It’s a rare exhibition that clarifies the lesser-known achievements of a master and helps us better understand the work of others. “Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel,” the show that just opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, does both compellingly.
By presenting and proposing interpretations for 76 rarely shown photographs, curator David Travis not only has illuminated the output of Weston’s final decade but also has shed light on a similar pattern among poets, composers and visual artists who have worked at the same level of virtuosity and imagination in their later years. We come away from the exhibition at once exhilarated by a personal vision and satisfied for having met a general truth.
Of course, the largest part of our pleasure comes from pictures by one of the three greatest photographers America produced. But Weston’s late images are different from his best-known still lifes, nudes, landscapes and portraits. They are so different that even in retrospectives the pictures from 1938 to 1948 have been sparsely represented and scarcely interpreted. The present exhibition is the first to really deal with them.
When the show begins in 1938, Weston is already a virtuoso of straight, undoctored photography. Long before, he moved from soft-focus portraits to sharp studies of character that often differed from the sitters’ views of themselves.
He also consistently saw abstractions in the everyday, having created glorious modern pictures of the female form, roots, peppers and shells as well as a homely bedpan.
The rigor within each of his photographs was as high as it could be. And such control was not to tell stories or to express personal emotion. Weston sought to convey visual fact. His mastery of every aspect of picture-making was in the service of an “objective” vision. The world knew him as a formalist.
Weston’s own moody style
In 1938, he had just completed an 11-month tour of California on a Guggenheim Fellowship and had settled into a new studio with his future wife, Charis Wilson.
To dispel the monotony of printing negatives from the tour, he returned to photograph on nearby Point Lobos, his much-favored landscape. Nearly a decade before, he had worked there, shooting static details as tightly controlled as any of his still lifes. Now he photographed vistas, the movement of the surf, broad effects of atmosphere, even sunsets he once considered too picturesque.
A year later, and the photographs changed again. Not since his early romantic portraits did any of Weston’s pictures project mood. But those were in the prevailing style of the day, whereas between 1939 and 1942 his images took on a moodiness in Weston’s own style, which became compositionally more complex. Travis points out “masculine and feminine elements, oppositions of light and dark, and symbols of life and death” — each contained with single frames. He also acknowledges that Weston himself would have denied such descriptions, but the pictures stand on their own and, clearly, a metaphorical reading of his work was more possible during this period.
External factors
For much of World War II, Point Lobos was closed to civilians and gas rationing restricted travel. So external circumstances as much as personal development affected Weston’s picture-making. Strangest of the photographs were tableaux taken on his property that apparently were meant to satirize different genres, including propaganda pictures.
But there also was an offhandedly brilliant series on cats, done for a book written by Wilson, and a group of sensitive family portraits. Did the latter come about because the war threatened to take away his sons, who increasingly were for him a source of emotional stability? It’s reasonable to think so. But, typically, Weston gave a more neutral explanation: the desire to take portraits outside of a studio.
The landscapes that followed, in 1944 and 1945, are the most puzzling of his career. They are cliffsides taken at Point Lobos. Each is of a broad section of rock that extends far beyond the confines of Weston’s frame. The photos present dark, scarred, ambiguous surfaces that Weston’s formalism cannot explain satisfactorily. The exhibition has a fairly large group of them that never have been shown together.
To help us understand these images, Travis leans more heavily on biography: a failing marriage, sons joining the military and, possibly, early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But the interpretation goes beyond such details to a broader pattern that appears among several types of artist in old age. Travis proposes that, like many others, Weston in later years turned away from communication with an audience to a communing with the self. He began to use virtuosity and imagination for private ends.
Weston’s cliffsides are thus for Travis landscapes of the artist’s interior, strongly suggesting the subject of his photographs is no longer the world of fact but Weston’s emotional life projected upon it. This again the artist would have denied. But the proposition brings a measure of clarity to hitherto unfathomable pictures. The pattern that clarifies has been agreed upon by such masters of the written word as W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens; more important, it also has been substantiated by the late works of Michelangelo, Liszt and other artists of deep and lasting significance.
To state the case so bluntly is to do a disservice to Travis’ text for the catalog of the show, as it forces nothing and builds an argument fine in nuance. Still, if one resists comparisons — how many difficult artworks created in advanced age remind writers of Beethoven’s late quartets! — there is something photo historians perhaps know so well that Travis did not have to write: Late Weston — the rock, water and tree pictures, not the nude caprices — seems to have in it both currents that will dominate American landscape photography, that is, the analysis of Ansel Adams and the inwardness of Minor White.
The brilliance of the show then rests in how Travis has seen how everything stems from the cliffsides. No exhibition has presented as many, and that kind of exposure was necessary, for apparently no previous reproductions did them justice. In any event, the images prove as challenging today as they were more than a half century ago. To have attempted to explain them away would have underrated their power. Travis gives us just enough so we can begin to comprehend their prescience while standing in awe of their mystery.
That kind of sensitivity makes the exhibition essential viewing.
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“Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel” continues through Oct. 28 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave. Curator David Travis speaks on the show at 6 p.m. Tuesdayin the museum’s Price Auditorium.
