The Bruce Museum received a significant gift of fifty black-and-white photographs by Brett Weston from the Christian Keesee Collection in 2015. These are the first images by Weston in the Bruce collection, which has been strengthening its photographic holdings in recent years. Soon a selection of the Weston images will be featured in an exhibition slated to open in November.
“The photographs in this gift come primarily from the 1940s through the 1980s and represent Weston’s signature style,” notes Susan Ball, Bruce Museum Deputy Director and curator of the exhibition. “Whatever the subject, the images are crisp, flattened, black and white, and brilliantly composed, but not staged.”
Throughout his nearly seventy-year career, Brett Weston (1911-1993) was obsessed with abstracted micro-images of reality as well as of cities and landscapes captured by a long telephoto lens that diminished the depth of field, thus flattening the image. Weston used a medium or large-format camera and contact printed on high-gloss paper directly from the negative, selecting his subjects carefully rather than manipulating in the dark room. The subjects, always from nature, became increasingly less recognizable as time progressed.
“He often combined groups of photographs in portfolios and although only a few portfolios were actually labeled ‘Abstractions,’” Ball explains, “they all share Brett Weston’s signature abstract and flattened style.”
Brett Weston gained international recognition at the age of seventeen, when he was included, with his father, Edward Weston, in an avant-garde exhibition at “Film und Foto” in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1929. Three years later he had his first one-person museum retrospective in San Francisco and frequently exhibited in the 1930s with the California group of photographers known as Group f.64, named for the aperture setting.
The gift of the Weston photographs to the Bruce comes from collector and philanthropist Christian Keesee, who acquired the vintage prints from the Brett Weston Estate in 1996 and created an archive in 1997 to organize and catalog the works as well as to increase the public awareness of the artist. This gift adds to the Bruce Museum’s growing collection of more than 800 fine art photographs.
The exhibition titled “Towards Abstraction, 1940-1985: Brett Weston Photographs from the Bruce Museum Collection” will open at the Bruce Museum on Nov. 5 and run through Feb. 9, 2017. The Bruce Museum is located at 1 Museum Drive. For information, call 203-869-0376 or visit brucemuseum.org.
