ZOOMING IN ON THE MYTH OF WESTON

There is art--like the Mona Lisa--and artists--like Van Gogh--whose quality is so undeniable that their fame congeals into cliche and their memory lives cast in the concrete of myth. They reach a point where, once their stature is acknowledged, there seems nary a new thought to be had about them.

If there is an American photographer besides Ansel Adams who attained this dubious altitude it is Edward Weston, the high priest of “straight” photography. Nudes that look like sand dunes. Bell peppers that look like nudes. Artistically exquisite and historically inescapable but completely inert and with nothing to teach to the present generation.

Well, maybe not, but that did not prevent a reverent fuss over the centennial of Weston’s birth, which was March 26, 1986, and inspired exhibitions, publications and scholarly symposiums that keep on rollin’ a year later. Los Angeles has to pay attention. Weston lived here for two key periods in his career, 1906-1923 and 1937-38. Despite the fact that his shrine is in Carmel, he is one of Los Angeles’ claims to early artistic fame and evokes the primitive days of our cultural scene, recalling the names of artists like Peter Krasnow, book dealer Jake Zeitlin and Galka Scheyer, champion of the Russo-German Blue Four artists.

It’s fun to reread Weston’s Aperture monograph on his time in the town back then--slumming with his girlfriend in a gay sailors’ bar, sipping wine in a bungalow on clear, hot, jasmine-scented nights, complaining about Los Angeles’ intellectual aridity with his cultural cronies, but loving the steamy sexiness of the place that attracts people to this day. His clipped, tough-guy syntax is like a Raymond Chandler artist-detective.

The sense of it all seeps through in “Edward Weston in Los Angeles” a two-part exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu to Feb. 1 and in the American wing at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino to March 29. Additional insight is provided in a concurrent show of 30 Weston prints at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Collectively they prove it possible to at least revise and clarify thoughts about a sacred icon like Weston and to see it is possible, through the magic of curatorial editing, to present quite different pictures of the same guy.

The Getty selection, organized by curator Weston J. Naef, immediately agglutinates floating impressions. Why is it that Edward Weston and D. H. Lawrence keep dribbling together in the mind? Both were artists who insisted on liberation--particularly of the sexual kind--but whose intellectualized treatment of the subject makes them seem curiously antiseptic and prissy. Both were men powerfully attracted to strong-willed women. Weston’s photos of women like Flora Chandler, Tina Modotti and Charis Wilson move toward an evermore stripped-down tomboy kind of feminine ideal. Streamlined nudes range from the muscular vitality of Bertha Wardell to the surreal displacement of Cristal Gang’s back as if cool power and odd overtones were more erotic than empathy.

Lawrence and Weston were both artists who came out West and made themselves central to coteries of artistic exiles. The circumstance seems to do something to people. Do they feel like an elite of aesthetic castaways, a trifle self-righteous? Are they inclined to mythologize one another? However it happens, the mix seems perfect for the creation of cult figures. That’s it. D. H. Lawrence and Edward Weston are both cult figures.

It would be wrong to suspect Weston Naef of guile in planting such irreverent thoughts, but the Getty show blazes a mental trail that leads to a kind of debunkment of Edward Weston. His self-portraits have a winsome edge that runs from cunning archer of the Douglas Fairbanks Jr. persuasion to woolly, charming gentleman of the Leslie Howard persuasion. We smile at such self-congratulatory portraits when they are taken by somebody else. When the sitter and the glamorizer are the same person that is, as Naef points out, a trifle narcissistic.

The Getty’s 39 works emphasize the inevitable autobiographical side of a photographer’s oeuvre. Studies of his children suggest that Weston’s feelings swung from Tom Sawyer sentiment to a vision of kids as succubi out of “Lord of the Flies.” Portraits romanticize. The painter Orozco is a Visionary, Imogen Cunningham a Bloomsbury-style eccentric, Karl and Ethel Struss Dedicated Idealists. My friends are important. I am important. It is important to record the image of My Studio in Tropico (now alas disappeared into Glendale).

Top with some of Weston’s more lumpish symbolic images like crudely phallic bouquets of bananas and roots and you have the image of a complicated psyche fueled by furious ambition while trying to be a nice down-to-earth regular guy and the hero of an exciting novel called “My Life.”

Weston’s sense of heroism was very much of his time. A vegetarian and student of the occult, he aped advanced visual styles of the day, particularly echoing artists from the

Stieglitz milieu like Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Charles Sheeler. The selection at the Simon ephasizes Weston’s classical-abstract side and argues silently that in many ways formal command was his greatest strength. He could make a pepper look like a Henry Moore, echo Brancusi in a gourd or anticipate the all-over style of the Abstract Expressionists in a view of Point Lobos.

Yet for an artist as visually pure as Weston the shows have a remarkably literary edge. We think everybody from Malcolm Lowry to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and realize that while we look at these pictures we also read subtext out of their collective persona. Was Weston a great innovator or just the guy who pulled the advanced trends of his time into photography?

Good question. By the time the Getty show is absorbed, Weston seems to stand more naked than we have seen him. Every artist, especially the exalted, should be subjected to such scrutiny.

If this excercise were somehow a complete turkey, it would be fun to attend just to see what happens to our image of Southern California when you visit the Getty, Huntington and Simon on the same day. It’s something of a logistical feat but proves this vulgar wasteland now is full of elegant period museums crammed with great art. But the show is not a turkey. The Huntington section by curator Susan Danly recasts Weston as an artist.

In later work, mainly from the ‘30s and drawn from the Huntington’s extensive holdings, he is more humane, nostalgic and humorous. His shot of a dead drifter in the desert is solemn and unself-conscious. He seems to have discovered death and the rickety quality of existence. Images of abandoned shoes and reamed-out car bodies participate in the art of objet trouve , but they are more about experience. Shots of Death Valley show waves of sand blowing across the earth like the vast tribes of nomads to which we all belong. The sublime wafts from the smeared clouds of Yosemite and humankind’s sense of the magic of it all is on the hex signs painted on a barn--pathetic and powerful.

Yeah, it’s a good thing to strip an artist down to his shorts and look at what a petty, inconsistent, arrogant, vain, imperfect wretch he is. Worse than the rest of us. And better. He makes these unforgettable images. Pears that look like nudes. Nudes that look like clouds. One look and you remember them forever. They become cliches, encrusted with our irony and doubt. Occasionally you take them off the reliquary shelf and clean off the barnacles. Good as new.