The Hyde Collection Exhibits : Edward Weston: 'Life Work'

Saturday, 29 July 2006 12:50

Glens Falls, NY – One of the most original and celebrated photographers of the twentieth century, Edward Weston (1886-1958) is the subject of a major exhibition at The Hyde Collection.  Edward Weston: Life Work will be featured in the Museum’s Charles R. Wood Gallery through August 13, 2006.  The Hyde is the only New York venue for this nationally-traveled show.  The 99-vintage photographs on view survey Edward Weston’s 40-year creative trajectory, which coincided with a major shift in American photography from soft-focus, sentimental pictorialism to hard-edged high modernism.  The exhibition will feature some of his earliest photographs from a family album including rare self-portraits and landscapes as well as Weston’s very last photograph, made in 1948, not far from his beloved home in Carmel, California.  Between these first and last images are some of the most highly prized and acclaimed photographs of the twentieth century.  A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition is available for purchase in The Museum Store.

Throughout this retrospective, previously unpublished masterpieces are interspersed with Weston’s well-known signature images.  Among the works on view are a striking 1909 outdoor study of Weston’s wife, Flora, perhaps his first nude; a 1907 landscape featuring a cow skull in the Mojave Desert; and a smoky view of the Chicago River harbor from 1916 that pays homage to photographer Alfred Stieglitz.  These works and others are among Weston’s most revered subjects that brought out the sensuality of natural shapes and reduced other forms to semiabstract simplicity.

The photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.  Most of the works were acquired from members of the Weston family and include a large collection from his daughter-in-law Dody Weston Thompson.  Edward Weston: Life Work is organized and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles. All works courtesy of the Michael Mattis and Judith Hotchberg Collection.

Edward Weston: Life Work

Edward Weston began his career in 1911 as a commercial portrait photographer in Tropico (now Glendale), California, working in the Pictorialist style of the day.  With the arrival of Modernist ideas in Los Angeles between 1914 and 1920, he began to experiment with figure studies and landscapes and decided to make a living as an artist outside the commercial photographic world.  By 1922 he counted Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Imogen Cunningham among his friends and declared himself "converted" to Modernism in a lecture in Los Angeles.

In the mid-1920s, Weston unleashed his newly trimmed-down approach in Mexico with works such as Tina Reciting (1924) and Excusado (1926).  Upon his return to Glendale in 1927, Weston continued to experiment with pure form and scale shifts using long exposures of shells, peppers, mushrooms, radishes, and kelp.  These nature studies led to a remarkable set of sculptural nudes completed in 1933 and 1934.

Subsequently, Weston turned to landscape. This exhibition includes an important suite of six landscape studies made near Oceano, California, from 1934-1946.  In addition to landscape and studies of desert detritus, portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures are well represented.  This chronological survey concludes with Weston’s consummate final photograph, nicknamed The Dody Rocks (1948).

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