"Nude"

63 N

gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard

signed, titled, and dated by Cole Weston (pencil) on verso

Edward Weston left Mexico for California in November 1926 and never returned, although he had hoped to do so. Moving back to Glendale, he set up his old studio but remained separated from his first wife, Flora (1879-1965). In February 1927, after seeing an exhibition of Weston's work at the University of California, Los Angeles, the dancer Bertha Wardell (1896-1974) enthusiastically volunteered to be his model. She became a friend and lover, posing nude for him in his studio. Over the course of several sessions, Weston made a number of pictures of Wardell dancing. He wrote in his daybook of one such visit, “Her beauty in movement is an exquisite sight. Dancing should be always in the nude!” Although inspired by her motions, the photographs were not actually action shots, for the light in Weston's studio required several seconds of exposure time. When Weston saw a movement that he wanted to record, he would call on Wardell to hold her pose while he made the picture.
As he had with his nude studies of Tina Modotti (1896-1942) in Mexico, Weston filled the frame with truncations of Wardell's body, isolating them against a plain background and capturing their simultaneous strength and elegance. However, with her identity masked in these faceless depictions, Wardell becomes a more neutral subject for Weston's study of human form. The dark lines accenting contours of her body were not, as some of Weston's contemporaries suggested, penciled onto the negative but rather were thinly cast shadows produced through skillful lighting.
Brett Abbott, Edward Weston. In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005, p. 50