(LA Times) Charis Wilson dies at 95; model, muse and last wife of photographer Edward Weston
Matthew Kruk
latimes.com
Charis Wilson dies at 95; model, muse and last wife of photographer
Edward Weston
Wilson was deeply involved in Weston's career and influenced his work.
She also was the author of several books, including, with her husband,
'California and the West.'
By Mary Rourke
10:56 AM PST, November 24, 2009
Charis Wilson, the muse, model and last wife of art photographer Edward
Weston and the author of several books including "California and the
West," which she co-wrote with her husband, has died. She was 95.
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FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this story misspelled the location
of the sand dunes where Edward Weston photographed Charis Wilson. They
are in Oceano, not Oceana. Also, the name of one of the novels written
by Wilson's father is "Ruggles of Red Gap," not "Rugles of Red Gap."
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Wilson, who had been suffering from various age-related ailments, died
Friday in Santa Cruz at the home of her close friend Joseph Stroud, her
daughter Rachel Fern Harris said.
A free spirit who took up with Weston when she was 20 and he was 48,
Charis (pronounced CARE-ess) Wilson posed for a number of his
photographs, many of them nudes, but her involvement with his career
went far beyond modeling. Wilson edited articles on photography by
Weston and traveled extensively with him for his work.
"She was one of the great models and one of the great artistic muses of
the century," Arthur Ollman, director of the school of art, design and
art history at San Diego State University, told The Times in 2007.
"Charis was fully involved in the making of Edward Weston's art during a
very productive period in his life," said Ollman, who included Wilson
and Weston in "The Model Wife," his 1999 book on artists and their
spouses.
Wilson's entry into Weston's life led to a change in his formalist
style, according to critics. Images of "her youthful face and womanly
form" show how Weston the "self-conscious aesthete" had matured into an
artist, "capable of indulging in true sentiment," wrote critic Andy
Grundberg in a 1990 New York Times review of a Weston exhibit at the
International Center for Photography. Photographs of Wilson rolling down
a sand dune ("Dunes, Oceano," 1936), floating in a swimming pool in
Carmel in ("Floating Nude," 1939) or sitting on a chair in Weston's
studio with a robe casually draped over her shoulders ("Nude," 1934) are
unlike nudes Weston had been known for.
A number of the Wilson images are included in "Eloquent Nude, the Love
and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson," a 2007 documentary with
archival footage and interviews with Wilson, directed by Ian McCluskey.
"He had been the master of the close-up of body parts," Ollman said of
Weston. In "Dunes, Oceano," however, Ollman said, "the model is moving
in space, there is no horizon line. It was a breakthrough for him,
largely because of Charis' spontaneity. Her uninhibited style gave
Weston a freedom that was vitalizing to him."
Weston was aware of a change in his style. "The first nudes of C. were
easily amongst the finest I had done, perhaps the finest," he wrote in
his daybook in April 1934.
One of the best known photographs he made of Wilson shows her fully
dressed in "Charis, Lake Ediza" of 1937. She sits on the ground leaning
against rocks wearing pants, a pullover and tall boots. Her head is
wrapped in fabric to ward off mosquitoes when traveling and camping
outdoors. There is "a look of exhaustion on my face -- since identified
by critics as 'sensuality,' " Wilson wrote in her 1998 memoir, "Through
Another Lens, My Years With Edward Weston," co-written with Wendy Madar.
The 28-year age difference between Wilson and Weston gave their romance
"a bohemian, May to December quality," photography dealer and historian
Stephen White said in a 2007 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
"Charis brought an essence of youth, when Weston was starting to wear
out."
Soon after they met, in Carmel in 1934, she began to pour her writing
talents into advancing his career. Along with editing his articles for
Camera Craft magazine, she wrote some of them under his name, she
explained in her memoir. "My goal was to make the articles sound exactly
like Edward Weston," Wilson wrote.
"She did write under his name," Ollman confirmed. "It was easy for her
and slavishly hard for him."
Wilson also managed Weston's studio, captioned and cataloged his
negatives and kept up his business correspondence. In 1936, she helped
him write an application for a Guggenheim fellowship, expanding on his
brief statement to make it a five-page presentation. He won a Guggenheim
in 1937, the first one ever granted to an art photographer. It was
renewed for a second year in 1938.
The money funded a series of road trips that led to the book "California
and the West," which was published in 1940.
Wilson drove their Ford, and Weston scouted the landscape. She kept a
diary that was the basis for the text of the book, which features close
to 100 photographs by Weston. It was a critical success which, for
Wilson, "settled any lingering doubts I had about my value as a
partner," she wrote in her memoir.
"You feel the presence of Charis strongly in the book," White said of
her contribution to "California and the West."
In her relaxed, informative writing style, Wilson described a crab apple
tree "in a full coat of snowball blossoms" that Weston photographed
"forty-six miles from Glendale on U.S. No. 66." She reduced Death Valley
to "a hundred miles of desolate geography" and noted "a wheezy
rattletrap" truck that passed her and Weston on the empty road.
She also traveled with Weston as his assistant for "Leaves of Grass,"
his books of photographs to go with the poetry of Walt Whitman,
published in 1942. She is the co-author of "Cats of Wildcat Hill,"
(1947), with photographs by Weston.
She was born Helen Charis Wilson on May 5, 1914, in San Francisco and
raised in Carmel. She was the only daughter of Harry Leon Wilson, a
popular novelist and humor writer in the 1910s and 1920s whose best
known work, "Ruggles of Red Gap," was first adapted as a movie in 1918.
Her mother, Helen, was an amateur artist and actress who performed in
local theater.
Wilson's older brother, Harry Leon Jr., was editor in chief of
publications for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for
some years.
Family friends included novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington. He and
Wilson's father collaborated on a Broadway play, "The Man From Home."
As a child, Wilson was shipped from boarding school to summer camp, she
wrote in her memoir. She attended several high schools, including
Hollywood High School after her parents divorced and her mother moved
temporarily to Los Angeles. She graduated from Catlin, a boarding school
in Portland, Ore., and was awarded a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence
College in Bronxville, N.Y. Her father said he could not afford to pay
the expenses that the scholarship didn't cover, so Wilson had to turn
down the scholarship.
For some months after that she lived in San Francisco, worked as an
actress in a French language theater and did secretarial work. She
"acquired a number of boyfriends and patronized the last of the
speakeasies" and was "desperately unhappy," she wrote in her memoir. She
returned to Carmel. Soon afterward she met Weston.
"My eyes keep returning to a short man in brown clothes . . . across the
room," she wrote in her memoir about her first meeting with Weston. They
were at a concert in Carmel, and before they were introduced, "we were
keenly aware of each other," she wrote. At intermission, Weston made his
way across the room to meet her.
He also wrote about the event. "A new and important chapter in my life
opened on Sunday afternoon, April 22, 1934," he wrote in his daybook. "I
saw this tall, beautiful girl, with finely proportioned body,
intelligent face well-freckled, blue eyes, golden brown hair to
shoulders -- and had to meet."
Most of the photographs he made of Wilson call attention to her beauty.
That changed toward the end of their 11 years together.
In "Civilian Defense" of 1942, she reclines on a couch, wearing only the
gas mask that was requisitioned to her when she served at the local
aircraft warning post during World War II.
The next year she posed for "My Little Gray Home in the West." Standing
outside the work studio behind the main house in Carmel, she holds a
sign with her husband's name on it that partly hides her nudity. Her
sullen expression adds to the sarcasm of the photograph's title.
"When I look at the nudes Edward made of me during our last years
together, I am struck by the sad face of that young woman who was me,"
Wilson wrote in an essay for the 1977 book "Edward Weston Nudes."
"We had broken the backbone of that strong bond of love and
understanding that keeps daily life from turning stale and deadly."
She fell from her place as "exalted goddess to the more human,
unenviable, and inglorious role of helpmate and art wife," author
Francine Prose wrote of Wilson in her 2002 book, "The Lives of the
Muses."
She left Weston in 1945. Soon afterward, she met Noel Harris, a labor
activist who lived in Eureka. They married in December 1946, the day
after her divorce from Weston was finalized.
"I can see now that falling in love with another person finally allowed
me to leave Edward, something my physical absence from Wildcat Hill
hadn't accomplished," she wrote in her memoir.
During her second marriage Wilson had two children, Anita and Rachel.
She worked various jobs and also taught creative writing. The marriage
to Harris ended in divorce but they remained close friends.
Weston stayed in the house he and Wilson shared. She owned it but rented
it to him. Eventually she sold it to him for $10,000. He died there, of
Parkinson's disease, in 1958. She continued writing to him through most
of his life.
"I would love to see your children," Weston wrote to Wilson in September
1955. She brought them to him. It was their last meeting.
Rourke is a former Times staff writer.
Copyright � 2009, The Los Angeles Times