Revisiting Weston at Artistic Crossroads

In 1925, Edward Weston returned to Mexico City from his home in Glendale for the second of two extended stays, which together turned out to be critically important to the development of his art. The first series of photographs he made on his return focused on the gleaming white curves of a porcelain toilet bolted to a patterned linoleum floor. For two weeks, he photographed nothing else.

One of those arresting pictures is included among the 140 works in “Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism,” the very large, very enjoyable survey of the artist’s career newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The picture, despite its seeming simplicity, is symptomatic of the astonishing richness and complexity of Weston’s best work.

In Weston’s picture, the toilet fills the frame, the rim of the bowl and the bottom of the base just grazing the photograph’s edges. The camera’s point of view, down low and close up, is not one normally seen in day-to-day encounters with the lavatory object, except perhaps in those instances when cleaning is underway. The voluptuous, undulating form, carefully lit and exquisitely printed to emphasize a lush array of deep blacks, elegant grays and bright whites, has all the sensuous appeal of a naked human body. It also teeters on the brink of total abstraction, the way the sleek, highly polished, contemporaneous sculptures of Brancusi do.

The photograph’s subject resonates in many directions. A porcelain toilet is a stark symbol of modern industrial civilization, then in the throes of convulsive birth in Mexico. Enshrined in an adventurous work of art from the 1920s, the bathroom fixture also recalls a provocative, similarly anthropomorphic precedent from the 1910s: Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous “Fountain,” a 1917 ready-made sculpture consisting of a store-bought urinal, which was notoriously rejected for inclusion in what was supposed to be an unjuried exhibition of avant-garde art in New York.

Weston titled his picture of an ordinary plumbing fixture with its Spanish nickname: “Excusado.” In more formal translation, “Excusado” locates the modern toilet--and, not so incidentally, the Modern work of art as well--somewhere between the realms of privilege and uselessness. While the visual inventiveness of Weston’s sleek, semiabstract photograph is unmistakable, the choice of subject attests to the subtle way in which his art is also socially loaded.

How could it not be? Weston was no longer a young artist when he made “Excusado” (born in 1886, he was 39), but one who had been diligently working with a camera for more than a dozen years. He had left his wife and three of his sons behind in Glendale to run off with his lover, actress and artist Tina Modotti, to post-revolutionary Mexico City in 1923, and he had been drawn back again in 1925.

The tumultuous capital city was a place where social and political reforms may not have been making much lasting progress, but cultural ferment was intense. Weston was ready for it. Theodore Stebbins, who organized the show for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with curator Karen Quinn, is surely correct when he writes in the catalog that Weston’s art was already undergoing a metamorphosis toward Modernism in the years around 1920, and that his brief 1922 visit to New York and difficult encounter with artist and impresario Alfred Stieglitz had a profound and lasting effect on his development. Yet, the years in Mexico City were the crucible in which Weston’s mature art was formed.

The exhibition at LACMA spans the period from about 1920 to 1948, when ill health finally brought an end to Weston’s work (he died 10 years later). Examples of the painterly Pictorialist images with which he first established his practice as a photographer are omitted. Instead, we enter his career at the point of transformation.

The earliest pictures show Weston in a state of rapid change: jettisoning the atmospheric fuzziness common to Pictorialist art, playing with sharp Cubist form and space, abandoning traditional suggestions of photographic storytelling, introducing industrial subject matter, and more.

Then come the pictures from Mexico, which feel qualitatively different. At first it might seem odd to speak of a photograph like “Excusado” in terms similar to those that come so easily to discussions of the rambunctious, sweeping, politically idealistic murals of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros or Jose Clemente Orozco, which were central to the milieu in which Weston landed. But finally, there’s a distinct connection.

Weston’s frame-filling composition monumentalizes a mundane subject, making the commonplace heroic. The toilet-scrubbing viewpoint shrewdly establishes a social dimension, redolent of manual labor and class distinctions. His own comparison of the fixture’s sweeping, voluptuous form with Hellenistic art, which he recorded in his journal, juxtaposes modern ideals with principles from antiquity, akin to the muralists’ own invocation of pre-Columbian cultures.

The late historian Nancy Newhall got it exactly right when she described Mexico City as “Weston’s Paris.” Without the sophisticated, revolutionary artistic milieu he encountered there in the 1920s, Weston might easily have been just another minor (if accomplished) regional disciple of New Yorker Alfred Stieglitz.

The exhibition at LACMA is drawn almost entirely from the collection of Saundra B. Lane, who, with her late husband William, purchased most of the vintage prints owned by Weston’s heirs in the late 1960s. Classic examples abound, from the pictures of green peppers to the archaic portrait heads, the close-ups of coastal rocks and driftwood to the voluptuous nudes and barren desert landscapes.

The show and its handsome catalog do not break much new ground, preferring instead to delve just a bit deeper into already well-explored territory. (Maybe someday we’ll get to see a more focused exhibition that does open new doors--say, a thorough examination of the profound impact that the work of Henrietta Shore, the remarkable but largely unsung Modernist painter, had on the development of Weston’s much-heralded photography.) But together they do provide a solid overview of a critically important figure, who was perhaps L.A.’s first enduring, nationally acclaimed artist.

* “Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through May 3. Closed Wednesdays.