When Color Was Vulgar: Paul Outerbridge’s Avant-Gardist’s Eye
“Ide Collar,” 1922.
© 2016 Estate of Paul Outerbridge, Jr. courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
History
can be an unreliable narrator. Paul Outerbridge was once a major force
in photography, straddling the worlds of commerce and art. He shared
European assignments for Vogue with Edward Steichen, and in
1929 became the second photographer to have his work acquired by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. But he died in obscurity in 1958, at the age
of sixty-one. In 2009, the Getty Museum reintroduced Outerbridge to Los
Angeles with a major retrospective. Now a fine show at the Bruce
Silverstein Gallery gives New Yorkers a turn.
Born
to a wealthy family in New York City, Outerbridge began his formal
study of photography in 1921, after a stint in the Army and a failed
attempt at a Hollywood acting career. A year later, his black-and-white
still-life of a shirt collar—an elegant triumph of angles and curves, in
which ordinary drifts into strange—was published in Vanity Fair. Marcel Duchamp was so impressed with the image that he tore the page from the magazine and pinned it to his studio wall.
One
reason that Outerbridge fell from the spotlight may be hard to fathom
in the Instagram age: he was a pioneer of color photography. In the
nineteen-thirties, after a decade of finessing the chiaroscuro
subtleties of black-and-white, he mastered carbro color printing, an
intricate, now obsolete process favored by magazines and Madison Avenue.
(Outerbridge literally wrote the book on the subject: “Photographing in
Color,” which was published by Random House, in 1940.) He ran a
thriving studio and brought an avant-gardist’s sense of composition to
even the most apparently banal endeavors. Seen through his eyes, an
assortment of striped beach equipment attains nearly Cubist levels of
fragmentary complexity.
For
decades, there was an inviolable rule in camera-arts connoisseurship:
color was vulgar. As the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary photography
curator John Szarkowski wrote, “Professionals used color when they were
paid to, doing their very best without knowing quite what they meant by
that. Considering the lack of enthusiasm and confidence with which most
ambitious photographers have regarded color, it is not surprising that
most work in the medium has been puerile.” The point-and-shoot ease of
the Instamatic camera only made matters worse: any amateur at a picnic
could call himself a photographer. (Szarkowski made an exception for
William Eggleston, who, in 1976, became the first color photographer to
have a solo exhibition at MOMA.)
One
version of the story has Outerbridge relegated to the footnotes of art
history because he championed experimentation in color over the purist
pursuit of black-and-white. He also failed to adapt when the less
expensive Kodachrome dye-transfer process replaced carbro printing, and
his studio business dried up. He moved to Los Angeles for a career
change, having been promised a job as a cinematographer that never
panned out. But stories have shadows, and there was also the matter of
Outerbridge’s nudes. He believed that the fullest expression of the new
color process was the study of the female body—but, again, what was
tasteful in black-and-white was considered unseemly in color. (One
glimpse, in this slide show, at a supine model and her strategically
placed kitten makes it clear that there was more to his impulse than
true-to-life flesh tones.) Almost none of Outerbridge’s erotic pictures
were shown in his lifetime. They remain among his most striking works.
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