Wilson believes that much of the trouble with Maddow’s portrait of Weston is that he relied too heavily on Weston’s surviving journal, which Weston himself felt to be unreliable. “I find far too many bellyaches; it is too personal, and a record of a not so nice person,” he wrote to Nancy Newhall in 1948. “I usually wrote to let off steam so the diary gives a one-sided picture which I do not like.” But Wilson’s own journal—the log she kept during her travels with Weston on two successive Guggenheim grants—puts another obstacle in the way of our understanding of Weston. Wilson is not a boring writer, but her dogged dependence on the log makes her one. For a good half of the book she relentlessly reports the day-by-day progress of the trips—every wilderness area reached, every person stayed with, every tree or mountain photographed, every inconvenience suffered. Weston recedes from view as the mass of floridly uninteresting information grows.
For all that, Wilson achieves at least some of her aim of portraying Weston as lovable and of conveying the pleasure and excitement of her life with him. It was a life of both deliberate and (because of the Depression) imposed simplicity. Weston made a fetish of living in opposition to bourgeois custom, and Wilson, who had had an unhappy childhood in a mansion, was glad to join him in his California dreaming life of meals of raw vegetables and fruits and nuts and living quarters furnished only with a bed covered with a red serape. She was as solemn about sex as he was. People were in those days.
Her belief in Weston’s greatness was absolute, and the selflessness of her dedication to his career is moving. It is also surprising—it contradicts Maddow’s description of her as “a new sort of a person” and doesn’t accord with the impression of her we receive from Weston’s photographs. In them she has a bodily ease, almost a languor, and a drop-dead expression on her face that are hardly the characteristics of a put-upon artist’s wife. Like his photographs of Mather, Weston’s photographs of Wilson take much of their special sparkle from the subject’s stunning beauty and presence. The 1977 book of Weston’s nudes, many of them of Wilson, brought, she writes, “a rush of attention in my direction.”
Suddenly I was a prime source—and a prime subject. It seemed that everywhere I turned I would see another image of myself, sitting in the doorway or stretched on the sand or perched on a model stand. I once emerged from a New York subway to face a soiled city wall plastered with posters of myself as I had looked fifty years earlier, sitting against a boulder in the High Sierra, my head swathed against mosquito attack, with a look of exhaustion on my face—since identified regularly by critics as “sensuality.”
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.
It was taken in 1937 at Lake Ediza in the Yosemite wilderness, during the first Guggenheim trip. In Through Another Lens, Wilson writes of how Weston almost didn’t get the Guggenheim. After working for days on his grant proposal, he threw out everything he had written and confined himself to this terse statement: “I wish to continue an epic series of photographs of the West, begun about 1929; this will include a range from satires on advertising to ranch life, from beach kelp to the mountains. The publication of the above seems assured.”
Weston was given to know by a person at the Guggenheim Foundation who wished him well that the committee of judges would be put off, possibly even insulted, by his Cordelia-esque terseness, and told to mend his speech. He did so. Like other desperately needy Depression artists, he could not afford to be willful. With Wilson’s help he wrote the five-page essay, full of hot air, that these occasions require. But before applying himself to the task, by way of explaining his original reticence, he wonderfully justifies it: “I felt the need for brevity and simplicity because I realized that any analysis I could give in words, of my viewpoint, aims, way of work,—must of necessity be incomplete—because it is these very things that I can only express fully through my work,—in other words that is why I am a photographer.”
The Lake Ediza picture turns out to be one of the few memorable images to come out of the Guggenheim trip. As one regrets Wilson’s Guggenheim journal, so one wonders whether the Guggenheim trip itself wasn’t a mistake—whether Weston wouldn’t have been better off staying home and taking modest but entrancing pictures of Wilson instead of grandiloquent but often uninteresting ones of nature. But then again, if he had stayed home, we wouldn’t have the Lake Ediza photograph, and surely one extraordinary photograph is worth a thousand negligible ones.
* Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration by Beth Gates Warren; and Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston by Charis Wilson and Wendy Madar
* The Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 1, Mexico, edited by Nancy Newhall (Aperture, 1973), p. 145.
* Justema’s memoir appears in a catalog of 123 photographs by Mather published in 1979 by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
* The Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 2, California, edited by Nancy Newhall (Aperture, 1973), pp. 4 and 18.
NUDES WITHOUT DESIRE
2002
In the mid-1960s, a most entertaining solution to a biographical mystery was offered by Mary Lutyens. The mystery concerned the six-year-long unconsummated marriage of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, which was annulled in 1854 after Effie revealed to her father that Ruskin had still not “[made] me his Wife.” “He alleged various reasons,” Effie wrote: “Hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason . . . that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April.” In a statement Ruskin wrote for his lawyer during the annulment proceedings, he corroborated Effie’s account: “It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.”
What did Ruskin see on his wedding night that repelled him so? What were the “circumstances” of Effie’s unclothed body that caused him to shrink from her for six years? Mary Lutyens ingeniously proposed that “Ruskin suffered a traumatic shock on his wedding night when he discovered that Effie had pubic hair. Nothing had prepared him for this. He had never been to an art school and none of the pictures and statues on public exhibition at that time depicted female nudes with hair anywhere on their bodies.”* “In his ignorance he believed her to be uniquely disfigured,” Lutyens wrote in another discussion of the subject.†
Lutyens’s imaginative reconstruction of the awful wedding night—the author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture gazing with petrified horror at his bride’s pubic bush—takes its tragicomic force from our shared memories of all the marmoreal vulvas we have seen in museums and in books like Kenneth Clark’s The Nude. Ruskin’s belief that his wife was abnormal came not so much from his ignorance of female anatomy as from his knowledge of Western art. He had imagined women were quite different. If he had never seen a painting or a sculpture of a nude woman, the “circumstances” of Effie’s body might not have seemed so strange, so like a betrayal. They might even have been arousing. Of course, Ruskin was not the only arty young man whose sex life was derailed by early museum visits.
Clark himself displays an aversion to the human body in The Nude—he writes of “shapeless, pitiful” art school models, of “the pitiful inadequacy of the flesh,” of the “inherent pitifulness of the body”—that could have come only of formative art experience. “In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art had led us to believe it should be,” Clark rather artlessly remarks, as if a boy’s or a girl’s first sight of his mother’s or father’s or nurse’s naked body is naturally preceded by the sight of Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Praxiteles’ Hermes.
Photography, which might have been expected to arrive on the scene as a kind of rescue mission of the body, bent on restoring it to its native naked state, in fact only perpetuated and elaborated the stylizations and bowdlerizations of art. Leafing through books of early nude photography, such as Graham Ovenden and Peter Mendes’s Victorian Erotic Photography and Serge Nazarieff ’s Early Erotic Photography, one is only secondarily struck by the photographs’ eroticism; the first, overwhelming impression is of their debt to painting. That many of these daguerreotypes and calotypes were made as figure studies for painters—and in several cases can be linked to actual paintings they covertly assisted—only complicates the plot of the art/photography relationship. It does not change the fact that the early photographers of nudes posed their models, arranged their backgrounds, and took their pictures with salon painting dictating their every move.
One of the best known of the photographs linked to a painting is Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s camera study, taken around 1850, of a nude woman holding a drapery to herself, standing beside a chair with her head averted; it is believed to be the source of the nude woman holding a drapery to herself who stands in the center of Gustave Courbet’s masterpiece The Painter’s Studio, looking over the seated painter’s shoulder as he works. In comparing the two nudes—especially when seeing them both in black and white, as Aaron Sharf reproduces them on page 131 of his book Art and Photography (1968)—one is impressed with how much more real, even more photographic, the painting is. Villeneuve was a painter and a lithographer before he became a photographer, with a taste for “anaemic, erotic scenes of feminine intrigue and despair, of would-be lovers hidden in boudoirs,” as Sharf characterizes his lithographs of the 1820s and 1830s. When he took up photography, he simply continued his sentimental program. In the photograph associated with The Painter’s Studio, Villeneuve works within well-trodden conventions of narrative painting—his nude could be a Susanna hiding her nakedness from the elders or a nymph surprised by a god or a satyr. In another respect—in the rather desperate way she is clutching the drapery and trying to hide her body with it—she could be an allegorical figure representing photography’s fear of unmediated actuality. The realist Courbet, in contrast, regards it with poignant fearlessness. His nude, in the intensity of her absorption in the painter’s activity, has allowed her drapery to fall away from her body, which is posed in profile and shows a protuberant belly and outthrust buttock and full, round breast. This is a most vital and real and sexy woman. Her body, though not idealized, is hardly “shapeless” and “pitiful.” She holds the drapery more out of habit than prudery; she is an artist’s model, a working woman (the drapery is one of her working tools) thoroughly accustomed to nakedness. The contribution of the Villeneuve photograph to the Courbet masterpiece was surely a minor one; it gave Courbet a hint, perhaps, about the rendering of the angle of the model’s shoulders and head. Whatever nineteenth-century photographers of the nude gave to contemporary art, they took back a thousandfold in their own abject dependency on it.
In the twentieth century, photographers of the nude continued to borrow from art—largely from symbolist, postimpressionist, and modernist painting and sculpture—but less abjectly. These borrowers believed they were making art themselves, and some actually succeeded in doing so. Edward Weston pursued the nude genre more assiduously—and, I think, more brilliantly—than any other practitioner. His earliest nudes, made in the teens and early twenties of the century, look as if he had been studying paintings by Whistler and Munch as well as photographs by the Photo-Secessionists. In the mid-twenties his gaze shifted to the European abstract art that the Armory Show of 1913 had introduced to provincial America and that the cranky but prescient Stieglitz kept on view in his 291 Gallery. In 1927 Weston wrote in his journal of his search “for simplified forms . . . in the nude body.” A year earlier—in an act that his biographer Ben Maddow sees as seminal for the abstract work to come—Weston photographed the toilet in his flat in Mexico City. “ ‘Form follows function’—who said this I don’t know—but the writer spoke well,” Weston wrote, and continued,
I have been photographing our toilet—that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty . . . Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture—and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convolutions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours—of the “Victory of Samothrace.”
Maddow tactfully notes that “in this new venture, [Weston] was following a precedent which was perhaps stored below the surface of his memory: the famous urinal that Marcel Duchamp sent to the historic Armory Show . . . which had been photographed by Stieglitz at the time.” Whatever its etiology, Excusado (as Weston named the photograph) is a work of remarkable presence and force. In its beauty of form and complexity of texture it might even be thought to surpass the abstract nudes—the famous pear-shaped nude, for example—that followed. Be that as it may, Weston’s nudes of the late twenties and thirties—his studies of limbs and breasts and buttocks that resemble the pared-down forms of modernist sculpture and functionalist design—belong among the works of photography that most convincingly support its artistic claims. They not only imitate but are works of modernist art.
“His nudes are indeed examples of strict, yet marvelous form,” Maddow writes—and adds, “But the function—and there is no need to specify which function—refuses to vanish, remains inextricable in the photographs, and can never be wholly theorized away, even by the photographer who made them.” In the opening chapter of The Nude, Clark extends the “function” to every artistic representation of the unclothed body, writing that “no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow.” But by the end of the book, Clark is obliged to create a category called “the alternative convention” to accommodate the fat, flabby, or aging bodies (rendered by Dürer, Rembrandt, Rouault, Cézanne, Rodin, among others) that do not turn him on and thus make a mockery of the early dictum. That Clark allowed this contradiction (and several others) to remain in his text may not be mere inattentiveness. It may be a signaling of his recognition that the subject is more unruly and complex than he anticipated and than his sleek treatise can handle.
Two exhibitions of photographic nudes by Irving Penn—one at the Metropolitan Museum and the other at the Whitney—give further evidence of the nude genre’s resistance to easy generalization. Indeed, both exhibitions have an atmosphere of difficulty and unease that is at odds with the crisp confidence of their respective catalog essays. The fifty nudes in the Met show are selected from photographs made in 1949–50, but not shown until 1980, when the Marlborough Gallery exhibited seventy-six of them under the rubric Earthly Bodies. (The Met has retained the rubric.) The Marlborough show was an event in photography—nudes like these had never before been seen. Rosalind Krauss, who wrote the Marlborough catalog essay, gamely struggled with the photographs’ strange originality and offered an original and strange argument that related the work (and all of photography) to collage. Little else was written about the nudes. A kind of awed hush settled around them. In her catalog essay Maria Morris Hambourg is content to assume the greatness of the work and to tell us how adorable the eighty-two-year-old photographer is. “A gentle man who scarcely speaks above a whisper, Penn is unfailingly polite,” she writes, and continues,
Attired like any America
n in blue jeans and sneakers, he has the unassuming modesty of a simple man, which he likes to think he is, or a monk. Although he avoids unnecessary chatter, he is a preternaturally good listener . . . He is completely present and seems to have all the time in the world for you. This exquisite sensitivity is wedded to a highly analytical and decisive mind and a meticulous and unsparing professional demeanor . . . Beneath this public face is a supremely tender soul protected, like a younger brother, by an absolutist’s will.
Even as I pick on Hambourg, I sympathize with her plight. Penn’s nudes are slippery. They almost force one to talk about anything and everything but themselves. And this may be where their singularity lies. The photographs immediately raise questions about their making. One doesn’t take them in and only later wonder how they came to look the way they do. These photographs (in most cases) have been meddled with—and meddled with in such striking ways that the image takes second place to the technique by which it was produced. Like the nudes of Weston’s classic period, the Penn nudes are faceless fragments of the body that evoke the forms of modernist art. But where Weston delivered his modernism through ordinary photographic means, Penn released his images only after putting them through an extraordinary darkroom ordeal. Step one was to obliterate the image by overexposing the printing paper to such a degree that it turned completely black in the developer. Step two was to put the black paper into a bleach solution that turned it white. Step Three was to put the white paper into a solution that coaxed back the image, but only up to a point—the point where the earthly bodies exhibit an unearthly pallor and, in certain cases (such as the catalog cover picture), a flat abstractness that human bodies assume only in primitive and modernist art.
Forty-One False Starts Page 21
