In discussing his portraiture, Avedon often referenced Viennese artist Egon Schiele as an important influence, specifically his ‘candor and complexity’ in portrait making (Richard Avedon Portraits, unpaginated). The 20th century Austrian artist’s electric, sensual drawings of men and women are shown against stark, empty backgrounds in contorted or in otherwise dramatic poses that exude raw sexuality and intensity.
Avedon’s arresting portrait of carnival worker Juan Patricio Lobato draws heavily on Schiele’s legacy. In Avedon’s photograph, the intensity of Lobato’s presence is made palpable through his direct gaze and an almost unnatural, captivating spine curvature that serves as a focal point for the portrait. The S-shaped curve is further accentuated by his black t-shirt, hooked around his neck, likely to keep cool on an August day.
Avedon spoke frequently of his ‘addiction’ to white backdrops. In Portraits, Avedon wrote ‘As one who is addicted to white backgrounds, it seems odd to me that a gray or tonal background is never described as being empty. But in a sense that’s correct. A dark background fills. A white background empties. . . If you can make it work successfully, a white background permits people to become symbolic of themselves’ (Richard Avedon Portraits, unpaginated).
Juan Patricio Lobato, Carney, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980 is one of the most arresting portraits from Avedon’s In the American West. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, to document the American West through the people that inhabited it, Avedon and his assistants traveled through 17 states during the summers between 1979 and 1984, stopping to photograph individuals in all manner of locations, including coal mines (see Lot 9), oil fields, prisons, state fairs, and carnivals. Juan Patricio Lobato was one of 752 individuals Avedon photographed in the course of his ambitious five year project, and one of only 125 images Avedon selected as the definitive representation of this body of work. In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon opened at the Amon Carter Museum in 1985 to widespread acclaim. In a celebrated career spanning more than six decades, this series is considered by many to be his crowning achievement.
‘In the American West shocked many viewers, but it thrilled me. I considered it to be a major achievement, and I quickly wrote a piece about the photographs, arguing that they constituted a radical break with the long-dominant lyrical pastoral tradition of Western photography, a tradition that concentrated, in most cases, on spectacular but mostly unpeopled landscapes.’
Photographs from In the American West rarely appear at auction. Another example of Juan Patricio Lobato has not been offered at auction in more than two decades.