Oct 31 at 10:30 AM - Sale 2684 -

Sale 2684 - Lot 84

Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
EDWARD WESTON (1886-1958)
William Edmondson, Sculptor, Nashville, from Edward Weston: Fiftieth Anniversary Portfolio, 1902-1950. 1941; printed circa 1951 by Brett Weston.
Silver print, the image measuring 7½x9¾ inches (19.1x24.8 cm.), the mount 13¾x9½ inches (34.9x24.1 cm.), with Weston's initials and the negative date in pencil on mount recto, and the Portfolio Print stamp with the print number "10" in pencil on mount verso.

Provenance
Dody Weston Thompson Collection; to the Collection of Dr. James and Debra Pearl

Edward and Charis were in Nashville from September 2 until September 8. He saved about forty negatives from the work he did while he was in Tennessee, and at least twenty-five of them were from Nashville. Most of those were of William Edmondson and his sculpture.
He made at least one other exposure of Edmondson in this pose, T41-ED-4. In both, the sculptor is in his studio along with the instruments and symbols of his trade: his toolbox., blocks of stone, a carving, marble chips, dust all over the ground, and even a ladder. The black space inside his workshop isolates the important components almost as if they were parts of an equation. The differences between the pictures are, in fact, slight: in the other, his face is a little more frontal and relaxed; his jaw a little more to the left; maybe the background is not quite as dark since the frame of the screen door is visible. Weston probably took two so that one could be published in Leaves of Grass and he would still have a variant.

Both images were extremely popular. The picture may have had particular appeal to liberals since it shows a black artist who partly overcame difficult constraints dictated by the times. It is said that Hearst, owner of Vanity Fair, refused to use any of Louise Dahl-Wolfe's photographs of Edmondson taken in 1933, or run anything on him, because he was black. Some see it as a representation of a naïve and direct artisan discovered by Weston, unaware that in 1937 Edmondson was the first black man to have a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1948, Edward sent Nancy Newhall a print for her study on black culture.

Reproduced Amy Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP/The University of Arizona), cat. no. 1632/1941
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