On April 8th, Sotheby’s will have the privilege of offering a group of photographs by Edward Weston and Brett Weston that have remained with descendants of the Weston family since their making.
The more than 40 photographs by Edward Weston and the nine photographs by his son Brett were given originally to Mary Weston Seaman, Edward Weston’s sister, beginning in the 1910s and continuing through the 1940s. The photographs include representatives of all of the photographic styles that Weston embraced in his long and influential career: the soft-focus works of his early Pictorial period; the beginnings of Modernism in his Mexican work of the 1920s; his classic, formal work of the 1930s; and the new, more documentary style of his later years, exemplified by photographs made across the United States, first for his 1938 Guggenheim fellowship and then for his commission to illustrate Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for The Limited Editions Club in 1941. The photographs have been held by Mary Weston Seaman’s descendants since her death, and have been the subject of two major exhibitions at The Dayton Art Institute, where the work has until
recently been on long-term loan. The collection, which will travel to San Francisco and Los Angeles in the spring before going on view in New York from April 2nd-7th, is expected to bring between $900,000 and $1.4 million.

Posted: 02|8|08 at 9:41 am. Filed under: Auction News.