Laguna Museum to Sell Outerbridge Collection

In a move that has stunned the photography community, the Laguna Art Museum has consigned a 93-piece group of works by Paul Outerbridge, a major 20th century photographer, to be sold piece by piece later this year by Christie’s auction house in New York.

The museum’s holdings of Outerbridge’s work--donated in 1968, a decade after his death, by his widow, Lois Outerbridge Cunningham--had been among its most distinguished assets.

Outerbridge, who was born in New York in 1896, is known primarily for his translation of the Cubist aesthetic into images of consumer objects for commercial clients in the 1920s and for developing a brilliant color film technique in the ‘30s. He also made steamy fantasy compositions using such props as hosiery, gloves and masks.

“We are proud to have [the collection] and we exhibited it several times,” Bolton Colburn, the museum’s chief curator, said Tuesday. “But it doesn’t fit very well into our collection,” which focuses on art from California. Outerbridge lived in Laguna Beach from 1943 until his death, but his glory years were over. The work in the collection was made in New York and Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s.

“They are beautiful photographs, and we’re all going to miss them,” said museum director Naomi Vine. “But Outerbridge is very well represented in other public collections, and his work is well documented and easily accessible in a number of ways.”

Colburn said the income from the sale will be put into the museum’s collection fund to purchase “significant [20th century] pieces we have our eye on.”

Word of the sale was decried by Los Angeles photography dealer G. Ray Hawkins as a “foolish decision.” Hawkins has been a longtime champion of Outerbridge’s work and represents his estate. “The Outerbridges from the Laguna Art Museum collection, to a great extent, are absolutely unique and pivotal pieces of 20th century art,” he said.

Christie’s will include 36 of Outerbridge’s photographs in an auction scheduled for April 23. As a group, the works are expected to fetch between $500,000 and $700,000.

In addition, 22 ink drawings and lithographs by Outerbridge will be offered at Christie’s April 20 sale of 20th century decorative arts, and 35 remaining photographs will be auctioned in the fall. Any works that do not sell will be returned to the museum.

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“I truly am saddened that [the museum was] not able to take a bit more time to give [the collection] a home in one institution in the U.S. that could protect it and exhibit it and make it available for academic reference,” said Teresa Luisotti, director of Gallery RAM, USA, a gallery in Santa Monica devoted to photography.

“[When] estates [are] torn apart, we lose our archives, the bodies of work that talk about an artist in a cohesive way.”

Although news of the sale didn’t surface until this week, museum officials said the board of trustees formally approved the elimination of the Outerbridge pieces from the collection in October 1993, five months before the departure of former director Charles Desmarais. But the decision to let the collection be broken up in auction sales came just a few months ago.

Vine noted Tuesday that two years had gone by since the decision to sell the works and that no institution had agreed to buy the collection, either in whole or in part, so putting it up for auction was “the most ethical thing.

“It’s my understanding that considerable effort was made to find another home for the collection to keep it intact,” said Vine, who has been on the job since March of last year (between Desmarais’ departure in March ’94 and Vine’s arrival, the museum was run by the board). Vine said the works were “turned over to a reputable outside dealer” who was charged with locating another museum willing to acquire the entire collection.

The dealer--whom museum representatives refused to name--was Jeffrey Fraenkel, longtime proprietor of Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, a respected source of 19th and 20 century photographs. He said the collection was offered to “less than a handful of museums.”

“It’s a specialized collection and it only would be appropriate for a few institutions,” Fraenkel said. “Secondly, one doesn’t want to approach too many institutions with a group of pictures, especially one that is already in one institution.” Asked why, he said only that this procedure was “simply tradition.”

Hawkins, meanwhile, called the search “the best kept secret I’ve ever come across. . . . There was not a single whisper of the availability of this collection in the marketplace.”

Colburn said the museum chose not to work with Hawkins: “He sells Outerbridge, and it was thought that might be a conflict of interest.”

Vine said offering the collection to a private dealer, or selling it from the museum, would have been “a questionable practice. The AAM [American Assn. of Museums] has established very clear guidelines, and we were very careful to follow them by the letter of law.”

Desmarais, meanwhile, said Tuesday that when he and the board explored the idea of selling the collection and using the proceeds to buy more California art, “every step along the way, it was with caveat after caveat,” especially in terms placing the collection in a single institution.

“Perhaps they might be sold if there was a way to keep the collection together and if we had a real program for how this acquisition money would be spent to improve the collection. Was it legitimate to let it out of Southern California, much less break it up?”

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“Most museums don’t see their collections as just an asset that you sell off,” Desmarais added. “The reason it’s called the permanent collection is that its something you nurture and grow for the future. It’s the patrimony of the community. . . . While I do think it’s their decision to make, it’s regrettable that such an important group of works is being broken up, that most museums would see it as essential to keep together.”

Joni Rehnborg, chairman of the museum’s collection committee at the time, said Tuesday that the plan to sell was “very carefully and heart-wrenchingly talked about” and that “great efforts” were made to interest the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu--which has a fabled photography collection--in acquiring the work.

Gordon Baldwin, an associate curator in the department of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, agreed that the collection is “outstanding . . . one of the most important [Outerbridge collections] in the country.”

But, he said, the Getty turned down the offer “for a variety of reasons, having to do with our acquisition priorities, prior financial commitments and material duplicated in our collection.”