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EDWARD WESTON (American, 1886-1958) CLOUDS signed “EW 1936” in pencil below image on mount gelati...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:25,000.00 - 35,000.00 USD
EDWARD WESTON (American, 1886-1958) CLOUDS signed “EW 1936” in pencil below image on mount gelati...
EDWARD WESTON
(American, 1886-1958)
CLOUDS
signed “EW 1936” in pencil
below image on mount
gelatin silver print
mounted on board
75?8 x 99?16 in. (19.4 x 24.3 cm)
mount: 1311?16 x 155?8 in. (34.8 x 39.7 cm)
1936
ESTIMATE: $25,000-35,000
PROVENANCE
Andrew Smith Gallery, SANTA FE
Private Collection, CALIFORNIA
LITERATURE
Beaumont Newhall, SUPREME INSTANTS: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF EDWARD WESTON, BOSTON, Little, Brown and Company, 1986, p. 183, fig. 158
(illustrated)
“Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smokestacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole—which is life. Life rhythms, felt in no matter what, become symbols of the whole. The creative force in man recognizes and records—with the medium most suitable to him—to the object of the moment—these rhythms, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant representation—not interpretation” (James Enyeart, Edward Weston and New York Graphic Society, EDWARD WESTON’S CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPES, BOSTON, Little, Brown and Company, 1984, p. 9).
So wrote Edward Weston in 1929, years after he rejected pictorial photography and vowed instead to make only pure, “straight” photographs. Returning to California in 1926 after a revelatory three-year trip to Mexico, this aesthetic philosophy dominated the rest of his oeuvre, in particular the western landscapes for which he is so well known. Settling in Carmel in 1928 with the vastness of the Pacific on one side and the lush national park of Point Lobos on the other, Weston embraced the “open, free, youthful, physically and psychically untilled soil” (Enyeart, p. 12) of California and sought to create form out of what he referred to as the “chaos” of “nature unadulterated and unimproved by man” (Enyeart, p. 8). Clouds is a spectacular example of Weston’s ability to locate order within nature using only his remarkable sense of framing, perspective and the camera itself. Sky and sea are carefully balanced and frame the phantomlike wisps of clouds drifting in the air and the gorgeous tones and white highlights transform this nature study into a masterpiece that reveals the interconnected forms and rhythms of life.