Oklahoma City Museum of Art receives 50 prints by photographer Brett Weston
Brett Weston, "Pines in Fog, Monterey," 1963.
The Oklahoma City Museum of Art has received 50 gelatin silver prints by American photographer Brett Weston (1911–93) from the Brett Weston Archive and Christian K. Keesee Collection.
The photographs date from 1940 to 1985 and highlight the range of the artist’s photography, from his early photographs of White Sands, N.M., to the glass, mud, and kelp abstractions for which he became known, to his later photographs in Hawaii. Photographs such as “Pines in Fog, Monterey “(1963), “Cut Wood, Europe” (1968), and “Ice Formation, Alaska” (1977) also reference Brett’s extensive travels.
“The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is honored to be the recipient of this generous gift from Mr. Keesee of Brett Weston photographs,” said Glen Gentele, president and chief executive officer, in the museum’s announcement. “This donation adds substantially to the museum’s growing collection of photography and is the second of three such gifts that will add another 50 Brett Weston photographs to the Museum’s permanent collection over the next year. We are grateful and thrilled by Mr. Keesee’s philanthropy.”
Brett Weston, "Banyan Roots, Hawaii," 1980.
Brett Weston, the second son of photographer Edward Weston, was born in Los Angeles in 1911. In 1925, at the age of 13, Brett began taking photographs on a trip to Mexico with his father’s Graflex camera. While there, he was exposed to the works of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Tina Modotti, who influenced his sense of form and composition.
He returned to California with his father in 1926 and began to exhibit his own works, while assisting Edward in his portrait studio. Brett’s work received international attention after being included in the important 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany.
During World War II, Brett worked briefly as an assistant cameraman for 20th Century Fox, before being drafted into the Army. Stationed with the Signal Corps in New York City in 1944, Brett took photographs of the city when off-duty and made important contacts in the photographic world.
The following year, he was assigned to the Army base in El Paso, Texas, where he became a sergeant, and began photographing the nearby gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument. The recent donation from the Brett Weston Archive–Christian K. Keesee Collection includes examples of Brett’s acclaimed photographs of White Sands, including “Sands and Grass, White Sands” (1946) and “Yucca and Dunes, White Sands” (1946). Brett was discharged from the Army in 1946 and spent the following year taking photographs of the East Coast on a Post Service Guggenheim Fellowship.
Brett’s work often incorporates the use of close-ups and abstracted details, displaying a preference for high-contrast imagery, which reduces his subjects to pure form. Throughout his career, he has repeatedly photographed subjects including tangled kelp, plant leaves, and knotted roots and has made numerous photography trips to Europe, Baja California, Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii, among other locations. Brett’s work became increasingly abstract in the 1970s as he began to more fully utilize a 2 ¼-inch format reflex camera. He spent a considerable amount of time taking photographs in Hawaii, during the 1980s, before his death in his Kona home in 1993.
Between 2004 and 2010, Christian K. Keesee donated 260 photographs from the Brett Weston Archive. The recent gift brings the museum’s Brett Weston Archive–Christian K. Keesee Collection to 310 photographs. The museum, along with the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Whitney Museum of American Art, is one of the largest repositories of Brett Weston photographs.
In 2008, the Oklahoma City museum exhibited “Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow,” the first major retrospective of the acclaimed American photographer’s work in more than 30 years.
The Brett Weston Archive was established in 1997 by Christian K. Keesee, a prominent art collector who purchased the entire inventory from the critically acclaimed American photographer’s estate.
Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art serves more than 125,000 visitors annually from all 50 states and more than 30 foreign countries and presents exhibitions drawn from throughout the world. The museum’s collection covers a period of five centuries with highlights in European and American art from the 19th through 21st centuries, a growing collection of contemporary art, and a comprehensive collection of glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly.
-BAM
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