a carved wood sculpture of An Abstraction of a School Desk, engraved 'BW 1952' on the underside of the base; accompanied by an oversized photograph, School Desk, Garrapata, mounted, signed in pencil on the mount, circa 1950, printed later (In Pursuit of Form, figs. 27 and 36, variant) (one sculpture, one base, one photograph) (3)

Acquired from Erica Weston, the photographer's daughter

The sculpture:
Monterey Museum of Art, In Pursuit of Form: Sculpture and Photographs by Brett Weston, July - October 2002

This photograph is in generally excellent condition. On the reverse of the mount is light graphite-colored soiling. The carved wood sculpture and base are in excellent condition.
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As with his photographs, Brett Weston’s three-dimensional wood sculptures favor smooth surfaces, clean lines, and an elegant, pared down exploration of form.  Through his father’s artistic circles, he was acquainted from an early age with the modernist sculptures of such masters as Brancusi and Henry Moore.   With his grandfather and brother, he learned to work with wood.  ‘I do sculpture with a lump of wood and tools,’ he told an interviewer in 1975.   ‘It’s in my blood.  My grandfather was a shipbuilder and a carpenter and my brother is a fine cabinetmaker.  I love tools and machines, but it goes beyond that’ (Hill and Cooper, Dialogue with Photography, p. 170).

Weston often used his photographs as a starting point for his sculptures.  It was a ‘back and forth’ relationship, as he put it, although he considered himself a photographer first and foremost (ibid., p. 170).   The sculpture offered here was inspired by his photograph of the metal suppoꦛrts of a crumbling, old-fashioned school desk, taken at Garrapata around 1950.

In her essay for the exhibition In Pursuit of Form: Sculpture and Photographs by Brett Weston (Monterey Museum of Art, 2002), to which this entry is indebted, Mary Murray describes in detail the variety of form and wood utilized by the photographer: while some works were executed as bas-relief panels, most of his sculptures are standing forms, carved from one piece of wood, anchored by a rod inserted into a wood base.  Works produced prior to the 1950s were relatively short, while later works, such as the one offered here, are relatively taller and grander in scale.  Weston experimented with an array of wood, including redwood, oak, and teak.  Mindful of cost and durability, Weston also worked with laminated layers of high-quality plywood, as in the sculpture offered here, which produced a striking pattern when carved (ibid., facing pls. 3 and 4).  

Weston was employed as both a sculptor and photographer by the Works Progress Administration in 1936, and in the following year, a selection of his wood carvings was exhibited alongside his photographs in a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art.  Of the sculptures exhibited in Weston’s 1937 show, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Alfred Frankenstein wrote, ‘His highly polished abstract sculptures in wood, exposing and revealing its natural grain, are his sand photography brought out in three dimensions.  I have yet to see any sculpture that so strongly demands to be handled, nor any more soothing and pleasing to one’s tactile sense’ (quoted in In Pursuit of Form, facing pl. 4). 

Murray records  that there are 43 Brett Weston wood sculptures extant.  Most🌺 of these have remained in the Weston family.  The sculpture offered here is believed to be the first Brett Weston sculpture to༒ appear at auction.