light and space with one photographs in which his own vision emerges un spot of brilliant sun slanting across her cheek. From mistakably (p. 11). Mary urged him to go to New 1914 to 1917 he received a shower of honors. Com York and see the legendary masters there. In New mercial and professional societies awarded him York, with his mind full of the forms and rhythms of trophies and asked him to demonstrate. Pictorial industrial America, he haunted the bridges and salons in New York, London, Toronto, Boston, Phila rode endlessly on the busses, looking up at the delphia, elected him to membership. Many one- towering city. Articles on Stieglitz by Paul Rosenfeld man shows at schools and clubs brought him further and Herbert Seligmann had helped him discover acclaim. why he was dissatisfied with his own work; actual But he was not content. Something was wrong — contact with Stieglitz left him rather bewildered, with himself, with his hazy Whistlerian and Jap though much moved by the photographs of anese approach. At the 1915 San Francisco Fair O'Keeflfe. His greatest enthusiasm was evoked by he first saw modern painting; radical new friends the clear structure of Charles Sheeler's architectural introduced him to contemporary thought, music, photographs. literature. His conservative friends and in-laws In August, 1923, he sailed for Mexico. With Tina, frowned; instead of settling down as a successful whom he had taught to photograph, he opened a man and father he began to sport a velvet jacket portrait studio in Mexico City. His exhibition at and a cape. He ceased to send to pictorial exhibi "The Aztec Land" in October contained palladio- tions. His work was changing. types of industrial themes, sculptural fragments of By 1920 the Japanese arrangements were vio nudes, highly individual portraits, people in con lently asymmetrical. An attic provided semi-abstract temporary life. The Mexican artists immediately themes of angular lights and shadows. By accident accepted him. "I have never before had such in he discovered the extreme closeup; focusing on a tense and understanding appreciation. The nude, he saw, in the ground glass, forms of breast intensity with which Latins express themselves has and shoulder so exciting that he forgot his custom keyed me to high pitch, yet viewing my work on ers. Groping, with occasional flashes of insight, he the wall day after day has depressed me. I see 2 was still trying to impose his "artistic" personality too clearly that I have often failed." on his subject matter. The three years in Mexico were years of ruthless Then, in 1922, the dark and exciting Tina self-scrutiny and growth. Unable in his halting Modotti took some of Weston's personal work to Spanish to control his sitters by conversation, he Mexico and exhibited it at the Academia de Bellas took them out into the strong sunlight and watched Artes. Her friends — Rivera, Siqueiros, the artists of in his Graflex for the spontaneous moment. A the surging Mexican Renaissance— were enthu startlingly vivid series of heroic heads against the siastic. What is more they bought — a new experi- sky resulted — the keen-squinting Senator Galvan at target practice, Rose Covarrubias smiling, with * Numbers refer to bibliography, p. 35. 6 the sun in her downcast lashes. Commenting on the physical quality — of things is rendered with the head of Guadalupe de Rivera (p. 13), Weston utmost exactness: the rough is rough, the smooth is wrote (1924): "I am only now reaching an attain smooth, flesh is alive, stone is hard.