The best pieces in Janet Malcolm’s recently published Forty-one
False Starts are, for me, the four
photography reviews – “The Genius of the Glass House,” “Good Pictures,” “Edward
Weston’s Women,” and “Nudes Without Desire.” Interestingly, two of them,
“Edward Weston’s Women” and “Nudes Without Desire,” begin with a discussion of
pubic hair. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” Malcolm artfully links the visibility
of “a few wisps of pubic hair” in a Weston nude with Weston’s audacious statement
(in a letter to the Museum of Modern Art) that pubic hair “has been definitely
a part of my development as an artist … that it has been the most important
part, that I like it brown, black, red or golden, curly or straight, all sizes
and shapes,” to launch one of her favorite subjects – Weston’s love affairs and
their impact on his work. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she writes,
Weston’s erotic and artistic activities are so tightly
interwoven that it is impossible to write of one without the other. It is known
(from Weston’s journals) that most of the women who posed for his nudes and
portraits – arguably his best work – slept with him (usually after the sitting)
and were sources for him of enormous creative energy.
Weston’s women fascinate Malcolm. In one of her first New
Yorker photography pieces, “Two
Photographers” (The New Yorker,
November 18, 1974; re-titled “East and West,” and included in her superb 1980
collection, Diana & Nikon), she
vividly describes Weston’s Charis
(1925):
A photograph of Charis shows a girl in a black beret and
a sweater straddling a ladder-back chair, her elbows outthrust and her chin
resting on the junction between her wrists; her brow is furrowed, she is
staring into the middle distance, and her slip is showing. The composition is
striking in its symmetries of legs, arms, and chair posts and ladders, and in
the deployment of blacks, grays, and whites. Equally striking is, “the thing
itself,” as Weston called the object of his quest for realism – in this case,
the relationship between the model and himself.
 |
| Edward Weston, "Charis" (1925) |
But, interestingly, in another essay, written shortly
after “Two Photographers,” Malcolm’s appreciation of Weston’s work appears to sour. The piece, called “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight”
(included in Diana & Nikon), is a
review of a Weston retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She writes,
Weston’s major works (most done in the 1920’s and 1930’s)
are the nudes, vegetables, shells, clouds, and landscapes that have been
transformed – sometimes almost beyond recognition – into pure, cold, perverse,
unmistakable Weston abstractions.
Note Charis’s
absence from the list of “Weston’s major works.” Had she forgotten about it?
She does refer to a nude portrait of
Charis (Nude, Oceano, California,
1936):
A well-known photograph of Charis stretched out face-down
on the sand – one of Weston’s most apparently straight-forward nudes – has an
attenuation, a starfish-like quality of inanition that is evocative of death
and sleep rather than of lovemaking.
Malcolm saw the MoMA retrospective as a “corrective” to
the thinking that Weston’s art was sourced in his erotic interaction with his
models. In “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight,” she says:
The picture of Weston that emerges from these sources
[Weston’s Daybooks and Ben Maddow’s Edward
Weston: Fifty Years] – of a vital and
virile romantic who lived a life of physical simplicity and emotional richness
in warm climates with one beautiful woman after another; who had the courage to
leave his wife and children and go to Mexico with his mistress, Tina Modetti;
who finally found the love of his life in his second wife, Charis; who enjoyed
the friendship of such artists and intellectuals as Diego Rivera, José Orozco,
Robinson Jeffers, and Ramiel McGehee – is at curious odds with the static,
indrawn, remote, and sometimes even morbid character of the photographs.
Yes, but it’s not at odds with the portrait of Charis
that Malcolm so glowingly described in “Two Photographs.” Curiously, she fails to
point this out. Her view of his achievement has turned inexplicably icy. In one of the
essay’s most pointed lines, she says, “Stieglitz’s blurry view of the Flatiron
Building on a snowy day is surely a more literal rendering of ‘the thing
itself’ than Weston’s razor-sharp close-up of a halved artichoke.”
.jpg) |
| Edward Weston, "Charis, Lake Ediza" (1937) |
This photograph, however Wilson remembers the
circumstances of its making, is indeed sensual, probably the sexiest of all of
Weston’s pictures of her. She sits with her legs spread and her hands crossed
over the inner thighs. That she is wearing trousers and high lace-up boots only
adds to the sexiness, you could even say dirtiness, of the picture. The face,
wrapped in a scarf as a Bedouin might wrap it, stares at the viewer and beyond
him. It is a very young face, perhaps a little sullen, certainly not unaware of
the provocativeness of the pose, but refusing to register it. One’s eye goes
back and forth between the hands and the face, alternating between the hands’
downward direction and the face’s straight-ahead one. I don’t know of another
photograph that puts the eye through such paces.
Malcolm calls Charis, Lake Ediza “extraordinary.” In “Nudes Without Desire,” another of
the excellent photography essays in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm says, “Edward Weston pursued the nude genre
more assiduously – and, I think, more brilliantly – than any other
practitioner.” And with that, Malcolm’s revision of her acrid opinion in “Assorted
Characters of Death and Blight” is complete.
(This is the first part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm’s
Forty-one False Starts.)
No comments:
Post a Comment