| One of the brightest students in the Clarence White School of Photography,
Paul Outerbridge Jr. learned the soft-focus artistic influences of the pictorialist
tradition in an age of increasing commercialism. His cool, stylized observations
of form under White’s tutelage helped transform the purist rhetoric of
straight photography into practical applicability. As did so many of his avant-garde
colleagues during the 1920s and 1930s, Outerbridge circulated his work in gallery
spaces as often as he published in the commercial spaces of magazines. One
of his best-known early advertising images, Ide Collar, was published in Vanity
Fair in 1922, and one year later the photograph was exhibited in the New York
International Salon. Avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp apparently found the
image
so fascinating that he tore it from the pages of Vanity Fair and pinned it
to his studio wall. . . .
- Rachael Arauz, independent curator and art historian |
Text excerpted from A Capital Collection: Masterworks from
the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
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