Edward Weston 1886-1958

Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 8 May 1979, Lot 197

Acquired by Margaret W. Weston from the above

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs, 1900-1930, September - November 1979; and traveling to The Art Institute of Chicago, December 1979 - February 1980

Hannover, Kestner Gesellschaft, Anton Josef Trcka, Edward Weston, Helmut Newton: The Artificial of the Real, March - May 1998

Monterey Museum of Art, Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston, January - April 2003

Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, November 2003 - January 2004

This print:

Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston (Monterey Museum of Art, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition), cover and frontispiece

David Travis and Anne Kennedy, Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs, 1900-1930 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 217 (this print)

Carl Haenlein, Anton Josef Trcka, Edward Weston, Helmut Newton: The Artificial of the Real (Kestner Gesellschaft, 1998, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 90

Peter C. Bunnell, ed.,  Edward Weston: On Photography (Salt Lake City, 1983), cover and unpaginated

The Smithsonian Institution print:

Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (New York, 2001, in conjunction with the exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art), p. 25

Manfred Heiting, ed., Edward Weston (Köln, 2004), p. 56

Edward Weston's 'The Ascent of Attic Angles' is the most intriguing, and perhaps the best, of all of Weston's 'attic pictures,' a key group of works that helped propel the photographer from his pictorialist beginnings and into the world of modernism.  Taken in the years 1920 and 1921, the attic pictures leave behind the soft-focus and sometimes sentimental Weston studies of the 1910s, and emphasize instead defined and geometric planes of light and structure.  Although other pictures from the attic series identify their sitters by name, the identity of the sitter in 'The Ascent of Attic Angles' can only be guessed.  An air of lyricism and mystery pervades the photograph: it is a narrative interrupted, a gesture frozen as in a film still, staged not with props, but with intersecting angles of light. 

The attic series began in July of 1920, with Weston's portrait of the dancer and designer Ramiel McGehee in his garret apartment in Redondo Beach, a picture entitled simply  'Ramiel in His Attic' (Conger 53).  A 'mystically inclined individual,' in the words of Beth Gates Warren, as well as a serious student of oriental art and philosophy, McGehee was a friend of both Weston and Margrethe Mather, and would remain close to Weston for some 40 years.  Around 1920, when the first attic pictures were made, Mather introduced Weston to her friend Betty Katz (later Betty Brandner), who appears in at least six different photographs made that autumn in her own attic (cf. Conger 54 for one of these, entitled 'Betty in Her Attic').  In this experimental phase of his life, Weston had physical affairs with both McGehee and Katz.  Beth Gates Warren, an authority on Mather and Weston in their Southern California years, recounts the foursome--Mather, Weston, Katz, and McGehee--enjoying the rounds of the nightclubs and bars of Los Angeles (cf. Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, pp. 21 and 25).  In 1921, Weston posed his friend and fellow photographer Johan Hagemeyer in McGehee's attic, for the picture 'Sunny Corner in an Attic' (Conger 55).  Based on its architectural features, McGehee's Redondo Beach garret has also been identified by Warren as the setting for 'The Ascent of Attic Angles,' and Warren speculates that the sitter of 'Ascent' is Betty Katz.  The date of 1921 on the photograph, however, also leaves open the possibility that the sitter is Tina Modotti, whom Weston had met by April of that year.  The identification of Modotti as the sitter was used when the present print was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. 

In his essay 'Edward Weston: The Transformation of Fine Art Photography' (in L.A.'s Early Moderns, Los Angeles, 2003), Michael Dawson proposes that the attic pictures rely more than a little on the influence of Ramiel McGehee and his knowledge and enthusiasm for Japanese and Chinese art, of which he had an extensive collection.   Dawson describes McGehee as highly educated, and a translator of Chinese poetry; for a number of years, McGehee had in fact lived in both China and Japan.  Warren points out that McGehee was known to have been personally adept in classical Japanese dance. His talents in this regard may well have influenced the pose of the sitter in 'Ascent.'  Both Warren and Dawson recount how Mather and Weston had ties to the community of Japanese artists in Los Angeles at that time, and the Japanese-Americans' appreciation of Weston's work is well-known.  Certainly the sparseness of the attic pictures, with their flat bisecting planes of light and shadow and choreographed sitters, call to mind certain rigors associated with Japanese prints and paintings.  For Dawson, Weston's experimental attic pictures are 'unique within the spectrum of fine art photography in Southern California' (Dawson, op. cit., p. 248). 

Several of Weston's attic pictures were exhibited in the salons of the day, and critical reception was mixed.  Warren provides a long list of the photographic salons in which one or more of the attic photographs were shown, from Los Angeles and San Francisco, to Kansas City and Philadelphia (Warren, op. cit., p. 136, fns. 81, 82, and 83).  'The Ascent of Attic Angles' was exhibited, possibly for the first time, at the Second Annual Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Seattle, November 1921.  Conger excerpts a number of the most provocative reviews of the various attic pictures, both positive and negative, including one commentator's verdict on 'Ramiel in His Attic':  'It should fairly startle the conventional portraitist and leave him gasping' (quoted in Conger 53).  This same reviewer linked the picture to the trends in painting of the time, calling the photograph 'suggestive of Cubist thought.'  Imogen Cunningham, however, noted the essential difference between the originality of Weston's attic photographs and the self-consciously artful photographs of the time; writing of 'Ramiel in His Attic,' Cunningham pronounced, 'It has all the cubisticly inclined photographers laid low' (quoted in Conger 53). Cunningham's own print of the Ramiel attic study is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.     

One important critic who, by Weston's own account, was a champion of the attic pictures was the Norwegian-born J. Nilsen Laurvik (1877-1953), likely the original owner of the print offered here.  In the 1979 Sotheby's auction in which Maggi Weston purchased 'The Ascent of Attic Angles,'  a small group of letters to Laurvik from Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, with associated ephemera, was offered as another lot; this group of letters and 'The Ascent of Attic Angles'  were originally part of the same collection.  Laurvik was something of a Renaissance man in the art world, one who mingled with photographers, critics, and the museum worlds on both the East and West Coasts.  A member of the Photo-Secession, he contributed to Camera Work, knew Stieglitz well, and exhibited his own autochromes at '291' in 1909.  Stieglitz photographed him on at least two separate occasions, and these portraits are reproduced in Greenough 367, 621, and 622.  It is certain that Weston's and Laurvik's paths had crossed by the early 1920s, when Laurvik was the director of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Conger points out that Laurvik and Weston had juried together, and that Laurvik had critiqued Weston's work (Conger, 'Biography' section, p. 7).  Although Weston destroyed his daybooks from the early California years, references to Laurvik pepper the photographer's later California daybooks, from 1927 to 1930.           

His wide range of subjects and tastes across a broad spectrum of the arts seems to have only confirmed for Laurvik the importance of photography.  In a transcript of notes for a lecture that he delivered to the Southern California Camera Club in 1922, Edward Weston quotes Laurvik as stating that photography was: 'The most valuable medium through which our present age can be portrayed--Photography--that wonderful extension of our own vision' ('Random Notes on Photography: Lecture Notes by Edward Weston,' in Edward Weston: Photographs and Papers, Center for Creative Photography, Guide Series Three, Tucson, 1980, p. 5).  Further on in his lecture, Weston described at some length one of his earliest encounters with Laurvik:

'And here seems to be an opportune place to record some personal observations to me from J. Nilsen Laurvik, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art -and one of the finest critics in America today, with a reputation for being fearless and outspoken in his opinions.  I met Laurvik first at the convening jury for the first Oakland Salon of Photography, later at an exhibit - at which time I asked him if I might show him a few of my prints.  He did not know my work but was at once agreeable - and invited me to tea in the Palace of Fine Arts.  Before meeting Laurvik, I spent a couple of hours at the Roerich exhibit [the Russian artist Nicolas Roerich] - and I felt almost apologetic over my own work - being so overwhelmed with the wonder of Roerich - and so I expressed myself to Laurvik - who rather berated my lack of faith in photography -

'In looking over my prints--Laurvik was most sensitive as to whether any real feeling, intellectual or emotional, had been sensed at the time of exposure. He unerringly picked out those which had real intent or those which were forced - lacking in spontaneity -or reminiscent of another medium or the past.  His final scrutiny was invariably the print quality - which delighted me.  ''Fine thing,'' ''great feeling,'' he would exclaim and ''now let us see the print quality.''  He liked my attic series very much.  When I told him Stieglitz had not given them the recognition I had hoped for in the Wanamaker show, he said ''Pay no attention to Stieglitz, he is afraid of them; they are too original '' (ibid., pp. 6-7).

In closing this account of his first serious meeting with Laurvik, Weston noted that Laurvik again told him, '''Photography is the most valuable medium we have to express our own time,''' adding, '''Some day photographs by the masters of the craft will be prized and valued as a Rembrandt or Whistler etching is now''' (ibid., p. 7). 

As with most of Weston's early work in platinum, none of the attic pictures exist in any quantity.  The print offered here is especially rare, believed to be one of only two prints of the image extant.  The other, also a platinum print on its original mount, is in the collection of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.  Similarly titled, signed, and dated to the print offered here, the Smithsonian print of 'Ascent,' along with 'Ramiel in His Attic,' was among a group of photographs Weston himself donated to the National Museum of American History in 1923.