Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Margrethe Mather (1886-1952)

platinum or palladium print, tipped to large cream-colored card, signed by Weston and Mather and dated in pencil on the mount, 1921

The photographer to John ('Jack') Taylor, 1920s

Sotheby's New York, 6 November 1976, Sale 3918, Lot 353

Private collection, San Francisco

Fraenkel Gallery, 1998

New York, AXA Gallery, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, February - April 2003; and traveling thereafter to the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, July - October 2003, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, November 2003 - January 2004

Conger 77

This print:

Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001), p. 75

Beth Gates Warren, Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Trust, 2011), fig. 62, p. 213

This scarce, early platinum or palladium print is characteristically affixed to large cream-colored card, and is dated and robustly signed by both Mather and Weston, in his early style, in pencil in the lower right corner of the mount. The print has rich, warm-tones, which range from a deep, soft black in Sandburg's clothing to a creamy off-white in the sun-bleached wooden bridge. The photographers' retouching and contouring in the wood railing in the upper left quadrant are features of the negative. The print is in essentially excellent condition. When examined closely, several very small deposits of original retouching are visible, some of which appear to have turned white with age. This does not undermine in any way the impressive appearance of this rare print. The large cream-colored card mount is generally clean. It is trimmed along the left and upper edges. There are a few light rust-colored deposits of indeterminate nature, and the left edge is faintly darkened. On the reverse of the mount, 'EW.0193.Y' is written in an unidentified modern hand in pencil.
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Edward Weston met photographer Margrethe Mather in 1913, and she became his model, lover, and most importantly, his teacher.  A sophisticated bohemian, well-connected to Los Angeles's left-wing circles, Mather introduced Weston to a world of expanded horizons.  According to Mather scholar Beth Gates Warren, to whom this entry is indebted, Mather and Weston entered into a photographic partnership in 1921, and approximately twelve doubly-signed images from this period, among them the present portrait of Sandburg, are extant.  This was the only time Weston co-signed work with another photographer. 

This photograph of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and biographer, Carl Sandburg, was taken in March 1921 on Glendale’s Monte Sano Bridge.  Sandburg, who was married to Edward Steichen’s sister Lillian, was in California on a lecture circuit and to interview Charlie Chaplin for the Chicago Daily News.  Weston and Mather made at least two photographs of Sandburg, one of which was included in their joint exhibition at the San Francisco Camera Club in July of that year. 

The print offered here was originally given by Edward Weston to the painter John Taylor (1897-1983).  Taylor studied under abstract artist Stanton MacDonald Wright, and made a living selling advertising for the Los Angeles Times.  His sister, Maud Emily Taylor, was a friend of Margrethe Mather and appears as the subject of a number of her photographs (cf. Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, pp. 45, 46, 51, and 52).