Word: westons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What photographer satisfied the biographical requirements for an artist better than Edward Weston? Like Gauguin, he made a mid-life lunge for the southern latitudes, putting family and studio on hold while he pondered the cactus in Mexico. His "commercial" portrait work he churned out with contempt, all but using one hand to press the shutter and the other to hold his nose. And among his remarkable inventory of lovers were the kind of women who not only danced naked for his camera but brought along their own finger cymbals...
...Weston's life, no less than his art, made him one of the fabled figures in American photography. His grumpy, exalted journals, published after his death under the title Daybooks, are full of aesthetic transports and sexual interludes. But they also show another side of his temperament, a no-nonsense sobriety that he called upon to achieve the condensed art of his mature years, when his aims were both clear and complex: "To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock...
...next time Harvard sends Eddie Marshall '26of Weston a dplea for donations, he says, "theywill work in [the 350th] somehow and ask 'did youhave a good time...
...chat with Harvard's friends. Everyone planning to attend Saturday's Stadium Celebration should ask them what's being done to give a real voice in University decision-making to those who aren't middle-aged, pinstriped white men with dark-colored sedans and homes in Belmont or Weston. If the answers seem a bit contrived, alums can express dissatisfaction at annual giving time...
...works escape the provincial air that clings to some early American modernism ("Colonial Cubism," in Stuart Davis' mordant phrase). Her main stylistic affinities are less with other American or European painting than with photography: the work of Stieglitz, but especially of her friends Paul Strand and Edward Weston, obsessed with sharp focus, clear emblematic shapes of stone, bone and weathered root, the far telescoped into the near. Her America was a more stripped, fundamental and varied place than anything one can find in "regional" painting of the '30s. She made indelible images of the city, such as her views...