Brett Weston: Nudes and Dunes

Michael Hoppen is very pleased to exhibit for the first time in the United Kingdom a comprehensive vintage selection of Brett Weston’s Nudes and Dunes.

Born in 1911, the son and apprentice of legendary photographer Edward Weston, Brett applied himself to photography from an early age. Moving with his father to Mexico aged thirteen he was introduced to Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and Tina Modotti. His father’s radical sense of composition and his exposure to modern art imbued him with a developed sense of form and a fascination with abstraction.

Weston began photographing the dunes of Oceano, California in the early 1930’s and continued to photograph the desert throughout his career. In the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s he developed the Underwater Nude series, harnessing the mercurial quality of the water in the same way he had the desert sand. Often quoting painters as more influential to him than photographers, he maintained a strong sense of design: an inherent ability to reduce his subject to pure form.

At seventeen Weston was part of the pivotal inter-war Film und Photo exhibition. He went on to mount his first one man retrospective at the De Young Museum in San Francisco aged twenty-one. Exhibited extensively ever since, his work is in the collections of innumerable museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, The International Centre of Photography and the Getty Museum.

Never before exhibited in this country this is the perfect opportunity for collectors to view Brett Weston’s work.