Torso
Outerbridge worked as a painter and set designer before becoming one of the most influential advertising photographers of his era. Although he would go on to perfect the luxurious and technologically advanced carbro color process in the following decades, his work of the 1920s tended toward simple, elegant compositions and Cubist abstractions. Here, Outerbridge isolates a woman’s nude torso so that it fills the entire frame. The photograph both looks back to Outerbridge’s training at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York, where he had studied two years prior, and ahead to the increasingly sensual and erotic nudes of his later career.
Artwork Details
- Title: Torso
- Artist: Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, New York 1896–1959 Laguna Beach, California)
- Date: 1923
- Medium: Palladium print
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Gift of the artist, 1929
- Object Number: 29.82.2
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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Paul Outerbridge Jr.
1922
Paul Outerbridge Jr.
ca. 1924
Paul Outerbridge Jr.
1921
Paul Outerbridge Jr.
1921
Paul Outerbridge Jr.
1924
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