Lot 18: MARGRETHE MATHER 1886-1952

'PIERROT'

measurements note
9 1/2 by 7 1/2 in. (24.1 by 19 cm.)

platinum print, tipped to a large sheet of heavy buff paper, signed and titled by the photographer in pencil on the mount, matted, 1920

PROVENANCE

Margaret Levy

The Weston Gallery, Carmel, California

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1982

LITERATURE

Another print of this image:

Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001), pl. 29

NOTE

The photograph offered here, believed to be one of only two prints of the image extant, is included in a group of works that Mather authority Beth Gates Warren classifies among the photographer's masterpieces. Along with the photographer's Moon Kwan studies and a double portrait of Edward Weston and Johan Hagemeyer, Warren cites the Pierrot pictures as the best examples of Mather's prescient modernism. As Warren observes, in her Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara, 2001), to which this entry is indebted, Mather's 'ruthlessly reductive eye' led her to a number of bold compositional choices that often preceded similar choices by her better-known lover Edward Weston.

Warren has identified the sitter in Pierrot as the Danish-born actor Otto Mathiesen, one of a group of theatre people in which Mather mingled, an extended circle that included the young Charles Chaplin, among many others. Warren charts Mather's involvement with the budding cinema communities around Burbank, Hollywood, and Edendale in the 1910s, and her portrait sittings with such stage luminaries as Lillian Gish, Nijinsky, and Leon Bakst. The Pierrot figure is a time-honored subject in the visual arts, used by generations of painters as well as photographers in the decades, and even centuries, preceding Mather's photograph. With its elements of costume, clown make-up, and expressive lighting, the Pierrot follows in a long tradition of portraits of the sad clown, and like Weston's Scene Shifter of Lot 17, has the theatre as its ostensible theme. In Mather's Pierrot, however, as in paintings of Pierrot, from Watteau to Picasso, the work transcends its nominal subject.

Within the Mather oeuvre, the Pierrot photographs comprise part of a group of pictures that work with shadows as a primary compositional device; the early work of Arthur Kales, Louis Fleckenstein, Johan Hagemeyer, Edward Weston (cf. the Scene Shifter of Lot 17), and others are a part of this tradition. Although many of these photographs are now forgotten, reproduced only on the pages of the camera magazines of the time, they represent a crucial step in the transition from pictorialism to modernism for both Mather and Weston. Warren posits Mather as one of the most innovative photographers working in this 'high-key' mode, as the light-and-shadow pictures were then described. Other than the photographer's own Moon Kwan pictures of circa 1918, Warren finds no compositional antecedents for Mather's Pierrot series, which, like the Moon Kwan photographs, are fearless in their paring down of extraneous detail and their rigorous use of empty space.

Beth Gates Warren has located only one other extant print of the image offered here, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.