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Nash Photo Gift to L.A. County Museum

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TIMES ART WRITER

Pop singer Graham Nash has decided to auction his widely acclaimed collection of photography, but he won’t take all the money and run. A generous portion of the proceeds will go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the acquisition of non-traditional photographs.

A sale of more than 450 works from Nash’s collection, scheduled for April 25 at Sotheby’s New York, is expected to bring more than $2 million. Nash intends to recoup his investment--an amount that has yet to be determined by his accountants. Once he has recovered his costs, he will split his profit with the museum. In addition, Nash will donate about 140 of the most up-to-date photographs to the museum.

Why is he selling?

“I love the thrill of the chase and the energy of new fields. In the ‘60s that energy was in rock ‘n’ roll. In the ‘70s, it was in collecting photography,” said Nash, who rocked to fame in the ‘60s with Crosby, Stills & Nash.

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During the ‘80s, Nash said, his interests turned from photography’s historical spectrum to contemporary works done with experimental techniques including computers. He has collected up-to-the-minute photographs, but now he will turn that job over to an institution that can handle the job professionally.

Nash’s gift of about 140 works from the ‘80s will give a considerable boost to the museum’s small collection. The auction proceeds should put the museum on the map as a collector of contemporary photography. While photography prices have risen dramatically along with the rest of the art market, photographs are still relatively affordable. Nash’s money gift--which could total several hundred thousand dollars--will be significant.

The musician could have gifted an institution that has a bigger and better photography collection, but he opted to aid a local museum that has only begun to establish its commitment to photography. “The County Museum of Art has been criticized for not doing enough for photography. Instead of criticizing, I’d rather help,” Nash said.

“We are delighted and very grateful, particularly at a time when gifts to museums are very hard to develop. Graham Nash’s generosity will go a long, long way to help us build a mature department of photography,” said Earl A. Powell, director of LACMA. The museum’s photography collection currently covers a broad of history but is strongest in post-1945 work, Powell said.

The Nash auction will be “the most important single-owner sale of photographs ever to come to auction,” according to Beth Gates-Warren, director of Sotheby’s department of photographs.

Nash’s collection is unusually broad, reaching from “Feathers,” an 1845 cyanotype by British photographer Anna Atkins (valued between $5,000 and $8,000) to Duane Michals’ 1973 triple portrait of Andy Warhol ($2,000 to $2,500). Nineteenth-Century images include works by Julia Margaret Cameron and Peter Henry Emerson. Twentieth-Century pieces encompass the visions of Lewis Hine, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen and Harry Callahan.

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“Graham Nash began collecting so early--in the early ‘70s during the formative years of the market--that he was able to acquire pieces that you don’t usually see at auction. He traveled a great deal, he was in touch with book and photography dealers and he had a lot of people looking for him,” Gates-Warren said.

Prime among the pieces in the upcoming sale are works by Paul Outerbridge, whose abstract still lifes, female nudes and surreal images are widely admired by photography collectors and critics. A 1927 self-portrait of the artist in a mask and top hat--a striking image that has never appeared at auction--is expected to bring at least $60,000. Two other Outerbridge works, “Saltine Box, Version II” and “H.O. Box” (which comes with a drawing of the same subject), are each estimated at $50,000 to $75,000.

A self-portrait by Steichen is valued at $30,000 to $50,000; his portrait of Gloria Swanson is expected to bring $10,000 to $20,000. The image that persuaded Nash to start collecting photographs, Diane Arbus’ “Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park,” also will go on the block, at an estimated price of $12,000 to $18,000.

Nash said that Arbus’ image of a scrawny, grimacing kid holding a war toy as if it would explode any minute is a great example of photography’s “power to move” human emotions. That famous picture turned him into an acquisitor, but he was already primed for action by his father who was an amateur photographer and by his own earlier interest in 19th-Century photographs of North American Indians.

Gates-Warren characterized the Nash collection as focusing on “human nature” and reflecting Nash’s ironic sense of humor. “He is a photographer himself. He has a very good eye and sense of composition, but he also feels a lot of empathy with the subjects of his photographs,” she said.

Nash’s collection was shown at UCLA in 1981 as part of a traveling exhibition.

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