New Wind, New Works : A controversy brewed over the sale of Outerbridge’s photos, but two acquisitions bought with the proceeds brighten two O.C. museums.

Today’s art museum weather report: After the storm, a rainbow.

A gale of controversy accompanied the April 1996 sale at Christie’s in New York of 29 photographs by Modernist innovator Paul Outerbridge Jr. that had been bequeathed to the Laguna Art Museum by his widow, Lois.

Ranging from platinum prints of still lifes from the 1920s to darkly playful female nudes shot with an experimental color process, these works were among the highlights of the institution’s 20th century holdings.

Museum officials said at the time that their net from the sale--in excess of $800,000--would be used to buy more art for the collection, owned jointly with the Orange County Museum of Art. Various names of artists active in California in the 1930s and ‘40s were bandied around.

And that’s the last we heard of the matter, until an announcement, issued last month by the two museums, of two new acquisitions purchased with part of the sale proceeds.

The paintings--by Agnes Pelton and Stanton MacDonald-Wright--now are on public view. (The first purchase with the sale money, to be exhibited at a later date, is a mixed-media work from the 1930s by obscure San Francisco painter Renaldo Cuneo.)

Despite their stylistic and philosophical differences, both Pelton and MacDonald-Wright were caught up in the twin currents of mysticism and perfumed aestheticism that wafted through California in the early 20th century.

The Pelton is the more unusual and powerful of the two, but both paintings add breadth, stature and sheer beauty to a collection seriously deficient in work by early Modernists.

While the former Newport Harbor Art Museum, OCMA’s predecessor, worked actively to acquire significant California works made after World War II, the traditional-minded Laguna museum owned few forward-looking works (other than some of the late lamented Outerbridges) that were made before the war.

(The two museums’ collections were combined as a result of their 1996 merger; when the Laguna museum regained its autonomy the following year, the merged collection became a trust overseen by members of the boards of both institutions.)

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Pelton, who died in 1961, was largely unknown until her 1995 retrospective at the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Her work is haunting in its use of simple forms and vivid color to evoke a serene otherworldliness. While superficially related to abstractions of landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Lundeberg, Pelton’s work was driven by an idiosyncratic spiritual quest.

In “The Guide,” at the Laguna museum, a gossamer gray shape resembling a diaphanous open cloak with a white bib and wings appears to float in the night sky--an elusive heavenly creature that embraces the viewer. Below, the reddish-brown curved surface of an astral body is studded with stars. One lines up with the large, bright star at the top of the canvas, as if demonstrating a mystical stellar geometry.

For Pelton, who loved to observe the night sky, stars had an incredible visceral power. She once wrote that they seemed “personal, like real beings--as no doubt they are.”

One commentator has said that Pelton meant the sketchy, squiggly lines forming the wing shapes to evoke a weaver’s motion, which in turn stood for the earthly work required to attain spiritual insight.

Although the painting is undated, the star forms were typical elements in Pelton’s work from the early 1930s, when she was in her early 50s and had just moved from Los Angeles to Cathedral City, near Palm Springs.

Growing up in Europe and Brooklyn, N.Y. in a family burdened with a dark history of adultery, Pelton was a sickly child and melancholy young woman.

She studied art with Arthur Wesley Dow (also an influential mentor of O’Keeffe’s), who taught his students to “fill space in a beautiful way.” A few years later, while studying abroad, she became a devotee of the writings of 19th century aesthete Walter Pater. Her early paintings were of dreamy figures whose vaporous garments merged with the outdoor settings.

In her mid-30s, Pelton--a lesbian who apparently never formed close personal attachments after an unrequited love in her youth--became interested in mysticism and the occult. A decade later, in 1927, while supporting herself with portrait commissions, she began painting abstractions and recording her spiritual feelings in a notebook.

In the California desert--where she also painted more straightforward landscapes--Pelton transformed startling atmospheric effects and unusual colors into fanciful visions. One day she observed a white triangle form over a dark gray cloud. “So perfect and fleeting,” she wrote, it just had to be “a sign.”

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Virginia-born MacDonald-Wright moved to California with his parents as a child. In 1907, the 17-year-old sailed to Paris and sampled classes at various art academies. Five years later he collaborated with a fellow ex-pat, Morgan Russell, on a new style: Synchromism.

Borrowing elements from Impressionism (broken brushwork), Cubism (fragmented images) and Fauvism (vivid, unrealistic color), the new style was meant to produce a heady aesthetic rush. The key technique involved reducing shapes to blocks of color that would create intense effects when placed next to one another.

Back in Southern California in 1919, MacDonald-Wright gradually lost interest in Synchromism. Myriad passions and occupations absorbed his years in Los Angeles, ranging from organizing the first modern painting show in Los Angeles (in 1920) to experimenting with color film. He directed the Art Students’ League, painted Federal Art Project murals, invented a new kind of architectural decoration, taught at UCLA and studied Zen.

In the ‘20s, his paintings became more figurative, as can be seen in “Untitled (Vase of Flowers),” from 1927-28, in the OCMA permanent collection gallery.

Despite the title, there really is no vase. Black-edged petals in orange, pink and yellow seem to be growing in the cracks between wedges of pure light and color. The glowing whiteness of the background, tinged with blue and yellow, is broken by L-shaped fragments or stacked “waves” of color.

The melding of recognizable imagery and colored ether isn’t completely convincing. It’s as if MacDonald-Wright was vacillating between one style and another, rather than, say, finding a fresh way to evoke the visual and olfactory pleasures of flowers. The painting hardly compares with the avant-garde work of his 20s. And yet, the light-struck brilliance of the color gives it a strong presence.

Lumbered with an inappropriately massive gold-toned frame--and displayed in a way that prohibits any glimpse of the additional painting MacDonald-Wright made on the back of the canvas--the piece looks like a fish out of water in its new setting, surrounded by Impressionist paintings from the ‘20s and early ‘30s by Granville Redmond, Franz Bischoff and Clarence Hinkle.

Surely it would be worth rearranging the galleries to give the new piece a more congenial context--even if it winds up next to Fredrick J. Schwankovsky’s amusingly eccentric attempt at synesthesia: a 1920 painting of a pianist with a flower growing out of her hands.

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* Agnes Pelton’s “The Guide”: through Sept. 13 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: $5 general, $4 students and seniors. (949) 494-8971. Stanton MacDonald-Wright’s “Untitled (Vase of Flowers)”: indefinitely, at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Admission: $5 general; $4 students and seniors; free on Tuesdays through Labor Day. (949) 759-1122.