WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — "I'd never heard of Paul Outerbridge until the Getty Museum's "Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance" landed on my desk.
He was born in 1896, died in 1958, and in between occupied himself with photography. Initially beginning as an acolyte of Paul Strand and Edward Steichen, he gradually evolved into something else entirely: a master of studio shots, mostly of environments — a desk, a gardener's shed — that could pass as the real thing except for a certain overly sanitary tone.
There's a sense in which Outerbridge was involved in an ironic-before-its-time dig at advertising art in the style that Cindy Sherman would make her own, except Outerbridge's photographs are technically superb.
His nudes tend to be riffs on classical Greek art, with a single screwy detail: a Greek bust stuck between a live girl's bust, for instance. (Some of his work carries an obvious overtone of S&M.)
Outerbridge made a living, when he made a living at all, by shooting for magazines like House Beautiful, and he was an early adopter of color photography, doing a great deal of innovative work with it in the 1930s, when it was extremely arduous and few magazines were publishing it.I'd like to see more, but according to the book, this is mostly all there is left after time and chance cast a lot of his work to the winds.
Certainly, Outerbridge is tailor-made for an exhibit at a place like the Four Arts.
Mike Browning's Word of the Week...
eldritch: uncanny; weird
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.