Edward Weston

Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago

Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Private Collection

Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001) pl. 63

When Edward Weston met photographer Margrethe Mather in 1913, she quickly 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. In her definitive study of the two photographers, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, Beth Gates Warren charts Weston's evolution, in the 1910s and 1920s, from his conservative family lifestyle to one of liberated self-expression in politics, sex, and art. Warren vividly describes the two personalities in play during these years: the bisexual Mather, free-thinking, radical, and connected to the budding Hollywood film crowd; the solidly middle-class and Midwestern Weston, married to an equally middle-class friend of his sister, and by the early 1920s, the father of four young boys. Unfortunately, but perhaps with good reason, Weston destroyed his journals from these early years in California. But he recorded in his daybooks, at the end of his life, the significance of Margrethe Mather:

“I even regret destroying my day book prior to Mexico: if badly written, it recorded a vital period, all my life with M. M., the first important person in my life; and perhaps even now, though personal contact has gone, the most important. Can I ever write in retrospect? Or will there be someday a renewed contact? It was a mad but beautiful life and love!” (Edward Weston, Daybooks, Mexico, p. 145).

By the time the present photograph was made in 1923, Mather’s and Weston’s romantic and artistic partnership was waning. Later that year Weston would leave for Mexico with his new muse and lover, the photographer Tina Modotti. The present nude—from a series Weston made of Mather in his Glendale studio—are among his most sensual and modern portraits at this pivotal time in his career. “Weston created a radiant series of visual exercises in rhythm and light, incorporating Mather’s figure as the focal point and composing the image around her” (Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, p. 31). 

Prints of this image are scarce. At the time of this writing, only one other print of this image is believed to have been offered at auction: sold at Phillips New York in April 1999 from The Coville Collection and now in a Private New York Collection. Prints of other images in this series are in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, and The Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.