Edward Weston: The Last Years.

• Author: TRAVIS, DAVID
• Position: Photographer

"... As he developed his art beyond technical virtuosity, Weston created photographs that could hold more-profound meanings, and thus a greater variety of interpretations."

THE LATER PART of an artist's career can be a private realm and its work difficult to appreciate if one demands that art must always communicate one sensibility to another. Older artists who once expounded their ideas to the wide world often turn quietly inward to examine what the creative life means not to their contemporaries, but to themselves.

The last decade in which Edward Weston (1886-1958) was active as a photographer primarily took place at Point Lobos, his favorite landscape on the central California coast, and at his home in the Carmel Highlands. Weston was a formalist, world famous for his virtuosity in making objective and exquisite views of natural shapes and patterns. By 1944, however, he had transformed himself into a man capable of making his own life experience the compelling subject of his art.

That change in Weston's work previously had been invisible to most admirers and scholars because it was subtle and his subjects still primarily natural objects and nudes. The shift was undeclared as well because, after 1934, he no longer made entries in his Daybooks, where he had articulated his thoughts about the medium. One might say that the pensive and more-somber character that his photographs from 1944 to 1948 emote is the result of the tensions of his dissolving marriage, the entry of all four of his sons into the military, and the onset of Parkinson's disease. The more introspective nature of much of his late work is also something that is possible with great artists who draw upon their wealth of personal experience in the last years of their creative activity.

Seen from these two perspectives, Weston's transformation, accomplished in the face of intractable adversities, becomes not a depressing tale, but, rather, a heroic one of perseverance, acceptance, and fulfillment. It is one of the inspiring stories in the history of American art to which the relatively little-known works of his last 10 years powerfully attest.

In May, 1938, Weston moved into a new studio in the Carmel Highlands with his young model, muse, professional partner, and wife-to-be Charis Wilson. He had just completed the most productive year of his career to date. An 11-month tour of California as a Guggenheim Fellow had provided him with ample opportunity to develop his natural still...