?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
EDWARD WESTON (1886-1958) Nude in Studio. Palladium print, the image measuring 6 1/2x7 7/8 inches (16.5x20 cm.), with Weston's pricing notations "5.00" (crossed out) and "4.00" in pencil on verso. 1920s
Provenance: From Weston; to the photographer Toyo Miyatake, Los Angeles; acquired from the descendants of Miyatake
Miyatake and Weston became friends and colleagues when Weston occupied a studio in Tropico. The two shared a sensibility and interest in experimentation and modern art. Miyatake was a founding member of Shakudo-Sha (Glowing Earth Society), an organization in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo devoted to the promotion of arts and literature. Weston showed work three times between 1925-31 with the organization, and gained a following in the Japanese American community in Los Angeles. The shows provided income Weston needed badly, helping to fund his travels to Mexico. Miyatake was imprisoned in 1942 at the Manzanar internment camp, where he continued to photograph (at first surreptitiously).
This image appears similar in setting to other studies made in Weston's Mexico City space. The composition--stark and structured--bears resemblance to other nude studies Weston made during this period, which examine the body both in its suppleness and beauty, and also as a muscled, abstracted shape. We are not aware of another print of this image.
