Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles Details
Review “A rehabilitation of an unjustly forgotten photographer, this absorbing read will appeal to students of art and California.”—Library Journal“An illuminating insight into both the creative process and into the lives of a group of people influential in creating the cultural world in which we still live today.”—Photographica World“A meticulously insightful account of the decade of collaboration between southern California photographers Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather, an interval little examined by art historians.”—College & Research Library News“In Artful Lives, Beth Gates Warren recaptures the milieu that formed both [Edward Weston and Margarethe Mather], and restores Margarethe Mather’s unique accomplishment to the position it deserves.”―Times Literary Supplement“Beth Gates Warren succeeds in bringing [Mather] out of obscurity and making a persuasive case for her photographic talent.”―Los Angeles Review of Books“This well-researched biography uncovers the story of Edward Weston’s early career years in Los Angeles, his partnership with fellow photographer Margarethe Mather, and their artistic community.”―Photo Life“One of the more hidebound notions about American art is that modern art photography was strictly an East Coast phenomenon, and that Los Angeles represented a cultural backwater. Last fall’s publication of Artful Lives, Beth Gates Warren’s groundbreaking study of Edward Weston and Margarethe Mather, thoroughly debunks this falsehood.”―Glendale News Press“Author Beth Gates Warren, a former director of Sotheby’s photo department, has written her exhaustively researched book with the page-turning pace of a novel. Her prose has as much love for its young, sexy and messy principals as it does for the city in which they lived.”―PureWow Read more About the Author Beth Gates Warren is an independent scholar and consultant in the field of fine art photography and the author of Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (W. W. Norton, 2001), which accompanied an exhibition she curated for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Read more
Reviews
Great book, and Beth Gates Warren did a terrific job here. I'm impressed and pleased by the amount of information she was able to find on Margrethe Mather, and the photographs of her in her youth- amazing. Usually books on artists are vague on details, like dates and specifics about people/events in the life of the subject, and forget there are such things as public records, but I can't make that complaint here. Warren tracked down facts - census records etc. Where there's a lapse in the documented record, she tries to fill in with a reasonable theory of what must have happened. . She presents Mather's version of her life story, but also points out where it and the verifiable documentation go off in different directions. Despite all this factual-ness, the book is not at all dry or dull, proving that you can have endnotes and actual research and still be entertaining. One obscure fact I really wanted to know the answer to- when exactly did Mather inhabit and own the carriage house on 4th Ave.- is actually answered in this book. The images are lovely too.
