?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
BRETT WESTON (1911-93) Dunes, Oceano. Silver print, the image measuring 6 3/4x9 1/2 inches (17.1x24.1 cm.), the mount 13 3/4x16 inches (35x40.6 cm.), with Weston's signature and date, in pencil, on mount recto, and his inscription "To Lydia, Xmas -- B.W.," in pencil, on mount verso. 1934
Gifted by Brett Weston to Lydia Parker; by descent to the Present Owner.
Weston was the second of Edward's four sons and the only child to achieve worldwide recognition as an artist. His remarkable gifts as a fine art photographer became apparent during his adolescence. By the age of 18, Weston's photographs, along with those by his father and Imogen Cunningham, were included in the groundbreaking Film und Fotoz exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany in 1929.
The exposure to his father's work and circle of photographers was an early influence on Brett. And he might also count Charles Sheeler, a painter and photographer known for his precisionist style in capturing industrial scenes, among his other influences. Weston's approach to photography was similarly formal but his subject matter was the natural landscape. His images, with their distillation of design and pattern, expanded the pictorial vocabulary associated with abstraction. His prints are stunning objects in which shadow, highlight and texture are beautifully rendered.
Until Edward's death in 1958, the two Westons worked closely together, inspired each other, and often exhibited jointly. Brett was a superb darkroom technician who printed for his father, especially when Edward became incapacitated by Parkinson's disease in the 1950s. He has been characterized as "a darkroom virtuoso," whose "...deep understanding of the capabilities of film photography produced prints seldom equaled in digital media."
