Outerbridge Photos Sold Over Protest

Twenty-nine photographs by Paul Outerbridge owned by the Laguna Art Museum were sold at a controversial auction Tuesday at Christie’s for more than $1 million.

“The sale exceeded our expectations and we hope to do something truly wonderful for everyone in Orange County with the collection fund that will result from this sale,” said Naomi Vine, the Laguna Art Museum’s director.

Proceeds from the auction will be used to purchase 20th century California art, said Bolton Colburn, the museum’s chief curator. Vine has said the photographs went on the block because they “do not fit the [museum’s] mission statement,” which states that the institution has a “special focus on the art of California.”

Before the auction, opponents said the sale of the Outerbridge collection was ill-advised because it violated the role of a cultural institution as a trustee of significant works of art donated to it.

Critics of the sale said the auction breaks up one of the finest holdings of Modernist photographic work in the nation and relegates many of the images to the obscurity of private collections, thus making eventual reassembly all but impossible.

The highest price Tuesday--$200,500--was paid for Outerbridge’s quintessentially Cubist study of a cracker tin, titled “Saltine Box.”

“Ide Collar,” a picture of a shirt collar that was Outerbridge’s first commercial advertising assignment, sold for $189,500 to the same buyer, who phoned in the bids to the auction house’s headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The auction house declined to identify the successful bidder.

Before the sale, Christie’s experts estimated the platinum print of the box could bring as much as $80,000 and the shirt collar $90,000.

In all, 36 images were offered; 17 of the pictures exceeded Christie’s estimates, while three were accurately predicted. But there also were a number of disappointments; nine were sold below their estimates and seven were not sold.

Critics of the sale have said that insufficient approaches were made to other museums to acquire Outerbridge’s photographs as a complete group, and that the Laguna museum’s action could have a chilling effect on potential donors contemplating giving material.

“The sale promises to disfigure the artistic face of the museum,” said Elaine Dines Cox, who assembled a comprehensive traveling exhibition of the photographer’s work for the Laguna museum in 1981. “One must call into question the credibility of the present-day decision makers at this institution,” Cox added.

G. Ray Hawkins, a photography dealer in Santa Monica who represents the Outerbridge estate, said late Tuesday that he had purchased nine of the photographs at the auction. Hawkins previously had labeled the decision to sell as “foolish” on the museum’s part. (Hawkins would not reveal which photographs he acquired Tuesday but did say his bid on “Ide Collar” was unsuccessful.)

Though steps to sell the works began in October 1993, the actual decision to auction the photographs and risk breaking them up as a group wasn’t made until last summer.

“They are beautiful photographs and we’re all going to miss them,” Vine said. “But Outerbridge is very well represented in other public collections.”

Outerbridge, who died in 1958, produced few prints from his negatives. The works that were auctioned Tuesday were acquired by the museum in 1968 from the photographer’s widow, Lois Outerbridge Cunningham.

Goldman reported from New York, Curtis from Orange County.