Edward Weston 1886-1958

Gift of the photographer to Arthur F. Kales

The Estate of Arthur F. Kales

To Graham Nash by Tom Jacobson, as agent

Sotheby's New York, Photographs from the Collection of Graham Nash, 25 April 1990, Sale 6003, Lot 194 

Christie's New York, 5 October 1994, Sale 7598, Lot 194

Other prints of this image:

Conger 28

Beaumont Newhall, Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston (Boston, 1986), pl. 3

Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001), pl. 17

Susan Danly and Weston J. Naef, Edward Weston in Los Angeles (The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Henry E. Huntington Library, 1986), fig. 23

Beaumont Newhall and Amy Conger, editors, The Edward Weston Omnibus (Salt Lake City, 1984), fig. 8

Christian A. Peterson, After the Photo Secession: American Pictorial Photography 1910-1955 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1997), pl. 97 

Margery Mann, California Pictorialism (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1977), p. 67

Pictorialism in California: Photographs 1900-1940 (The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Henry E. Huntington Library, 1994), fig. 5

Anne Tucker, Target II: 5 American Photographers (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1979), cover and p. 23

It is believed that this print of Epilogue is the only vintage print of the image in private hands.  Amy Conger locates three other vintage platinum or palladium prints, all in institutional collections:  the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (formerly in the collection of the photographer Johan Hagemeyer); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The subject of Epilogue is Margrethe Mather, Weston’s fellow photographer, business partner, and lover.  Weston described Mather as ‘the first important person in my life,’ one who widened the scope of his experience and pushed him past the aesthetic confines of salon Pictorialism.  Epilogue relates to another photograph by Weston of Mather, entitled Prologue to a Sad Spring (Conger 52).  While both images use elements from the vocabulary of Pictorialism – soft focus and consciously deployed props, for instance – they look forward to the modernism that Weston would investigate thoroughly in the following decades.  Weston/Mather expert Beth Gates Warren writes, ‘Although probably taken first, Epilogue was the more modern of the two images, combining aspects of [Weston’s] experimental shadow pictures from the mid-teens with the geometric planes and massings that began to dominate his images in the early twenties’  (Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, p. 23).

This print of Epilogue comes originally from the collection of photographer Arthur F. Kales (1882 – 1936), a member of the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles, of which Weston and Mather were founding members.  Kales studied law, and went on to a career as an advertising manager with pioneering radio broadcaster Earle C. Anthony in Los Angeles and San Francisco. From 1922 to 1936, Kales wrote regularly about Pictorial photography for Photograms of the Year.  In his own photographic work, Kales frequently used movie sets as backdrops, and costumed dancers and actresses as models. One Kales photograph (Pictorialism in California, p. 72) was taken on the ‘Babylonian’ set of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance.  Kales was a master of the difficult bromoil transfer process, and this allowed him to heighten the sense of drama and atmosphere in his photographs.  In 1928, fifty of Kales’s photographs were exhibited in a retrospective of his work at the Smithsonian Institution.  

While outside Weston and Mather’s circle, and working in an entirely different photographic mode, Kales was an appreciator of Weston’s work.   It is easy to guess that he would have admired, in this print of Epilogue, Weston’s bravura technical control of photographic craft, and his evocative use of a stage-like setting.  Whereas Kales tended to seize upon any elements of drama in his own images, however, Weston skillfully underplays the drama in Epilogue.