Ide Collar
Paul Outerbridge Jr. American
Not on view
"I have attempted to interpret the beauty of the simplest and humblest of objects," Paul Outerbridge Jr. wrote in 1922. Inspired by his teacher Clarence H. White’s artistic vision for applied photography, Outerbridge regarded the aperture as a kind of canvas in which to arrange compositions with absolute balance. In this, his first commercial assignment, he achieved such equilibrium by custom-cutting a grid of linoleum squares to the scale of his subject. When published as an ad in Vanity Fair, the photograph was ensnared in a scrollwork frame. Such a Victorian flourish seems incongruous today, but at the time, a picture as stark as this seemed to need dressing up. Nevertheless, Marcel Duchamp was said to have clipped the ad and pinned it to his studio wall, apprehending the mass-market collar’s readymade style.
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