In the 1940s, the celebrated photographer Edward Weston – then in his mid fifties – noted in one of his daybooks on the remarkable similarity between the photos he was taking at the time and the ones that he took when he was young and just starting out.
That observation of the artist assessing the arc of his career is at the core of a new exhibit, opening Feb. 9, at the Monterey Museum of Art titled “Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist.”
The artistic output of Weston, perhaps the most towering name of the many artists who have been associated with Carmel in its century-long history, has been examined and evaluated from many different perspectives going back many years. But the new exhibit is claiming to the first attempt to compare rarely seen images from Weston’s early years to the later images for which he is well-known.
“Young Man” includes about 40 photographs from Weston’s early years (his late teens and early twenties) found in a family photo album that came from the descendants of Weston’s first wife, Flora Chandler Weston. “They have been published in some of the anthologies and catalogues,” said the show’s curator Graham Howe, “but no one has ever exhibited them before, to my knowledge.”
Those photos are presented side by side with photos Weston took decades later as a mature and established artist, which come from the Monterey Museum’s permanent collection of Weston photographs (a small number are owned by Monterey Peninsula College).
The purpose, said Howe, is to get a sense of Weston’s growth as a visionary artist. “What we’re finding,” he said, “is that he took more or less the same photographs as a teenager and a young man (that he took later), the same subjects, the same compositions. He got technically better as he got older. But the vision, the ideas, the images that he composed in a very strict, disciplined, Modernist way, they were there ingrained in him from the beginning. He was born an artist.”
Weston was born outside of Chicago in the 1880s and was already shooting pictures in his mid teens. Most of the images included in the new exhibit date from his earliest experiences after moving to California in 1906 (He didn’t arrive in Carmel until 1929). He and Flora first lived together in Tropico, a small agricultural town known for its strawberries that today is a neighborhood in Glendale. It was a tract owned by Flora’s family, the same Chandler family that owned the Los Angeles Times.
“What Flora did was to compile a series of photo albums to hand down to the kids, four boys,” said Howe. The album included Weston’s early output.
In terms of subjects, Weston’s early work is almost identical to his later work. “The interesting thing,” said Kim Negri, the MMoA’s board vice president, “is that visitors will be able to see that he was doing it all, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, nudes. You’ll see a very broad range of his work.”
“It’s quite the same subject matter,” said Howe. “He loves pretty girls. He clearly did have the same preoccupations, landscapes, still life. The nudes came a bit later. It was a little more risqué to take too much off in the very early days.”
The exhibition was created by the firm Curatorial Assistance, from Pasadena, of which curator Howe serves as CEO. The exhibit, with the images on loan from the Monterey Museum of Art, will be traveling to museums in the United States and abroad, after its debut on the Monterey Peninsula, considered to be the spiritual (and actual) home of Edward Weston and his famously artistic family.
“The lesson in all this,” said Howe, “especially for a younger audience or people aspiring to be artists, is to trust your instinct and just do it. Then, work to get better at it. (Weston’s early photos) show a lot of promise, but if he didn’t continue to do it, they wouldn’t have amounted to much. Looking back, these photographs were the seeds that grew.”
