Volume 49, Number 19 · December 5, 2002
Edward Weston's Women
By Janet Malcolm
Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration
by Beth Gates Warren
Santa Barbara Museum of Art/Norton, 153 pp., $39.95
Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston
by Charis Wilson and Wendy Madar
North Point, 376 pp. (1998; out of print)
In 1975 I wrote a review of a retrospective of Edward Weston's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art for The New York Times. I was allowed an illustration, but the one I chose—the well-known pear-shaped nude, a starkly abstract study of a woman's bottom—was considered too racy by the Times of that time, and I was obliged to accept a staid substitute: a seated female nude in which the model had so arranged her body that nothing of it showed but bent legs and thighs and arms and the top of an inclined head. A few years later, I had occasion to look at that staid picture again and to see with amusement something I and obviously the Times had not noticed in 1975: if you look very closely at the intersection of the woman's thighs, a few wisps of pubic hair are visible. I had been led to this discovery by the photograph's model, Charis Wilson, Weston's second wife, who wrote a remembrance of Weston in a book of his nudes published in 1977, and recalled of the picture that
Review, 3659 words
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