PHOTOGRAPHS COLD AND WARM

...His concise statements about small Southern towns with their porches, stores and signs are beautiful, and totally without the false glamour afflicting so much contemporary work...

...Music...

...In addition, there are numerous landscapes...

...In 1932, he wrote: "I would say to any artist dare to experiment-consider any urge as a gift from the Gods not to be lightly denied by convention or a priori concept...

...Music, it appears, has haunted photographers no less than painters-the great Stieglitz made a group of prints called "Music-A Sequence of 10 Cloud Photographs...

...Actually, I have proved, through photography, that Nature has all the 'abstract' (simplified) forms Brancusi or any other artist can imagine...

...Weston's career as one of the fathers of "straight" photography did not begin until the '20s when, after some success as a portraitist, he traveled to Mexico City and fell in with the artists Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Siquieros, who greatly admired his work...

...I find ready to use, select and isolate, what he has to 'create.'" Move over, Brancusi, and make way for the new, labor-saving medium...

...What he used to call "Weston fans" will find everything they could possibly want in this latest show, put together by Willard Van Dyke...

...The most impressive pieces here, I think, are the silky nudes he made during the '30s, and the portrait of Tina Modotti reciting...

...The attention Bloch paid to lighting and composition in his "snapshots" is remarkable...

...Included are those studies of shells so erotic, they caused Rivera to inquire whether the photographer was "sick" at the time he did them...

...In Stieglitz' imagination, Bloch "would point to violins, and flutes, and oboes, and brass and would say he'd have to write a symphony called 'Clouds.'" It came to pass that Bloch did see the pictures and reacted just as Stieglitz had dreamed, except that he did not, so far as I know, go to the extent of writing anything called "Clouds...

...In 1937 he became the first photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his exhibitions were legion...

...Similarly, Gautrand's rocky landscapes are geologically interesting, but technically self-conscious...

...His photographs he treated like snapshots, keeping them in albums...

...With my camera I go direct to Brancusi's source...

...the toilet bowl, bedpan, and so forth...

...Weston (1886-1958) described himself as "a prolific, mass-production, omnivorous seeker...

...After he contracted Parkinson's disease in 1948, his career virtually ended-although he still had the satisfaction of seeing his work presented in Paris, at the Musee d'Art Moderne, and with the help of his son Brett, he went on making prints from the thousand negatives he considered his best...

...The pictures may be magnificent, yet they are terribly cold and metallic in their virtuosity...

...These late prints demonstrate very clearly Weston's obsession with the abstract possibilities of water, rocks, foliage...

...the black silhouette of a mountain top meeting a fluffy cloud is from the same year as his Piano Sonata...

...Weston could not have failed to see how brutally Rivera's clear, hard imagery contrasted with what he himself had been doing...

...Bloch's interests outside music were boundless, ranging from metaphysics to mushroom collecting...

...I have often been accused of imitating his work-and I most assuredly admire, and may have been 'inspired' by it-which really means I have the same kind of (inner) eye...

...His style then was pictorial, soft in focus and romantic in flavor...

...An oeuvre with a pleasing personality as well as great artistry is that of Walker Evans, and the Neikrug Galleries are offering a sampling of it (through March 2), in company with some pictures by Jean Claude Gautrand and Russell Drisch...

...John Szarkowski has rightly said, "[Evans'] work constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales...

...Maybe one reason the ship of art is foundering is simply that too many people are aboard...

...He was a restless personality who liked to travel and in 1916 came to the U.S., where he stayed for 14 years...

...Man, why that is music...

...But if he felt little kinship with humanity-beyond his wives and four sons-he displayed no greater warmth when he turned to the wilderness...

...and a single fir tree atop an escarpment was taken when he was writing Avodath Hakodesh...

...This show and the special edition of the quarterly journal Aperture accompanying it (Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition by Nancy Newhall) suggests, though, that he merely switched his allegiance to sculpture and to the philosophy informing modern art in general...

...Contact with painters, it has been remarked, paradoxically freed Weston from dependence on painting...

...One learned that the steaming locomotive pausing at some points was shot while he was working on an epic rhapsody called America Anthem...

...Plant life, rock formations, abandoned shacks, dead animals, beaches, and dunes, all speak of a detachment that is positively Republican...

...On Art PHOTOGRAPHS COLD AND WARM BY VIVIEN RAYNOR 260-odd prints by Edward Weston in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (through March 30, and then to Houston, Detroit, Des Moines, Denver, and Baltimore) were for this reviewer too much of a good thing, they would have been not nearly enough for the photographer...

...Its heady masculine vigor must surely have impressed the young Northerner, despite his apparent lack of interest in politics...

...Putting Drisch's vacuous hand-tinted blowups of vegetables and mason jars alongside them was unkind...

...Presumably the composer was too diffident to tell Stieglitz about his own work, but it was nonetheless very important to him...

...It is odd, considering Evans comes from a later generation, that his photographs seem more old-fashioned than Weston's, albeit in an admirable way...

...These are sensitively if not startlingly composed, and very professionally done (Bloch was technically quite au courant and was quick to get a Leica shortly after it had been invented...

...Under Rivera's leadership, Mexico's social realist movement had developed into one of the few successful marriages between art and revolution...

...The full effect of Weston's Mexican experience can only be conjectured, of course, but it would seem that with the fin de si??cle foresworn and 20th-century purism embraced, his essential romanticism found an outlet in a kind of creative swagger...

...Minor White's comparing them to Beethoven quartets, however, strikes me as stretching things a bit...

...Whenever I can feel a Bach fugue in my work, I know I have arrived," he said...

...the similarly suggestive peppers...

...As far back as 1946 he did not feel adequately represented by a retrospective of 300 works...

...He regarded cities as "excrescences" and, living as far from them as he could, devoted his life to a celebration of his natural surroundings...

...On gaining access to the family's negatives, he printed the show's pictures himself, enlarging them at his discretion...

...Returning to Europe in 1930, he took up residence in Italy, only to be forced back here in 1938...

...The medium was for him a journal rather than an alternate form of expression...

...How did you ever do that...

...But the exhibition consisted primarily of Swiss and Italian landscapes with figures-the earliest (1898) being of a Swiss village market filled with milling cattle, Only those familiar with Bloch's music could have appreciated fully Johnson's efforts to align the prints with the musical compositions...

...Not that his social conscience was aroused-far from it, to judge by his later work and utterances...

...Among his portraits is one of the adolescent Yehudi Menuhin, in which the extraordinarily sculptural forms of the mouth are so sharp as to be close to caricature...

...all the same, the show conveyed an attractive and intelligent spirit...

...On the quesion of abstraction, he proposed: "We cannot imagine forms not already existing in nature-we know nothing else...

...Take the extreme abstractions of Brancusi: They are all based on natural forms...

...Born in Illinois, Weston spent most of his life in California, starting out there as a commercial photographer in 1911...

...In these early platinum prints, sunlight slants attractively across a wall before suffusing the head and shoulders of a sitting figure, or it dapples a nude in a Renoiresque manner...

...Weston did not want for recognition in his lifetime...

...A view of the Chicago River shows boats and warehouses dissolving into a Monet-like mist...

...An Ansel Adams scene, by contrast, even when it looks super-naturally desolate, invariably contains some human response...

...Nevertheless, he also groped for a definition of the aims of photography that would prove it the autonomous, separate art he wanted it to be...

...The quotes are taken from an essay written (for a regular issue of Aperture) by Eric Johnson, a graduate student of photography at the University of New Mexico...

...Johnson first encountered them at a small exhibition in Portland, in 1972, and became acquainted with the composer's daughter, Lucienne-a painter who at one time worked with Rivera...

...Evidently, Weston was a lonely man...

...He hoped it would stir the composer Ernest Bloch to exclaim: "Music...

...It coincided with the exhibition of photographs by Ernest Bloch that he mounted at the Ingber Gallery (which ran through February 22...

...He settled in Oregon, and died in 1959...

...Weston's photographs might, I suppose, be seen as a kind of visual music...

...Born in Geneva in 1880, Bloch had decided on a musical career at the age of 10 and by 29 had produced a number of compositions, including the opera Macbeth...