Edward Weston

The photographer to Sonya Noskowiak

The Estate of Sonya Noskowiak

Arthur Noskowiak, Sonya Noskowiak's brother

Acquired by the present owner from the above

Negative 145N was included in Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston, originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1986 and traveling thereafter to numerous venues through 1990. 

Conger 725, 728, 730, 825, and 828 (these prints); Supreme Instants, cat. 59 (Negative 145N, possibly the print offered here); Edward Weston: Nudes, p. 73 (Negative 72N); The Garden of Earthly Delights: Photographs of Edward Weston and Robert Mapplethorpe, p. 42 (Negative 80N); Edward Weston's Book of Nudes, pl. 11 and p. 81 (Negative 136N);  Edward Weston: Life Work, pl. 55 (Negative 145N);  Weston's Westons: Portraits and Nudes, pl. 34 (Negative 145N)

This group of nude studies of Sonya Noskowiak was given originally by Edward Weston to Noskowiak, in whose collection they remained until the time of her death in 1975.  They were then put on long-term loan by Noskowiak's estate at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.  While at the Center, these prints were used for reproduction in Amy Conger's Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, the most complete catalogue to date of Weston's work.  One print (Negative 145N, Conger 828) was chosen by curator and dean of photographic historians Beaumont Newhall for his seminal 1986 retrospective exhibition of Weston's work, Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston.    

Weston met Sonya Noskowiak in 1929 through his friend and fellow photographer Johan Hagemeyer, for whom she worked as a receptionist.  They soon became lovers and lived together, and Weston taught Noskowiak the craft of photography.  Noskowiak was a frequent model for Weston, who was clearly intrigued by the aesthetic possibilities presented by her lithe and angular body.  According to Amy Conger, the earliest of the nude studies offered here (Conger 725), made in 1933, may have been one of the first done by Weston with a new 4-by-5-inch-format Speed Graphic camera.  This camera was smaller and more mobile than the 8-by-10 camera to which Weston was accustomed, while still yielding negatives of sufficient size from which to make contact prints, such as those offered here.  The highly experimental nude studies Weston embarked upon with this new equipment constituted a departure from the work he had done before.  Using the comparatively light-weight camera, Weston varied his point of view from exposure to exposure, focusing on specific parts of Noskowiak's body, and being especially sensitive to the angles created by her limbs in relation to the edges of the frame.  The resulting images are direct, resolutely unromantic, and austere in their depiction of their subject; they are among the most purely modernist nudes Weston had produced up to that time. 

Along with Weston, Noskowiak (1900-1975) was a charter member of Group f.64, the association of West Coast photographers devoted to 'straight,' unadorned, and objective photography.  Nine of her photographs were included in Group f.64's inaugural exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1932, alongside work by Weston and his son Brett, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, and others. 

The full catalogue information for this lot is as follows:

a group of 5 Nude Studies of Sonya Noskowiak, each mounted, signed, dated, and numbered '2/50' or '4/50' by the photographer in pencil on the mount, each inscribed with the negative number and 3 dated by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, each matted, 1933-34, each no. 2 or 4 from a projected edition of 50 (5)

Full exhibition information for the print of Negative 145N offered here is as follows:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston, November 1986 - February 1987, and traveling to the Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D. C.; Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Cincinnati Art Museum; and The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, through 1990