The Unknown Weston : Edward Weston’s Career--and International Fame--Began in Los Angeles. A New Show at the Getty Brings His Early Works to Light

Edward Weston is celebrated today as one of the world’s great photographers, an artist who pioneered the medium and showed the world that a photograph need not emulate a painting to qualify as a work of art. Weston created a body of work that has become an integral part of the field’s visual grammar: non-erotic nude studies that emphasize form over content; majestic still lifes of commonplace vegetables; magnificently textured close-ups of the natural formations in the rocks, trees and ocean at Point Lobos near Carmel. With almost religious zeal, he produced sharp, crisp images of what he called “the thing itself,” and so became the spiritual father of what is known as “straight” photography.

Weston was drawn to such a variety of subjects as a byproduct of his nature, for he was a restless man. Throughout his life, he was a wanderer and a philanderer, incapable of staying in one place or with one woman for any length of time. His travels and his love affairs are legendary. The one constant in his life was his art; he once ranked the passions of his life, in order, as “photography,” “my sons” and “women.” Today he is revered as much for his devotion to his medium as for his contributions to it.

To commemorate the centennial of his birth, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has launched a comprehensive Weston retrospective that will tour the United States through 1990. The Huntington Library in San Marino is also displaying a selection of Weston prints from the second half of his career, which he gave the institution as a condition of a Guggenheim grant. But the most unusual exhibit of Weston’s work is to be found at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. Its theme is Weston’s early years in Los Angeles--a chapter of his career that is often all but forgotten in studies of his work, though his affiliation with Los Angeles lasted, on and off, for 30 years. Many of the Getty’s 50 prints on display have not been seen publicly for 70 years. Part of the reason for this oversight is that, despite Weston’s extraordinary local success as a portrait photographer and the international success he achieved here as an art photographer, Weston himself came to disavow his early works. His admirers will be surprised at the style of these seminal photographs, primarily because they lack the sharp-focus clarity that imbues his later work. For this reason, Weston destroyed nearly all his plates from that era. The few prints that survive were handed down to descendants of the friends he gave them to.

So why mount an exhibit that Weston himself would have hated to see? “Edward Weston is the most important visual artist--in any medium--with roots in Los Angeles,” says Weston Naef, the Getty’s curator of photographs. “He is not only one of the great giants in the art of photography, he is the only artist whose work is known in every country of the world where there is visual literacy. It is important for us to acknowledge that he has genuine artistic roots here. He is more often associated with Carmel and Northern California, but it was with photos made in Los Angeles that he had his first international fame.”

The Getty photographs date from 1906, when Weston came from Chicago at the age of 20 to visit his older sister, May, and her husband in a section of Glendale that was then called Tropico. Weston fell in love with the wide-open terrain, the promise of adventure, and he decided to stay.

Weston’s career began with the purchase of a post-card camera--the precursor to today’s Polaroids--which he carried from door to door, providing local families with photographic souvenirs of their children, pets and even their deceased relatives in caskets awaiting burial. From that he graduated to a job retouching negatives at a downtown Los Angeles studio. This apparently represented enough of a display of financial stability to win the hand of his sister’s friend Flora Chandler, though it would ultimately be her earnings as a third-grade schoolteacher that would support them and their four sons. (Money woes plagued him throughout his life. The $35,000 that a single Weston print posthumously fetched at a recent Sotheby’s auction would have sustained him for a decade or more.)

Weston worked his way up from darkroom assistant to full-fledged photographer, all the while taking pictures of friends, family and scenery around Tropico, for his own amusement. By 1911, he had developed enough confidence to build his own studio in Tropico, a $600 shack described at the time in a local newspaper as “a diminutive bungalow . . . almost hidden by palms, banana plants and shrubbery.” The first week of business yielded only $1 in sales--for a dozen post cards--but eventually Pasadena socialites and Hollywood stars found their way up the daisy path and onto the old mohair couch in Weston’s 11x14-foot cabin. One newspaper item spotlighted Weston’s “portraits of children, the most difficult branch of the art,” and noted that his prices were “most reasonable.”

Soft-focus portraits in the Pictorial style were what customers expected, artfully retouched photographs that resembled paintings by Sargent or Whistler. “Weston had no drawing talent,” says his biographer, Ben Maddow. “He didn’t feel at home manipulating negatives.” Indeed, retouching, much in demand by his narcissistic clientele, was a custom he came to loathe, so much so that the principle of “straight” photography, with which his name later became synonymous, forbids its use. In later years, his shingle would dictate “Unretouched Portraits” only.

Nevertheless, Weston excelled at his early portraiture, and his success carried over to the work he did for himself, using his friends or his young sons as models. He began sending his pictures to tony “salons” throughout the country--Atlanta, St. Paul, Boston, Philadelphia--where they were displayed to much acclaim and frequently won awards. In 1914, Weston first achieved an international reputation when five of his pictures were cited as the best at the London Salon, the most prestigious place in the world to have one’s work displayed.

Weston told a visiting reporter: “My neighbors say, ‘How can a photographer doing his work in a little shack like mine win the great awards?’ They think it is some kind of hoax.” In fact, he took great pride in the distance he was able to keep from the bustle of downtown Los Angeles, where his sister thought he ought to relocate. “I’m going to make my name so famous,” he told her, “that it won’t matter where I live.”

The next few years were perhaps the most critical and convulsive in Weston’s career, for they represent both the pinnacle of his earliest fame and also his growing internal need to redirect and reorient his art. Even as he was elected to membership in the London Salon--one of six from the United States, and the only one from California--Weston was experiencing dissatisfaction with his work. Partly to blame was the bohemian company he kept, the artists and dancers and musicians who populated his night life, so unlike the babbitt-like clientele he photographed by day. His coterie constituted an insular avant-garde, far from the cultural center of New York but every bit as intent on keeping abreast of the latest trends in literature, music and art. They read about Jung, Freud, the occult. They loathed middle-class culture and attacked the status quo. Together they went to concerts and poetry readings, drank wine and discussed religion.

On a typical evening, as recorded by Weston, the group eschewed “deadly respectable ice-cream parlors with smug people, sickening sweets, bad music” for “a Greek coffeehouse near Los Angeles Street where sailors gathered--there had been a murder committed there and fights were a nightly occurrence.” They had stumbled on a rowdy gay bar. It was, wrote Weston, “a fascinating night.”

Another key influence on Weston was his exposure, at the 1915 International Exposition in San Francisco, to the modern concepts of symbolism and Expressionism, whose elements quickly found their way into his pictures. By 1920, he had latched onto yet another art style that was in vogue--Picasso’s Cubism--and again adapted it to his photography. In short, he was through with soft-focus and fuzzy effects. Now his pictures, in keeping with the times, would be hard-edged and angular, constructed of geometric patterns and cones of shadow and light.

In many of the portraits of Weston’s arty friends included in the Getty exhibit, curator Naef sees another force at work--the power of the unconscious. In the golden age of Freud, Naef believes, Weston produced “psychological portraiture” that was “more incisive, more character probing” than anything he had done up to that point. (When Weston relocated to Carmel at the end of the decade, a newspaperman there would write: “If I were going into partnership with a man or to marry a woman, I would want first to see a Weston portrait of him or her. It would constitute a report far more informative than any that could be submitted by a psychiatrist, a doctor, or a fortune teller.”)

As he began to develop his philosophy and the sharp-focused, unretouched style, Weston stopped sending his photographs to salons. Turning his back on his previous accomplishments, he scraped the emulsions off his prizewinning plates and used them for windowpanes. He converted a silver trophy into a container for shoe polish. He decried his own artistic pretenses, and even the clothes he had worn to play the part (described by Maddow as “the American idea of a European artist’s costume: cape, flowing tie, cane and velvet jacket”).

Indeed, Weston was growing more and more dissatisfied with the way things were going for him in Los Angeles. Though he was strongly attached throughout his life to his sons, he was spiritually detached from his wife soon after they were married, and he entered into a long string of adulterous relationships with models, assistants and disciples. He was ready for a major change--in his life, his work, even his locale--and it came in the form of a three-part pilgrimage.

The first leg of his journey was a 1922 visit to Middletown, Ohio, where his sister May now lived. At the American Rolling Mill Co. factory where her husband worked, Weston photographed the huge smokestacks in a style that represents a true turning point; the ARMCO pictures are generally considered to be the first great Weston images that embody the requirement that a photograph be about “the thing itself,” as he would later articulate his now-famous dictum--crisp, clear, bold.

From Ohio, Weston ventured to New York City to meet the godfather of the reigning school of photo-secessionists, Alfred Stieglitz, whose Camera Works magazine he had been studying assiduously for years. The experience left him euphoric. He hung on Stieglitz’s every word, and Stieglitz was a man of many words. “Frankly,” Weston confided in his journal, “I did not know always what he was talking about,” but he was stimulated and encouraged nonetheless.

The third part of Weston’s pivotal adventure was what Maddow calls his “psychic voyage,” his much-delayed Odyssean mid-life journey to Mexico in 1923. One of the popular gathering places of Weston’s crowd in Los Angeles had been the studio of painter and fabric designer Roubaix de L’Abrie Richey. It was Robo, as he was known, who persuaded Weston to visit the “artist’s paradise” of Mexico: “There is for me more poetry in one lone zerape-enshrouded figure leaning in the door of the pulque shop at twilight or of a bronzen daughter of the Aztecs nursing her child in the church than could be found in L.A. in the next 10 years,” he wrote. Robo even offered to do advance publicity for a Weston exhibit in Mexico City.

Although Robo died at the age of 31 before the exhibit opened (from cholera, smallpox or tuberculosis; the accounts vary), the show was well received. More to the point, many of Weston’s prints sold to the public, a phenomenon he was unaccustomed to in the United States.

In a gesture that has been compared to Gauguin’s abandonment of France for Tahiti 30 years earlier, Weston--eager for new subjects and inspirations--took the path of other cynical artist expatriates of his generation. “I leave for Mexico to start life anew,” he wrote to Stieglitz. “Why I hardly know.”

He took with him only the oldest of his four sons and his lover, silent-movie-actress Tina Madotti, who, 10 years his junior, was drawn to Weston and, as Maddow writes, “became his pupil, his model, his admirer and his mistress: all more or less at the same time.” Weston, for his part, was no doubt drawn to what a poster for her film, “The Tiger’s Eye,” advertised as Madotti’s “exotic allure.” She also happened to be Robo’s wife. From the deck of the S.S. Colima, Weston waved goodby to his wife and three youngest sons, and heard Flora call out, “Tina, take good care of my boys!”

As further evidence that Weston was seeking to purge his creative soul, he burned the diary he had started keeping several years earlier. Says Maddow: “He felt it was the work of an unsophisticated young man. He was ashamed of his bohemian period.” And so his legendary published Daybooks--one of the most compelling literary insights into an artist’s psyche--begin with his escape to Mexico.

With Los Angeles still his home base, Weston spent three years in Mexico, where his work was well received and where he befriended Diego Rivera and other artists of the Mexican Renaissance.

When he returned to Glendale in 1926, Weston, afraid to leave his studio for fear of missing portrait customers, started photographing the series of vegetable and shell still lifes that cemented his position in the pantheon of master photographers. But the city had grown and changed; the wide-open spaces were disappearing. Weston now was more miserable than ever and openly contemptuous of the city’s “blocks of smug bungalows” and “long- faced, bleary-eyed commuters” he so detested. He spent the next 10 years traveling up and down the coast--to Carmel, San Francisco and, finally, a home in Santa Monica Canyon with his sons and his second wife, Charis Wilson, who was 28 years younger than he. Together, they embarked on his 1937-38 Guggenheim expeditions (as the first photographer to receive the $2,000 grant, he was finally unleashed from his studio to pursue his art full time), and at last they settled in Carmel. It was there that, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, he took his last photograph in 1948.

In a 1953 letter to a researcher who apparently inquired about his early work in Tropico, Weston writes that those pictures “have disappeared over the years.” In a shaky hand that betrays the advanced stages of the ailment that would end his life on New Year’s Day, 1958, he adds: “I think the studio still stands, moved back and whitewashed--a used-car lot.”

Indeed, used Volkswagens were being sold on the same spot where Edward Weston first attracted the world’s attention to his photographic wizardry. Today, the shack is vanished completely. In its place, just north of the intersection of Brand and Los Feliz boulevards, is a U-Haul dealership whose employees have never heard the name Edward Weston nor seen the images he has immortalized on film.

As Weston Naef says: “Living in Los Angeles today and not realizing how important Edward Weston’s local contribution was to photography is like living in Holland and not knowing how much Rembrandt contributed to the definition of cultural life there.”