Nude, Margrethe Mather

From the Getty Museum record

> Edward Weston met Margrethe Mather (1886-1952) in the autumn of 1913, when she and Elmer Ellsworth (1867- probably 1937), both photographers, made an impromptu visit to Weston's studio in Tropico. In 1914 the three established the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles, a club for serious camera artists only. Not long after their first meeting, Weston and Mather became romantically involved, and over the course of their ten-year relationship, she acted as muse and model for his developing oeuvre, and he for hers. She also influenced his social and artistic outlooks by introducing him to radical views on politics, art, and sexuality. By 1921 the two had become equal partners in photography, cosigning at least a dozen prints they created together. > > Weston made a series of images of Mather posing nude against a backdrop of silvery panels in his Glendale studio in 1923. Despite his proclamations about his conversion to Modernism, this plate still shows some influence of Pictorialism and Symbolism, in which juxtapositions of nude female figures with props such as chests, vases, or orbs were common. Although not a particularly Modernist subject, and certainly a far cry from the industrial themes he had promoted the year before, this assemblage was rendered by Weston in a new way, using sharp focus and subjugating symbolic to compositional content. Like the Japanese woodblock prints that both Weston and Mather admired, this image utilizes an asymmetrical balance of the chest and nude figure along with strong geometrical divisions brought about by the lines of the paneled screen to achieve aesthetic interest with a relatively simple arrangement. > > Brett Abbott. Edward Weston, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 28. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.