Unlike earlier artists, who chose only subjects “worthy” of art’s attention — episodes from ancient history, for instance, or the beauties and the terrors of nature — Weston took toilets seriously. Or pretty seriously.
“I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty,” he wrote in the journal he called his “Daybook” while living in Mexico in the 1920s with the Italian-born photographer
Tina Modotti. An excerpt from the daybook is included as a wall text next to the 1926 photograph “Excusado.”
“It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject matter,” he continued, but “my excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form.” The photograph is a testament to his excitement, a precise study of shadow and light, form and volume, that treats the toilet more as a sculpture than as a piece of plumbing.
It took a couple of decades for Weston to arrive at this then-radical response to everyday objects. Born in Chicago in 1886, he began taking photographs as a teenager and then followed his older sister to California, where he married and had four sons, opened a commercial photography studio in 1911 and slowly transformed himself into an artist.
As the show’s title indicates, photographs from the breadth of Weston’s career are included — although they are drawn from a single, private collection, that of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, and so are marked by idiosyncrasy and obvious gaps. There are Pictorialist images from Weston’s early career, like a misty view of “Chicago River Harbor,” from 1916. There are portraits — Weston made his living, begrudgingly for many years, as a portrait photographer — although the ones here depict luminaries like the artist Diego Rivera, the novelist D. H. Lawrence and the composer Igor Stravinsky.
But back to the issue of toilets. A later work, “Invalid’s Utensil,” from 1930, flattens the divide between abstract modernist sculpture and everyday object even further. To make this image, Weston stood a bedpan on one end and photographed the object in profile.
“It has a stately, aloof dignity,” he wrote — and then, alluding to his earlier photograph of the toilet in Mexico, “Form follows function, again.”
That “Invalid’s Utensil” looks like modernist sculpture is no mistake; Weston made the photograph after seeing sculptures by the Romanian-born artist
Constantin Brancusi at the home of
Walter and Louise Arensberg in Los Angeles. Thumbnail photographs of Brancusi’s “Princess X,” from 1915-16, and “Maiastra,” from 1912, mounted on the wall at the Heckscher next to “Invalid’s Utensil,” show how he translated an obsession with form — divorced from any narrative or grand allegory — into photography, and how different media cross-pollinated during the modernist era. (Brancusi was similarly invested in Weston’s medium, spending a great amount of time photographing his own sculptures.)
And, yet, Weston’s reputation might better be tied to another humble object rather than to the lowly toilet: the green pepper.
“Pepper No. 30,” from 1930, hung in a central location in this show, is considered one of his masterpieces. Photographed in close-up, the pepper’s curving, muscular form looks at one moment like a human back, then like two beings with heads leaning toward each other — then like just a pepper.
Weston wrote with similar levity in his daybook about the green pepper. He believed it was showing “the strain” of being photographed all week, and should be cut up into a salad — which made him feel like a cannibal for eating his models. “But I rather like the idea that they become a part of me, enrich my blood as well as my vision,” he wrote.
Other found objects received the same treatment as the pepper.
“Chambered Nautilus - Halved” and “Nautilus,” both from 1927, transform seashells into abstract, Brancusian sculptural forms. “Cabbage Leaf” and “Toadstool,” both from 1931, highlight the expressive, graphic qualities of plants: veins in the cabbage leaf and gills (lamellae) on the underside of the mushroom.
Weston is also famous for his nudes. Included here are photographs of Margrethe Mather from 1914; she was a fellow artist and later a collaborator, whom Weston met in 1913 and who is often credited for inspiring him to photograph mundane objects. There are also photos of Modotti and Charis Wilson, who became his second wife. Weston’s photographs of his son Neil, which framed the boy like a fragment of classical statuary and were later re-photographed for postmodern purposes by the artist Sherrie Levine, are not on view.
Weston’s landscapes hark back to the work of 19th-century Western survey photographers, like
Eadweard Muybridge and
Carleton Watkins. But they also look forward to
Ansel Adams or
Aaron Siskind. “Big Sur,” from 1929, shows a series of cliffs, like abstract sculptural forms, receding into the distance. “Surf on Black Sand, Point Lobos,” from 1938, and “Eroded Rocks, South Shore, Point Lobos,” from 1948, perform the same trick of perspective as Weston did on the pepper, collapsing our near and far visions until the landscapes look at one moment like distant views, and at others like close-up abstractions.
But to return once again to that question of toilets: the most famous modern art episode involving a toilet found
Marcel Duchamp, the French expatriate artist, anonymously submitting a urinal to a 1917 open-call exhibition in New York.
“Fountain,” as he titled it, became a cause célèbre when it was rejected — and later, an example of early conceptual art in which ideas and evocative gestures, rather than handcrafted objects, became the focus of art.
Duchamp and Weston occupied different branches of modernism, with Weston eschewing potty humor and treating the toilet as a serious formalist object. But it was still the same tree. The Arensbergs, in whose home Weston saw those Brancusi sculptures, were Duchamp’s most important patrons; and Alfred Stieglitz, whom Weston looked to as the elder statesman of American modern photography, photographed the original, notorious “Fountain.”
And so, although “Edward Weston: Life Work” offers an idiosyncratic, shorthand version of Weston’s oeuvre rather than a comprehensive survey, it touches on some key moments of 20th-century art and acquaints you with some of its underlying arguments, including the celebration of mundane objects — some edible, some not.
“Edward Weston: Life Work” is at the Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, through July 24. Information: (631) 351-3250 or heckscher.org.
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