EDWARD WESTON | 'CABBAGE LEAF'

Sotheby's New York, 28 April 1999, Sale 7296, Lot 214

Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., San Francisco

Private collection, Reno

Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., San Francisco

Michael Shapiro Photographs, Westport, 2013

Conger 651

Merle Armitage, The Art of Edward Weston (New York, 1932), pl. 37

Nancy Newhall, ed., The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Volume II, California (Millerton, 1973), pl. 6

Terence Pitts et al., Edward Weston: Forms of Passion (Aperture, 1995), p. 179

'For the first time in months, I am excited to work, and by "still-life," – though I do not like the designation still-life, a misnomer for my most living artichokes, peppers, onions, cabbage! Cabbage has renewed my interest, marvelous hearts, like carved ivory, leaves with veins like flame, with forms curved like the most exquisite shell' (Edward Weston, Daybooks II, p. 213, entry 23 April 1931).  

The photograph offered here is from an intensive series of cabbage studies Edward Weston made between 1927 and 1936. Unlike Cabbage Fragment (42V) and Cabbage Leaf (39V and 40V), the present still life consumes nearly the entire 8-by-10-inch negative.  Dramatically lit, the cabbage is transformed, monumental, and abstracted.  

It is believed that no other print of this image has appeared at auction. According to his negative log, now in the collection of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Weston made only 8 prints of this image, far fewer than his projected edition of 50. A later note by Weston in the log indicates that he destroyed one of these prints. Conger locates 4 prints in institutions: the Center for Creative Photography; Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and a project print at the University of Santa Cruz.