Outerbridge Sale Ignores Big Picture

One of the tenets of being both an art critic and a reporter is that you aren’t allowed to air your personal opinion while wearing your reporter’s hat.

But now that Christie’s sale of portions of the Outerbridge material from the collection of the Laguna Art Museum is a done deal, I’m changing back to my critic’s hat.

I am deeply disappointed that the museum has permitted such a lively and important body of work to leave the community, to be sold piecemeal and scattered around the world (buyers so far have included dealers from New York, Canada and Switzerland)--based on the astonishingly flimsy excuse that the work did not fit the museum’s mission statement.

This action makes no sense on any level except as an example of shortsighted greed.

Even though Outerbridge’s career was forged in New York and Paris, his elegant Modernist photographs from the 1920s and lush color prints from the ‘30s are fully in keeping with the museum’s stated collection policy: “ . . . the art of California and related works, with an emphasis on the 20th century” (my italics).

In fact, in 1990, when the museum’s Collection Committee prepared a list of artists it wanted to add to the permanent collection, Man Ray--the Surrealist painter, sculptor and filmmaker--was proposed “to go with our Paul Outerbridge collection.” And rightly so, because both were Americans of the same generation; both were strongly influenced by avant-garde European art of the early 20th century and made their marks as radical stylists.

Outerbridge first attracted notice with his suavely composed platinum prints, in which real objects were stripped of everyday associations to serve as elegant harmonies of form and tone. Then, in the Carbro prints, he created a fetishistic world of female nudes and almost palpably vivid, intensely colored objects redolent of magic and intrigue--a darkly playful world that seems particularly relevant to some of the late 20th century’s most controversial artists.

Outerbridge’s membership in an international community of multimedia artists of the 1920s and ‘30s should have been enough by itself to keep the works at the museum.

But he also was a local guy in the 1940s and ‘50s--he and his wife were proprietors of a local dress shop. In fact, Outerbridge was part of a long-lived and vital tradition of local photography that began in the 1930s with the lush, sometimes frankly campy, Pictorialist style of William Mortensen, who established a photography school in town.

Only three years ago (how soon we forget!), the museum celebrated this connection in an exhibition of works from the collection called “Visions and Ecologies: Photography in Laguna Beach, 1918-1993.”

Beginning with Mortensen and segueing to George Hurrell (who stopped off in Laguna before heading to Hollywood), the show also included prints by Outerbridge, William Current (a friend of Outerbridge’s and the subject of one of his photo magazine articles) and internationally known photographer Lewis Baltz (who became acquainted with Outerbridge’s work while visiting Current’s camera shop.)

The provenance of the work was impeccable; it all came from Lois Outerbridge, the artist’s widow. (She claimed only to have placed the work on long-term loan, according to photography historian Graham Howe, who knew her, but she died before being able to straighten things out with the museum.) Most crucially, it was the museum’s own 1981 exhibition of Outerbridge’s work that put both the photographer and the museum on the map.

How much more local can you get?

Ironies large and small abound. Considering that Outerbridge was one of the official photographers of Laguna Beach’s major tourist attraction, it seemed very odd indeed that the museum saw fit to send his 1950 photograph of two figures from the Pageant of the Masters to an auction house.

On a larger scale, it gives one pause to consider some of the names on the list of artists whose work the museum hopes to purchase with money from the sale--some of whom spent even less time in California than Outerbridge, and produced their primary body of work elsewhere.

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The 29 Outerbridge photographs sold at the auction in New York on April 23 brought in $1,063,180, including commission; subsequently, buyers have been found for four of the seven unsold works. (Only two of the five lots of Outerbridge’s drawings and prints offered at Christie’s April 20 auction of 20th century decorative arts were sold, at prices well below the modest estimates.)

After Christie’s commission and fees for photography and shipping are subtracted from the April 23 total, the museum stands to realize more than $800,000, according to extremely rough and preliminary estimates by Bolton Colburn, the museum’s chief curator.

Although the museum still has not identified individual works it hopes to acquire with the money, Colburn has said that proceeds from the sale will be used for works by “California Modernists” of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. Among the artists in whom Colburn said the museum is interested: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, Helen Lundeberg, Henrietta Shore, Knud Merrild, William Brice, Agnes Pelton and Man Ray.

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Normally one would not quarrel with the validity of the Laguna Art Museum’s interest in acquiring work by these artists. But just how “Californian” are they all, given the burning importance of this issue to the powers that be at the museum?

Well, Man Ray spent the ‘40s in California and then returned to Europe. His famous photographic works, made of chance distortions of objects on sensitized paper (Rayographs), date from the 1920s; in Hollywood, he was a painter and fashion photographer.

Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright are best known for codeveloping an abstract painting style known as Synchromism in Munich and Paris in 1913. While Macdonald-Wright studied at the Art Students League in Los Angeles before leaving for Paris, later became the school’s director and subsequently taught at UCLA, Russell had little to do with California. He spent nearly all his professional life in France.

So why was it deemed better to cash in the Outerbridges and buy more works by a bunch of different artists than to keep a very good thing the museum already had?

What seems to be missing at the museum these days is a sense of the big picture--of the history of art, of the history of the museum and its role in Laguna Beach, of the potential chilling effect on future donors of art to the museum, and of the meaning of having a permanent collection in the first place.

After the news broke about the impending auction, one of the museum’s trustees tried to explain the logic of it to me. “We’ve already showed the Outerbridge stuff over and over,” he said. “We’ve done everything we could do with it!”

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Guess what? That’s what a permanent collection is. Something you store and maintain and permit other institutions to borrow (thus building your own institutional prestige) and, yes, show over and over, in different contexts, as the years go by.

Chances are that no other body of work owned by the museum--which is not exactly rolling in major pieces of art--would have provided the continual sense of psychological revelation and aesthetic pleasure as these photographs.

Letting them go was one of the worst mistakes the museum has ever made.