THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD WESTON
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946. Hardcover. Quarto. (10 in. x 7 1/2 in.). Rust-brown cloth over boards, with black lettering to top board.36 pp.
Frontis photo portrait of Edward Weston by ansel Adams, 1945. 23 plates, followed by a "Brief Chronology"; and list of "One-Man Exhibitions 1921-1946"; a "Selected Bibliography", and a list of "Articles, Catalogs, Books aboust Weston". Previous owner's name and phone number in ink to front pastedown. Some leaching of color to boards. Dustjacket shows several large chips, edgewear, and closed tears. It has done a creditable job of protecting its assigned book.
Author Nancy Newhall thanked Beaumont Newhall "for his invaluable aid in preparing the text and the bibliography...". The author crafted and provided a six-page biography of Weston, taking the reader from his boyhood beginnings, his first camera gifted by his father, and his ensuing obsession with all things photography, to his discontent as a staid married husband and provider, Mexican travels and encounters with Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, and others, his rapid developing into a brilliantly gifted, yet radical interpreter of what the eye can only see.
His friend Jean Charlot wrote: "It was the good fortune of Mexico to be visited, at the time when the plastic vocabulary of the Renaissance was still tender and amenable to suggestions, by Edward Weston, one of the authentic masters that the United States has bred...Weston photographs illustrated in terms of today the belief in the validity of representational art...cleansed...of its Victorian connotations...He dealt with problems of substance, weight, tactile surface and biological thrusts that laid bare the roots of Mexican culture..." Very Good in Fair Dustjacket. Item #88087
Price: $65.00