Chicago is not where he made his finest photographs, but Chicago was his home, and to honor the centennial of his birth, the Art Institute has mounted an exhibition of the work of Edward Weston.
In a year of such tributes to one of the century`s finest photographers, the Art Institute show is not so comprehensive as the blockbuster organized by historian Beaumont Newhall and James Enyeart of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. That show, containing 237 prints, is now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will wend its way through the United States, arriving at Northwestern University`s Block Gallery in January 1989. The San Francisco show, as an example of its inclusiveness, includes two of Weston`s Chicago photographs, including a lovely image of the Lake Michigan surf that is suggestive of his later work.
Nor is the Art Institute show as adventurous as the one at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The Getty exhibit features Weston`s work from 1906 to 1922, when he lived in Los Angeles, and offers further insights into his soft- focus, impressionistic photographs, made in the Pictorial style. The Getty catalogue, incidentally, contains a photograph Weston took of the Art Institute in 1906, the year he left Chicago for California. It is not one of his better pictures, a snapshot really, but one looks at it and wonders about its meaning to Weston. Was it a talisman? A souvenir? A bit of prophecy? We will probably never know.
The Art Institute has chosen not to emphasize the Chicago years (Weston was born in Highland Park on March 24, 1886, and moved to Chicago, where he lived until 1906). Nor does it break new ground in Weston scholarship. But this does not mean that ”Edward Weston, A Centennial Celebration: Photographs from Chicago Collections” is a disappointment: No collection of Edward Weston photographs can fail to please, even a collection that shows us an Edward Weston that is very familiar to us.
If the Art Institute show proves anything, it is that there are several serious collectors of photography in Chicago. The greatest number of borrowed prints comes from the Exchange National Bank collection (17 prints and an Ansel Adams portrait of Weston). Chicago collector Richard Sandor loaned five prints to the exhibition, including two lovely nudes in Weston`s Pictorial style. Tony Armour, another Chicago collector, contributed seven prints, and half a dozen other collectors have contributed one print each from their collections.
The rest of the prints in the show come from the Art Institute`s holdings, which include about 15 vintage prints and 203 more that were printed by his son, Brett, under Weston`s supervision near the end of his life, when Parkinson`s disease had ravaged his body.
In all, about 60 prints are on exhibition through Feb. 1. For those unfamiliar with his work, the show will serve as a satisfactory introduction to his development between 1920 and 1948, the years of his most productive and memorable work.
Weston`s most popular photographs were taken during the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when he was making his lovely nude studies of Tina Modotti and his closeups of vegetables and shells. These include ”Pepper No. 30, 1930,” ”Artichoke Halved, 1930,” ”Cypress Root, 1929,” ”Oceano Dunes, 1936,” and ”Shell, 1927.” Nudes and dunes, landscapes and vegetables, clouds and trees: most of these important motifs are on exhibit at the Art Institute.
Weston began as a commercial portrait photographer, making retouched portraits of his suburban patrons in Tropico (now Glendale), Calif. But in 1922, after a visit to Alfred Stieglitz in New York City, he broke with his past–the studio portraits and the soft-focus pictures–and began producing crisp, sharply focused pictures, in a style that came to be known as
”straight photography.”
In a statement accompanying a 1930 exhibition of his pictures, Weston offered a succinct description of his technique and its underlying philosophy: ”To see the thing itself is essential; the quintessence revealed direct, without the fog of impressionism–the casual noting of transitory or superficial phase. This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant representation–not interpretation.”
”Pepper No. 30” is the finest example of ”significant representation.” Viewers unfamiliar with the subject matter of this breathtakingly simple picture have seen it as a nude, a clenched fist, even the broad, muscular back of a weight lifter. But no, it is a green pepper . . . and something more.
Weston`s spartan style of living was equally simple. His modest house and studio, where he lived from 1929 until his death on New Year`s Day in 1958, was built by one of his sons for about $1,000. Life within was ruthlessly pared to its simplest elements, organized around one purpose: the creation of Weston`s art.
Beaumont and Nancy Newhall visited Weston in Carmel, and Nancy recorded a typical day at his home on Wildcat Hill: ”The Weston way of life, we learned, involved the minimum time and effort in the kitchen or at the dishpan. Breakfast was coffee; you could help yourself to fruit and bread and honey if you liked. Lunch was eaten in the hand–a hunk of cheese, a few dates, an avocado. Around four o`clock, when light goes bleak in the west, there was a cry for `Coffee!` At nightfall, all hands dropped work and joyously collaborated to make supper a feast. I found this simplicity and freedom exhilarating.”
As romantic as Newhall makes it sound, Weston`s living arrangements were also a result of brutal necessity. Even today, it is difficult to make a living as a serious photographer, but it was almost impossible then. Today, many of Weston`s photographs sell for $15,000. Weston never earned more than $5,000 in one year.
(The Art Institute, incidentally, will show three films that offer a glimpse of Weston`s life: ”The Photographer,” by Willard Van Dyke, and two films based on Weston`s Daybooks, his fascinating diaries from 1923 through 1934. All three films will be shown at 3 p.m. on Tuesdays and Saturdays in January.)
The Art Institute exhibit also includes photographs from his Guggenheim years, when he traveled 35,000 miles through the West, taking about 1,200 pictures during 1937 and 1938. It also includes examples of his work in the East and South to illustrate an edition of Whitman`s ”Leaves of Grass” and his Big Sur landscapes from the 1940s: wild, dark, chaotic images that stand in anguished contrast to the lyrical images of the 1930s.
Visitors to the Art Institute who are unfamiliar with Weston`s work will be struck by its physical beauty: the rich, brown tones of his earlier prints and the black, knife-edge sharpness of his mature work. All of his finest images display a meticulous sense of composition and a sensuality of line that offer immediate gratification.
But there is that other quality in Weston`s finest work–beyond the counterpoint of light and dark and the harmony of composition–that is less susceptible of analysis. It is the emotional quality of these pictures that must be seen to be experienced, and once seen, is not soon forgotten.
Face to face with the finest examples of his work, viewers may experience what Weston himself once felt when he made these pictures, an emotion he experienced even as a young man, experimenting in Chicago with the tools of his trade:
”Can I ever forget certain days, periods, places?” Weston wrote in his daybooks. ”One of the earliest–the scene in a Chicago apartment, printing from my first negative made with a stand camera purchased with money saved penny by penny, walking ten miles to save ten cents, denying sweets, selling rags and bottles: a second-hand camera I had seen in a downtown window, with tripod and a filter it cost $11.00. I can even recall my ecstatic cry as the print developed out–`It`s a peach!` ”
A peach, certainly . . . and something more.
