Brett Weston
Vintage Photographs
Vintage Photographs
Sept. 17 - Nov. 7 1998
Dune
This exhibition was the artist’s first one-person retrospective in a New York art gallery. A large portion of the exhibition featured never before exhibited - and therefore largely unknown - bodies of work. It is believed that fifty percent of Weston’s photographic artwork was neither shown nor reproduced during the artist’s lifetime. This exhibition will provide the opportunity to more fully assess Brett Weston’s unique contribution to the medium of photography, and his significant place in its history.
Brett Weston seemed destined from birth to become one of our greatest American photographic artists. Born in Los Angeles in 1911, the second son of photographer Edward Weston, he had perhaps the closest artistic relationship with his famous father of all four of the Weston sons. In 1925, Edward removed Brett from school and took him to Mexico where the thirteen year old became his father’s apprentice. Surrounded by the revolutionary artists of the day, such as Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and influenced as well by the striking contrast of life in Mexico, it was there that Brett first began making photographs with a small Graflex 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 camera.
Weston’s introduction to modern art, via the work of the painters Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, unquestionably influenced his sense of form and composition. An acute sense of design was evident in Brett’s early images of organic and man-made objects. At the age of eighteen, nearly twenty of his images were included in the landmark German exhibition Film und Foto, considered one of the most important avant-garde exhibitions held between the two World Wars. This recognition brought the younger Weston international attention and inclusion in numerous photographic exhibitions in the following years, including his first one person museum show at the age of 21.
Included in the exhibition will be a vintage contact print of Hand and Ear, 1929, one of the images originally shown in Film und Foto. The photograph was taken as a portrait of Ramiel McGehee, a man with only one eye. When McGehee covered his sightless eye with his palm, as he so frequently did, Brett quickly focused in on the detail of his fingers pressed to his temple. It is an unusual but clear example of Brett’s lifelong concentration on textures and patterns. Like his photographs of plants, airplanes, land or cityscapes, this close-up invites the
discovery of sensual rhythms in nature that would otherwise go unnoticed. Not one to address the intellectual properties of his subjects, he demonstrated a belief that pure form was meaningful as content, and challenged viewers’ perceptions of ordinary things through out his career.
In 1929, Brett and his father moved to Carmel, California where the Weston family, including Brett’s three brothers, would maintain homes for the rest of their lives. At various times, Brett Weston lived in Los Angeles where he had his own studio and portrait business, and in New York where he was stationed in the army. He also traveled extensively on personal photographic trips in Europe, Japan, Alaska and Hawaii. In 1947 Weston received a Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to photograph along the East Coast.
Throughout the decades of the 1950’s and 1970’s, Brett Weston’s style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose - plant leaves, knotted roots and tangled kelp along the beach - were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career. In the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s Weston spent much of his time in Hawaii where he said," I have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically." He died at one of his two Hawaiian homes, in Kona,
in January 1993.
Brett Weston seemed destined from birth to become one of our greatest American photographic artists. Born in Los Angeles in 1911, the second son of photographer Edward Weston, he had perhaps the closest artistic relationship with his famous father of all four of the Weston sons. In 1925, Edward removed Brett from school and took him to Mexico where the thirteen year old became his father’s apprentice. Surrounded by the revolutionary artists of the day, such as Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and influenced as well by the striking contrast of life in Mexico, it was there that Brett first began making photographs with a small Graflex 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 camera.
Weston’s introduction to modern art, via the work of the painters Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, unquestionably influenced his sense of form and composition. An acute sense of design was evident in Brett’s early images of organic and man-made objects. At the age of eighteen, nearly twenty of his images were included in the landmark German exhibition Film und Foto, considered one of the most important avant-garde exhibitions held between the two World Wars. This recognition brought the younger Weston international attention and inclusion in numerous photographic exhibitions in the following years, including his first one person museum show at the age of 21.
Included in the exhibition will be a vintage contact print of Hand and Ear, 1929, one of the images originally shown in Film und Foto. The photograph was taken as a portrait of Ramiel McGehee, a man with only one eye. When McGehee covered his sightless eye with his palm, as he so frequently did, Brett quickly focused in on the detail of his fingers pressed to his temple. It is an unusual but clear example of Brett’s lifelong concentration on textures and patterns. Like his photographs of plants, airplanes, land or cityscapes, this close-up invites the
discovery of sensual rhythms in nature that would otherwise go unnoticed. Not one to address the intellectual properties of his subjects, he demonstrated a belief that pure form was meaningful as content, and challenged viewers’ perceptions of ordinary things through out his career.
In 1929, Brett and his father moved to Carmel, California where the Weston family, including Brett’s three brothers, would maintain homes for the rest of their lives. At various times, Brett Weston lived in Los Angeles where he had his own studio and portrait business, and in New York where he was stationed in the army. He also traveled extensively on personal photographic trips in Europe, Japan, Alaska and Hawaii. In 1947 Weston received a Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to photograph along the East Coast.
Throughout the decades of the 1950’s and 1970’s, Brett Weston’s style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose - plant leaves, knotted roots and tangled kelp along the beach - were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career. In the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s Weston spent much of his time in Hawaii where he said," I have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically." He died at one of his two Hawaiian homes, in Kona,
in January 1993.