Edward Weston - Photographs New York Saturday, April 9, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Pace Wildenstein MacGill, New York

  • Literature

    Aperture, Edward Weston: Fifty Years, p. 165; Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, fig. 1200 for variants; Stebbins, Weston's Westons: Portraits & Nudes, fig. 20

  • Catalogue Essay

    Nude, New Mexico was taken in 1937, the same year Edward Weston was awarded the first of two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships. The grant allowed Weston and his new wife, Charis, to embark on an extended trip across California. Already a favored subject in his nude images, including the Oceano series taken the year before, Charis continued to serve as muse. The image in the current lot is one in a series of images in which a supine and nude Charis is awakening, stretching and rolling over. While the level of corporeal abstraction is still hinted—the arms are folded into each other and the legs are likewise interlocked and twisted—Weston did not crop out any limbs or reduce the image to a study of line and composition. Rather, Nude, New Mexico, is an emotional marveling by a man who had rediscovered love. “My work is never intellectual,” Weston stated in 1939. “I never make a negative unless moved by the subject.” This image, accordingly, is as much a testament to Weston’s Modernist style as it is to his joyous, newfound love.

59

Nude, New Mexico

1937
Gelatin silver print.
7 3/8 x 9 1/2 in. (18.7 x 24.1 cm).
Signed, dated and annotated 'Nude in Old Adobe' in pencil on the verso.

Estimate
$50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for $56,250

Photographs

9 April 2011
New York