The Nelson-Atkins Museum Opens Modernist Photographer Brett Weston

Written by Arnold Waldegrave Tuesday, 22 November 2011 23:06

Kansas City, Missouri.- The Nelson-Atkins Museum is pleased to present "The Photographs of Brett Weston", on view from November 23rd through April 1st 2012. Over his long and prolific career, photographer Brett Weston (1911-1993) exemplified the modernist aesthetic. The son of famed photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958), Brett Weston was a “natural” with the camera. "The Photographs of Brett Weston" presents a condensed survey of his career of about 40 prints. While rare works from the Museum’s Hallmark Photographic Collection are also included, this exhibition celebrates a gift of 260 Weston prints from Christian K. Keesee, owner of the Brett Weston Archive in Oklahoma City, and provides a study collection for students and researchers.

Brett Weston grew up in LA. He was the second son of photographer Edward Weston. Van Deren Coke, former curator of the San Francisco Museum of Art referred to Brett Weston as the "child genius of American photography." Brett began taking photographs in 1925 and lived in Mexico with Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. He had his first international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17 and his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Brett had an intuitive very sophisticated sense of abstraction, often flattening the plane and engaging in layered space, an artistic style more commonly seen among modern painters like David Hockney than other photographers. He is best known for his work on the dunes around Oceano, California, a location that he later shared with his father Edward Weston, who never learned to drive. He preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920's and encouraged Edward Weston to explore the new silver papers in his own work.

Brett Weston was credited by renowned photographic historian Beaumont Newhall as the first photographer to make negative space the subject of a photograph. Don Ross, a photographer close to both Brett and Edward, said that Brett never came after anyone. He was a true photographic equal and colleague to his father. "Brett and I are always seeing the same kinds of things to do - we have the same kind of vision. Brett didn't like this; naturally enough, he felt that even when he had done the thing first, the public would not know and he would be blamed for imitating me." Edward Weston - Daybooks - May 24, 1930. Brett used to refer to Edward Weston lovingly as "my biggest fan" and there was no rivalry between the two photographic giants.

Brett loyally set aside his own photography to help Edward after he was unable to print his own images due to Parkinson's disease, which claimed Edward's life in 1958. Brett Weston married and divorced four times. He had one daughter, Erica Weston. Brett Weston lived part time on the Big Island of Hawaii the final 14 years of his life, as well as in Carmel, California. He maintained a home in Waikoloa that was built by his brother Neil Weston, and later moved to Hawaii Paradise Park. He died in Kona Hospital in January, 1993 after suffering a massive stroke. In November of 1996, Oklahoma City collector Christian Keesee acquired from the Brett Weston Estate the most complete body of Weston’s work in existence. One of the primary goals of the Archive is to organize and catalog the collection in such a way as to offer immediate access to recognized as well as unknown and unpublished photographs by Brett Weston. A catalogue raisonne documenting each and every print in the collection with all attributable information on the photographs is currently underway, with a database available for research via the internet. Works by Brett Weston are included in collections of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.


When the massive Beaux Art Nelson-Atkins’ Building opened in 1933, newspapers nationwide reported visitors “amazed,” “gasping at its innovations and marveling at its luxury.”  Still, times being what they were in the Great Depression, operations were modest. The institution-wide transformation of the Nelson-Atkins has included the 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building expansion and renovation of the original 1933 Nelson-Atkins Building. The museum's European painting collection is also highly-prized. It include works by Caravaggio, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Petrus Christus, El Greco, Guercino, Alessandro Magnasco, Giuseppe Bazzani, Corrado Giaquinto, Cavaliere d'Arpino, Gaspare Traversi, Giuliano Bugiardini, Titian, Rembrandt, and Peter Paul Rubens, as well as Impressionists Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh, among others. It also has fine Late Gothic and Early Italian Renaissance paintings by; Jacopo del Casentino (The Presentation of Christ in the Temple), Giovanni di Paolo and Workshop, Bernardo Daddi and Workshop, Lorenzo Monaco, Gherardo Starnina (The Adoration of the Magi), and Lorenzo di Credi. It has German and Austrian Expressionist paintings by Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer (Record Player), Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oskar Kokoschka (Pyramids of Egypt). The museum is distinguished (and widely celebrated) for its extensive collection of Asian art, especially that of Imperial China. Most of it was purchased for the museum in the early 20th century by Laurence Sickman, then a Harvard fellow in China. The museum has one of the best collections of Chinese antique furniture in the country. In addition to Chinese art, the collection includes pieces from Japan, India, Iran, Indonesia, Korea, and Southeast, and South Asia.

The American painting collection includes the largest collection open to the public of works by Thomas Hart Benton, who lived in Kansas City. Among its collection are masterpieces by George Bellows, George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Church, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent. It also has fine Contemporary Paintings and Creations in the Bloch Building by; Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter ("Mirror"), Wayne Thiebaud ("Bikini Girl"), Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, and Alfred Jensen. In 2006, Hallmark Cards chairman Donald J. Hall, Sr., donated to the museum the entire Hallmark Photographic Collection, spanning the history of photography from 1839 to the present day. It is primarily American in focus, and includes works from photographers such as Southworth & Hawes, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Homer Page, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol, Todd Webb, and Cindy Sherman, among others. Outside on the museum's immense lawn, the Kansas City Sculpture Park contains the largest collection of monumental bronzes by Henry Moore in the United States. The park also includes works by Alexander Calder, Auguste Rodin, George Segal and Mark di Suvero, among others. Beyond these, the park (and the museum itself) is well known for Shuttlecocks, a four-part outdoor sculpture of oversize badminton shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. In addition, the museum also has collections of European and American sculpture, decorative arts and works on paper, Egyptian art, Greek and Roman art, modern and contemporary paintings and sculpture, pre-Columbian art, and the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. As well, the museum houses a major collection of English pottery and another of miniature paintings. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.nelson-atkins.org

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