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Dimensions: 7 1/2 by 9 3/8 in. (19 by 24 cm.)
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Provenance: The photographer to O. G. Jones
Butterfield & Butterfield, San Francisco, 19 September 1984, Sale 3466M, Lot 1499
Jedermann Collection
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
Acquired by the present collection from the above
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Literature: Other prints of this image:
Conger 82
Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: Fifty Years (Aperture, 1973), p. 90
Edward Weston Nudes (Aperture, 1977 and 1993), p. 19
Daybooks, Mexico (Aperture, 1973), pl. 2
Edward Weston: La Mirada de la Ruptura (Mexico City, 1994), p. 85 (reversed)
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Notes: This photograph was originally acquired from Weston by O. G. Jones, a concrete contractor in Southern California who was introduced to Weston in the early 1920s by their mutual friend, Ramiel McGehee. When Weston told Jones that he was interested in photographing industrial sites, Jones arranged access for Weston to photograph several of the factories that he had helped construct. Plaster Works (Conger 177), from 1925, is perhaps the best known of the resulting images. Also in 1925, Weston made striking, modernist portraits of Jones (cf. Christie's New York, 30 October 1989, Lot 575). Jones remained friends with Weston, visiting him in Glendale and later in Carmel, buying prints from the perennially straitened photographer. Jones ultimately built an impressive collection of Weston's work, including a number of the photographer's industrial images, Pepper (2P), and the rare platinum print of Breast offered here. These photographs were sold in the above-listed auction at Butterfield & Butterfield in 1984. Weston's portraits of Jones are now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Modern and unsentimental, Breast marks an abrupt departure in Weston's work from his heretofore Pictorial approach to nude studies. While the focus in the image is somewhat soft, this nude possesses a straightforward physicality that had not been seen before in Weston's nudes. The model for Breast is the same as that in another nude study, Refracted Sunlight on Torso (Conger 81), made during the same sitting in 1922. Weston later recounted the unusual events surrounding the making of these two images to Nancy Newhall, who wrote: 'One day in 1922, a woman he did not know telephoned for a sitting. Would he photograph her nude? Considerably astonished, Edward said yes. The woman came. Perhaps the strangeness of the encounter sharpened his seeing' (quoted in Conger 81, note).
Weston first photographed the woman positioned against a blank wall, with streaks of sunlight crossing her torso. He then repositioned the woman, using the panes of a window as the background. 'Yet,' Newhall continues, 'as though the lyric nude marked the end of a way of seeing then, Edward found in the ground glass during the same strange sitting a close-up prophetic of his seeing for the past 12 years -- column of arm, hinge of shoulder, hemisphere of breast. Flesh no longer is incorporeal; it has weight, it has form, volume, dynamics' (ibid.).
Conger locates three prints of this image, all in institutional collections. The George Eastman House has a non-vintage gelatin silver print made by the photographer's son, Brett, in 1953; the Museo Regional de Guadalajara, Mexico, has what is likely a vintage platinum print, perhaps purchased by the museum from Weston's exhibition there in 1925; and the Special Collections of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has a Project Print. Additionally, there is a vintage platinum print of this image in a private collection.
