EDWARD WESTON (1886–1958) - Nude Study (Anita), Mexico 1925

Vintage contact print, black light tested 

22,6 x 18,9 cm

Titled, dated and numbered 'EW #22' in pencil in unknown hand on the reverse

Gifted by the artist to scholar and writer Anita Brenner (1905-1974), Mexico, 1925

PROVENANCE:  The print comes from the Estate of Anita Brenner. Acquired by the present owner through Sotheby´s 2010. 

LITERATURE: 
Nancy Newhall, The Photographs of Edward Weston, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1946, p. 15 (variant)
Amy Conger, Edward Weston: The Form of Nude, New York 2005,  p. 18. (variant)
Edward Weston's Book of Nudes, The J. Paul Getty Musuem, Los Angeles, 2007, pl. 3.(variant)
Edward Weston 1886-1958, Taschen, Cologne 2017, p. 89. (variant)

Edward Weston –Nude Study (Anita), Mexico 1925

 In 1923, Edward Weston travelled to Mexico with his son Chandler and the photographer Tina Modotti, seeking a new beginning, both artistic and personal. He had already left behind the soft-focus style of Pictorialism, but it was in Mexico that he discovered a new visual language: clarity of line and geometric reduction became the foundation of his modernist vision.

A pivotal work in this transformation is the nude of the writer Anita Brenner, made on November 11, 1925. Brenner, a central figure in Mexico’s cultural circles and the avant-garde of the 1920s, became part of Weston’s search for renewal.

The photograph belongs to a sequence of fifteen negatives created in a single afternoon, a cycle Weston later described as his most important series of nudes:

“These images … retain their importance as my finest set of nudes—that is in their approach to aesthetically stimulating form.”
(Daybooks, Mexico, November 13, 1925)

The austere formalism of these studies reveals Weston’s new way of seeing: the body is no longer portrayed as likeness but reimagined as pure form. The radical reduction to volume and plane lends the print a sculptural intensity, condensed in the velvety depth of its surface.

Just two days after the sitting, Anita Brenner was badly injured in a car accident. Weston noted the event with evident compassion in his diary:

“It is—well most fortunate that I took advantage of A.’s presence the other day. She was badly hurt in an automobile accident the night following the sitting and is now in a hospital with various cuts, contusions and a broken ankle. Poor girl! I shall send her a set of proofs to cheer her.”

The print presented here comes from Anita Brenner’s estate. It is very likely one of those Weston sent her at the time as encouragement. It is a contact print from the original 8×10-inch negative, made on fine-grain chloro-bromide paper—typical of Weston’s darkroom practice of the mid-1920s.

• Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Aperture, New York, 1990, p. 136