WANAFOTO: Irving Penn

Showing posts with label Irving Penn. Show all posts

07/09/25

Visual Language: The Art of Irving Penn - Auction @ Phillips, New York

Visual Language: The Art of Irving Penn

Phillips, New York

Auction viewing: 30 September – 7 October 2025

Auction: 8 October 2025

Irving Penn

Mouth (For L’Oréal) (A), New York, 1986

Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Irving Penn

Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), New York, 1950

Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Irving Penn

Ginkgo Leaves, New York, 1990

Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Phillips will host Visual Language: The Art of Irving Penn, a landmark auction of photographs and artworks from The Irving Penn Foundation. This standalone sale, featuring photographic prints and paintings that Penn made during his seven decades-long career, marks the first time that the foundation has offered the artist's work through auction. This historic event will celebrate Penn’s remarkable talents, highlighting his unique vision and masterful craftsmanship across a variety of photographic print processes. The 70-lot sale will take place on 8 October 2025 ahead of Phillips' seasonal Photographs sale on 9 October.

Tom Penn, Executive Director of The Irving Penn Foundation, said, “As stewards of Irving Penn's artistic legacy since 2010, this auction is a pivotal moment for The Irving Penn Foundation as we aspire to expand our charitable and educational program. My father would say to me, ‘whatever you do in life, do it with complete passion.’ It was with passion that he sought excellence in everything he did, and each object included in this sale reflects the innovation and exactitude that defined Penn’s practice. The artworks selected for the auction span the range of mediums and subjects Penn explored across his career, presenting rarely seen images alongside his most well-known photographs that provide a new perspective on the diversity of his production. Through this carefully considered sale, we demonstrate Irving Penn's mastery and enduring influence in the field of photography.”

Irving Penn

Black and White Hat, New York, 1950

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Irving Penn

Untitled, circa 1987

Estimate: $30,000 – 50,000

Irving Penn

Miles Davis Hand on Trumpet,

New York, 1986

Estimate: $70,000 – 90,000

Irving Penn

Télégraphiste, Paris, 1950

Estimate: $30,000 – 50,000

Irving Penn was one of the 20th century’s most significant photographers, known for his arresting images, technical mastery, and quiet intensity. Though he gained widespread acclaim as a leading Vogue photographer for over sixty years, Penn remained a private figure devoted to his craft. Trained under legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch in Philadelphia, he began his career assisting at Harper’s Bazaar before joining Vogue in 1943, where editor and artist Alexander Liberman recognized Penn’s distinctive eye and encouraged him to pursue photography. Penn’s incomparably elegant fashion studies reset the standard for the magazine world, and his portraits, still lifes, and nude studies broke new ground. His 1960 book Moments Preserved redefined the photographic monograph with its dynamic layout and high-quality reproductions. In 1964, Penn began printing in platinum and palladium, reviving this 19th-century process to serve his own distinct vision. He was one of the first photographers to benefit from the burgeoning fine art photography market of the 1970s, and he earned a growing following of collectors and curators leading to major exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Art Institute of Chicago, and National Portrait Gallery, London, among many other institutions.

Irving Penn

Irving Penn in a Cracked Mirror (Self-Portrait) (A),

New York, 1986

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Irving Penn

Mud Glove, New York, 1975

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Irving Penn

Three Tulips ‘Red Shine’, ‘Black Parrot’, ‘Gudoshnik’,

New York, 1967

Estimate: $70,000 – 90,000

Irving Penn

Marriageable Young Woman of Imilchil, Morocco, 1971

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

An innovator in every sense, Penn’s approach to photography was bold. Few photographers of his generation experimented as widely with both conventional and historic print processes, and none achieved Penn’s level of excellence in all. Phillips’ auction will feature work in a variety of photographic media, including Penn’s bravura gelatin silver prints, such as Coffee Pot, nuanced platinum-palladium prints like Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), and rare dye-transfer prints, led by the iconic Ginkgo Leaves.

Vanessa Hallett, Phillips’ Deputy Chairwoman and Worldwide Head of Photographs, said, “Irving Penn was one of the foremost photographers of our time, standing alongside the great contemporary artists who have come to define the 20th-century art historical canon. Today, Penn’s vision and skill remain unequaled. Phillips is honored to work with the foundation in its 20th-anniversary year, shining a spotlight on Penn’s technical genius, creative process, and extraordinary output while presenting this groundbreaking work to a new audience. These works were preserved for decades by the artist and his foundation, hence their incredible provenance and condition. We are thrilled to provide a platform that educates the next generation of collectors on Penn’s impact, while assisting the foundation further its mission of preserving and advancing Penn’s legacy for years to come.”

Irving Penn

Cracked Egg, New York, 1958

Estimate: $30,000 – 50,000

Irving Penn

Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972

Estimate: $150,000 – 250,000

Irving Penn

Coffee Pot, New York, 2007

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Heralding an exceptional opportunity for collectors, many of the works selected from the foundation's archives have never before appeared at auction; this includes several examples from Penn's influential 1950 Black and White series for Vogue, and the large-scale four-panel platinum-palladium print of Mud Glove with typography advertising his 1977 Street Material exhibition at The Met. In addition to his work as a photographer, Irving Penn was also an accomplished painter and draftsman. For the first time at auction, Phillips will also showcase his work in these mediums, taking the opportunity to set forth the full range of this remarkable artist's creative output.

The Irving Penn Foundation was established in 2005 to promote knowledge and understanding of Irving Penn’s artistic legacy, including the diversity of techniques, mediums, and subject matters the artist explored. It is the largest repository of Irving Penn's work.

PHILLIPS NEW YORK

432 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022

Click here for more information:

https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/NY040425

16/03/25

Sharon Core @ Yancey Richardson, NYC - "Facsimile" Exhibition

Sharon Core: Facsimile

Yancey Richardson, New York

February 27 – April 12, 2025

SHARON CORE

Peony: Tempest, Page 66, 2023

Epson UltraChrome ink on Canson Photo Rag paper

20 x 22 inches

Yancey Richardson presents Facsimile, an exhibition of new work by SHARON CORE, the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery and one that continues her ongoing interrogation of the meaning of authenticity and authorship in her work.

Through the meticulous recreation of historical still-life paintings, along with more recent artworks rendered through the medium of photography, her work explores the tension between reality and its photographic representation. In Facsimile, Sharon Core expands these themes by subverting her usual process. Rather than reproducing painted still-lifes through photography, she has instead turned to Irving Penn’s iconic Flowers series—a masterful collection of photographic still-lifes—and reinterpreted them through painting. This ambitious project both deepens and reframes Core’s exploration of the still-life genre by posing questions not only about photography in the digital age, but about material specificity and the status of the reproduction as well.

At the center of Facsimile is a hand-made reproduction of Penn’s 1980 book Flowers, which originated from a commission for Vogue magazine for its annual Christmas edition in 1967. Each year from 1967 to 1973, Irving Penn focused on a different flower—beginning with tulips and moving on to poppies, peonies, roses and other blooms—capturing their ephemeral beauty in various states of perfection and decay. In 1980, these images were compiled into the popular and widely available book Flowers, published by Harmony Books, now out of print. Core’s Facsimile: “Irving Penn, Flowers” resurrects and reimagines the book as a tactile, meticulously handcrafted object that visitors are invited to handle. Alongside this edition, Sharon Core presents a selection of her 73 hand-painted recreations of Penn’s photographs, displayed throughout the gallery to offer a closer look at her reinterpretations of the original works. Rather than a departure, we might see this as a return for Sharon Core, who originally trained as a painter. The interplay between painting and photography has always been central to her practice and Facsimile brings this dialogue into sharper focus.

Core’s process for Facsimile is as intricate as it is conceptually layered. Each of Penn’s photographs is recreated as a painting using Epson UltraChrome inks on Canson Photo Rag paper, materials typically associated with digital photographic printing. Through this method, Sharon Core subverts the intended use of contemporary materials, transforming them into tools for painting. She then photographed her painted pages, designed a layout replicating that of the original book and bound the final prints into an edition of seven. In Core’s words, “the book is a multiple sculpture or a three-dimensional print that must be handled and touched to experience. My name is nowhere in the ‘book,’ therefore it is not an artist book, per se, but in fact a converted replica or facsimile.” By humanizing and rarifying a mass-produced object, Core’s “three-dimensional print” calls for a different kind of attention from the viewer. It cannot be experienced via a screen and must instead be encountered physically. In this generous gesture, the now out-of-print book is given a new lease on life, taking on a different meaning through a complex process of conversion: transforming photographs into paintings, which are then re-photographed, printed and bound into a book.

Visually, Facsimile diverges from Penn’s original photographs through Core’s expressive, painterly approach. Unlike her earlier series, in which she precisely reproduced certain still-life paintings in three-dimensions and photographed the results, effectively posing questions about the boundaries between illusion and reality, here Sharon Core seeks to emphasize the handcrafted nature of all photographs. As she notes, “Ever more so, the photograph is manipulated and collaged and is printed not through time and light, as in analog process, but with a fluid medium on paper. It becomes a machine assisted drawing or painting.” In Facsimile, Sharon Core makes explicit the artistry behind the work: the hand-lettered text is visibly imperfect and the images, while faithful to Penn’s compositions, are imbued with the texture and fluidity of the artist’s brushwork. Even the colors in the paintings result from a rigorous process of mixing and diluting the digital hues of cyan, yellow, magenta and black.

There is no trompe l’oeil effect at play here, nor any photorealist painting technique either and the result is therefore not an exact replica but a layered gesture that urges us to reflect on the evolving nature of representation in the digital age. By moving from a mechanical form of reproduction to an analogue process, while using a medium of mass production, Sharon Core questions the role of materiality in image-making. This finely crafted body of work seems to slip between painting, photography and sculpture, casting new light on Penn’s original photographs and book, while posing deeper questions about image-making technologies and their supposed ties to representing reality in this post-truth era.

SHARON CORE was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1965. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Georgia in 1987 and her MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art in 1998. Sharon Core began exhibiting her photographs in New York City in 1998 and has since shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. She was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Art Grant in 2000. Her monograph, Sharon Core: Early American, was published by Radius Books in 2012. The artist lives and works in Esopus, New York.

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York City

www.yanceyrichardson.com

12/12/24

Irving Penn @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Kinship" Exhibition Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Irving Penn: Kinship

Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Pace Gallery, New York

November 15 – December 21, 2024

IRVING PENN

Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

IRVING PENN

Three Single Oriental Poppies, New York, 1968

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

Pace is pleased to present Irving Penn: Kinship, an exhibition of work by the famed photographer IRVING PENN, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas, at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show spotlights works produced by Irving Penn throughout his 70-year career, including selections from his Worlds in a Small Room series, his iconic portraits of artists, actors, and writers, and other genres of his images. These photographs are exhibited within an installation designed by Hank Willis Thomas to replicate a structure that Irving Penn used to photograph many of his high-profile subjects.

Working for Vogue for nearly 70 years, Irving Penn left an indelible mark on the history of photography. His inventive fashion photographs, which transformed American image-making in the postwar era, continued to appear in the magazine up until his death in 2009. The artist was also highly accomplished and experimental in the darkroom, having engineered, among other innovations, a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints.

A trained photographer, Hank Willis Thomas, widely known for his galvanizing public works around the US, is deeply interested in both the making and consumption of images. His investigations into subjectivity and perception inform his work in photography and other mediums, including sculpture, screenprinting, video, and installation. Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room works—for which he journeyed to Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea, and Morocco to capture people’s portraits within a tent he used as a portable studio—have been particularly influential for Hank Willis Thomas, who was part of the artistic team behind the traveling, participatory installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), which debuted in 2011 and has since been presented around the world.

Often investigating the ways that framing and perspective can shape our experiences of the world around us, Hank Willis Thomas situates Irving Penn’s photographs within a bespoke, star-shaped structure with intersecting corners, created using a material similar to the plywood flats of the photographer’s original studio for his portraits in a corner. Displayed on the structure’s exterior walls and within its central interior space, Irving Penn’s images will invite viewers to inhabit a similarly intimate, enclosed space as the subjects of his portraits captured across the globe—through Thomas’s vision, this room becomes a new world of its own.

Showcasing the varied but interconnected motifs and ideas that Irving Penn returned to time and again over the course of his life, the images selected and paired by Hank Willis Thomas speak to a transcendent, universal quality that can be traced across the photographer’s vast oeuvre. His arrangement of Penn’s works is guided by a kind of “visual muscle memory,” which he describes as “the notion that an artist’s eye and hand retain the imprints of past works, unconsciously shaping new creations.” The diverse photographs on view, for Thomas, are marked by their stillness and dignity, their shared interest in capturing and communicating the human experience in a single frame.

“In Penn’s work, I see a profound reverence for the overlooked and the mundane,” Hank Willis Thomas writes in a curatorial statement for the show. “His fashion photography, often celebrated for its clean lines and sculptural compositions, shares a surprising kinship with his still lifes of discarded objects. By juxtaposing these images, I want to highlight how Penn’s meticulous attention to detail elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s as if each image, regardless of subject, carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most unlikely places.”

Concurrent with this curated presentation in New York, Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition of his work at Pace’s London gallery, Kinship of the Soul, is on view through December 21. A retrospective of Penn’s work, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, is on view through May 1, 2025 at The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.

Hank Willis Thomas’s work is currently featured in the group exhibitions Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 18, 2025 and Grow It, Show It: A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, through January 12, 2025. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Gun Violence Memorial Project—a collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain—is on view through January 20, 2025.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

pacegallery.com

27/06/19

Irving Penn @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Still Life

Irving Penn: Still Life
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
Through 16 July 2019

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents the exhibition Still Life by American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), devoted to his still lifes, including the well-known series Street Material, Cigarettes and Flowers. The exhibition features over 30 photographs taken in New York over six decades for publications such as Vogue, as well as on his travels. Irving Penn created some of the most memorable still lifes of our time, and his innovative portraits, still lifes, fashion and beauty photographs made his reputation as one of the most high-profile and influential photographers of the 20th century.

Irving Penn began his career as a photographer in 1943 at the suggestion and with the encouragement of Alexander Liberman, then art director of US Vogue. The same year, one of Irving Penn’s colour photographs for Vogue appeared on the cover of their October issue, showing the first photographic still life in the magazine's recent history. In the ensuing 60 years, he took more than 150 cover photographs for Vogue and produced pioneering editorials, which became known for their natural lighting and formal simplicity, making him the leading photographer in the field. At a time when photography was understood primarily as a means of communication, Irving Penn approached it with an artist's eye, expanding its creative potential in both his professional and his personal work.

Many of Irving Penn's still lifes combine food with everyday objects. He staged laid tables with exquisite arrangements of dishes, fruit and vessels, reminiscent of the Dutch masters of the Golden Age like Willem Kalf or Pieter Claesz. A cut-open watermelon, a crumpled linen table-napkin, a broken-off piece of baguette or a fly sitting on ripe fruit relate to the transience symbolised in vanitas paintings and emphasise the absence of the human being. The choice of subjects and the context of the objects also call to mind Georges Braque's early Cubist pictures.

"The extreme deliberateness of these still-life arrangements – far from the traditional mock simplicity of a few pieces of fruit, a few flowers – adds to the sense that the objects are codes, that they carry a message even beyond the one the title announces" (Adam Kirsch, 2017).

The individual states of decay illustrated in the Cigarettes photographs show an interesting correlation with human characteristics, and may also be interpreted as memento mori. Irving Penn's first solo exhibition at MoMA in New York took place in 1975 and featured exclusively the Cigarettes series, which was perceived as a provocation and contrast to his popular earlier fashion photographs. Irving Penn’s interest in the theme led him to photograph other litter he found in the street, such as flattened paper cups or old playing-cards. Through his lens, street litter – which most people prefer to ignore – became something fascinating, almost iconic, however, while simultaneously expressing an explicit consumer criticism through them.

Irving Penn composed his still-life photographs like a painter, working with large-format cameras, and was tireless in his attempts to expand the creative possibilities of the medium. He was deeply involved in each stage, from the meticulous composition of the picture to making his own prints. Unlike most other art photographers, he experimented with platinum-palladium and silver gelatin prints in order to lend each of his works a distinctive texture and original character. With his unique signature and stringently reduced aesthetic, he remains a defining stylistic influence, an inspiration to countless successors.

In 2017, to mark the centenary of his birth, a comprehensive retrospective entitled Centennial was held at the Grand Palais in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the C/O Berlin. The exhibition consisted of some 240 works, including an extensive presentation of his diverse still lifes, some of which are shown in the Salzburg exhibition. Irving Penn's photographs have been displayed in many exhibitions worldwide, including Irving Penn: Underfoot at The Art Institute of Chicago (2013), Irving Penn: Diverse World at the Moderna Museet/Malmö (2012, and subsequently at the Kumu Art Museum/Tallinn), Irving Penn: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery/London (2010) and Irving Penn: Small Trades at the J. Paul Getty Museum/Los Angeles (2009-2010).

Irving Penn's works are represented in distinguished private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Maison Européenne de la Photographie/Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art/New York, Moderna Museet/Stockholm, Morgan Library and Museum/New York, Museum of Modern Art/New York and the National Gallery of Art/Washington DC.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has represented The Irving Penn Foundation, in collaboration with the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, since September 2017.

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG
Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg
www.ropac.net

23/03/19

Irving Penn @ Pace Gallery, Palo Alto, CA

Irving Penn
Pace Gallery, Palo Alto, CA
April 11 – May 26, 2019

IRVING PENN

Hell’s Angels, San Francisco, 1967

“In 1967 there was word coming out of San Francisco of something stirring—new ways of living that were exotic even for California. People spoke of a new kind of young people called hippies, and of an area where they had begun to congregate called Haight-Ashbury. They seemed to have found a satisfying new life for themselves in leaving the society they were born to and in making their own. … It grew on me that I would like to look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances. I suggested to the editors of Look magazine that they might care to have such a report. They said yes—hurry.”—Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room, (Grossman, 1974, 50)

In 1967 armed with a Rolleiflex, Irving Penn came to San Francisco. He rented a building in Sausalito that allowed him to photograph under plenty of northern light, with beams strong enough to bear the weight of the Hell’s Angels’ motorcycles. This studio—like countless studios Irving Penn used over the course of his career—became a neutral space where the photographer and subject could focus on the task at hand to capture individual expression. Photographing them in his signature smooth pared-down style, Irving Penn brought equal consideration and expertise into his work with young hippie couples, motorcyclists, and radical nude dancers as he did with celebrated actors, artists, and luminaries of his time. Decades later, Pace Gallery brings the work of Irving Penn to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The exhibition at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto highlights Irving Penn’s work in the Bay Area while contextualizing these pieces in his larger oeuvre. Rare streetscape works from a 1947 visit to San Francisco are on view, including Lone Star Baptist Church, 99-Year-Old House, and House Front. The exhibit features over a dozen photographs from Irving Penn’s return visit to San Francisco for Look magazine in 1967. Highlights include Hell’s Angels, and Hippie Family (Kelley). The latter is a sensitive portrait where the mother looks directly into the camera lens with an open expression, while the father, in a quarter pose, looks at the lens from a side glance. He clutches the child tightly against his chest and away from the camera, as if in protection from the viewer’s watchful gaze. The complexity with which Irving Penn has photographed the family reveals his renowned gift in extracting the nuances of personality and social relationships.

Irving Penn was not only one of the most seminal photographers of the 20th century, but he was also a master craftsman and innovator in photographic printing. The exhibition will present works made in gelatin silver, cibachrome, and platinum-palladium. Until Irving Penn began using the process in the mid-1960s, platinum-palladium printing was regarded as a 19th century technique that had mostly gone extinct. Irving Penn’s method required incredible stamina and an alchemist’s touch as he hand-coated paper with a light sensitive solution of platinum and palladium, then exposed each sheet multiple times through his large-scale film negatives using ultra-violet lamps. This printing process would take days to complete but gave a delicacy to the photographs and infused them with a soft internal glow that can be seen in Bird Bones (Sweden), New York (1980) and Hippie Family (Ferguson), San Francisco (1967).

IRVING PENN (1917–2009) was born in Plainfield, New Jersey. From 1934–38, he studied design with Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. Following a year painting in Mexico, he returned to New York City and began working at Vogue magazine in 1943, where Alexander Liberman was art director.

Irving Penn photographed for Vogue and commercial clients in America and abroad for nearly 70 years. Whether an innovative fashion image, striking portrait or compelling still life, each of Penn’s pictures bears his trademark style of elegant aesthetic simplicity.

Irving Penn has had over 40 major museum exhibitions in his lifetime including shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and his Centennial opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2017 and toured at the Grand Palais, Paris, France; C/O Berlin, Germany; and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, Brazil.

PACE, PALO ALTO
229 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301
www.pacegallery.com

22/12/17

Irving Penn @ Grand Palais, Paris

Irving Penn
Grand Palais, Paris
Jusqu'au 29 janvier 2018

Irving Penn

Girl with Tobacco on Tongue (Mary Jane Russell)

[Jeune femme avec du tabac sur la langue (Mary Jane Russell)]

New York, 1951

Epreuve gélatino-argentique, 37,5 × 36,5 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

L’année 2017 marque le centenaire de la naissance d’Irving Penn (1917-2009), l’un des maîtres de la photographie du XXe siècle. L’exposition est la première grande rétrospective consacrée à l’artiste américain en France depuis sa mort. Elle retrace les soixante-dix années de sa carrière, avec plus de 235 tirages photographiques entièrement réalisés du vivant de l’artiste et de sa main, ainsi qu’une sélection de ses dessins et peintures. L’exposition Irving Penn offre une vision complète de l’ensemble des sujets majeurs de son travail : la mode, les natures mortes, les portraits, les nus, la beauté, les cigarettes et les débris. Certaines séries cultes, comme les nus, les mégots et les petits métiers seront ici présentées en profondeur. Issu d’une formation aux beaux-arts, Irving Penn développe un corpus d’images marqué par une élégante simplicité, un certain goût pour le minimalisme et une rigueur remarquable, du studio jusqu’au tirage auquel Penn accorde un soin méticuleux.

Suivant un parcours tout à la fois chronologique et thématique, les visiteurs découvrent la production de l’artiste depuis ses débuts à la fin des années trente, jusqu’à son travail autour de la mode et des natures mortes des années 1990-2000.

L’exposition s’ouvre sur les premières natures mortes en couleur que l’artiste a photographiées pour Vogue à partir de 1943, précédées par des scènes de rue à New York et des images du sud des Etats-Unis, du Mexique, de l’Europe. Après la guerre, son travail se déplace de la rue au studio, qui devient le lieu exclusif de ses prises de vue pendant toute sa carrière. En 1947-48, il réalise pour le magazine Vogue des portraits d’artistes, écrivains, couturiers et autres personnalités du monde de la culture, de Charles James et Salvador Dali à Jerome Robbins, Spencer Tracy, Igor Stravinsky et Alfred Hitchcock.

En décembre 1948, il voyage jusqu’à Cuzco au Pérou, où il photographie les habitants et les visiteurs venus en ville pour les festivités de fin d’année. Ses enfants de Cuzco sont devenus un chef-d’œuvre de l’histoire de la photographie.

Envoyé à Paris en 1950 par le magazine Vogue, Irving Penn est ensuite révélé comme véritable maître du portrait de mode, produisant quelques-unes des plus grandes icônes photographiques du XXe siècle. Beaucoup sont des études de Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, la femme et muse de l’artiste, portant des modèles haute-couture des années 1950. En parallèle pendant ce séjour à Paris, il commence une étude photographique des Petits Métiers, une série de portraits qui puise ses racines dans une tradition établie en gravure depuis des siècles et qu’il continue à Londres et New York. Toutes ces prises de vue emploient le même fond, un rideau peint trouvé à Paris qu’il a conservé dans son studio tout au long de sa carrière et qui est présentée dans l’exposition.

Dans les années 50 et au début des années 60, Irving Penn est devenu un photographe fortement demandé. Il continue à réaliser des portraits pour Vogue que l’on peut qualifier de classiques : Picasso, Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot, Marlene Dietrich, Francis Bacon ou encore Colette. L’artiste les veut profonds et aboutis, comme l’art de Goya, Daumier ou Toulouse-Lautrec qu’il a étudiés.

Dans la partie suivante, les visiteurs découvrent un ensemble d’études de nus datant de 1949-1950, une célébration de chair pliée, tordue, tendue, relâchée, brillamment façonnée par le méticuleux tirage argentique et au platine de Penn.

Entre 1967 et 1971, Irving Penn a voyagé pour Vogue dans le Pacifique et en Afrique. L’ensemble suivant est constitué de portraits faits notamment au Dahomey (aujourd’hui le Bénin), en Nouvelle-Guinée et au Maroc. Là, Penn procédait à ses prises de vue dans un studio itinérant, aménagé dans une tente qu’il avait lui-même conçue et avec laquelle il voyageait.

Irving Penn a également photographié les détritus, l’éphémère, le processus de désintégration, notamment avec sa série des mégots de cigarette datée de 1972. Plus d’une vingtaine d’images sont présentées au même titre que les nus ou les portraits car, comme l’estimait Penn lui-même, « A stubbed out cigarette tells the character, it tells the nerves. The choice of cigarette tells the taste of the person » (« Une cigarette écrasée indique le caractère, elle révèle la nervosité. Son choix en dit long sur le goût d’une personne »). Les rebuts, blocs de métal, éléments de la rue et autres détritus démontrent l’intérêt constant d’Irving Penn pour les natures mortes, depuis ses premières images jusqu’à la fin de sa carrière.

L’ultime section de l’exposition est consacrée aux dernières photographies de mode et aux portraits de sa maturité, incluant des personnalités comme Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman et Zaha Hadid.

Cette exposition est organisée par le Metropolitan Museum of Art à New York et la Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, en collaboration avec la Fondation Irving Penn. Elle a été présentée du 24 avril au 30 juillet 2017 au Metropolitan Museum of Art à New York : Irving Penn: Centennial.

Cette exposition est présentée du 24 mars au 1er juillet 2018 à la Fondation C/O de Berlin, et du 21 août au 25 novembre 2018 à l’Instituto Moreira Salles.

Commissariat de l'exposition : Maria Morris Hambourg, commissaire indépendante et fondatrice du Département de la Photographie au Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York et Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel conservateur en charge du Département de la Photographie au Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ; Jérôme Neutres, commissaire et directeur de la stratégie et du développement à la Rmn-Grand Palais.

Grand Palais, Paris
Galeries nationales, entrée Clemenceau
www.grandpalais.fr

A lire également sur Wanafoto :

Irving Penn, Les Petits métiers, Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, 9 octobre 2010 - 16 janvier 2011

30/04/17

Irving Penn: Centennial at The Met, NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Irving Penn: Centennial
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
April 24 - July 30, 2017

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major retrospective of the photographs of Irving Penn to mark the centennial of the artist's birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn (1917–2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial, is the most comprehensive exhibition of the great American photographer's work to date and includes both masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.

Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine, Irving Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images characterized by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were innovative and immensely influential. Yet Irving Penn's photographs of fashion are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure to take in more complete codes of demeanor, adornment, and artifact. He was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor's sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude studies and life-long explorations of still life.

Irving Penn dealt with so many subjects throughout his long career that he is conventionally seen either with a single lens—as the portraitist, fashion photographer, or still life virtuoso—or as the master of all trades, the jeweler of journalists who could fine-tool anything. The exhibition at The Met will chart a different course, mapping the overall geography of the work and the relative importance of the subjects and campaigns the artist explored most creatively. Its organization largely follows the pattern of his development so that the structure of the work, its internal coherence, and the tenor of the times of the artist's experience all become evident.

The exhibition is most thoroughly explore the following series: street signs, including examples of early work in New York, the American South, and Mexico; fashion and style, with many classic photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the former dancer who became the first supermodel as well as the artist's wife; portraits of indigenous people in Cuzco, Peru; the Small Trades portraits of urban laborers; portraits of beloved cultural figures from Truman Capote, Joe Louis, Picasso, and Colette to Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman, and Joan Didion; the infamous cigarette still lifes; portraits of the fabulously dressed citizens of Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; the late "Morandi" still lifes; voluptuous nudes; and glorious color studies of flowers. These subjects chart the artist's path through the demands of the cultural journal, the changes in fashion itself and in editorial approach, the fortunes of the picture press in the age of television, the requirements of an artistic inner voice in a commercial world, the moral condition of the American conscience during the Vietnam War era, the growth of photography as a fine art in the 1970s and 1980s, and personal intimations of mortality. All these strands of meaning are embedded in the images—a web of deep and complex ideas belied by the seeming forthrightness of what is represented.

Irving Penn generally worked in a studio or in a traveling tent that served the same purpose, and favored a simple background of white or light gray tones. His preferred backdrop was made from an old theater curtain found in Paris that had been softly painted with diffused gray clouds. This backdrop followed Irving Penn from studio to studio; a companion of over 60 years, it will be displayed in one of the Museum's galleries among celebrated portraits it helped create. Other highlights of the exhibition include newly unearthed footage of the photographer at work in his tent in Morocco; issues of Vogue magazine illustrating the original use of the photographs and, in some cases, to demonstrate the difference between those brilliantly colored, journalistic presentations and Penn's later reconsidered reuse of the imagery; and several of Penn's drawings shown near similar still life photographs.

Irving Penn: Centennial is co-curated by Maria Morris Hambourg, independent curator and the founding curator of The Met's Department of Photographs, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.

History of Irving Penn at The Met

The exhibition follows from a magnificent promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met in honor of the artist's centenary of 187 photographs by Penn, representing every period and all facets of the artist's long career with the camera. Selections from this gift form the core of the exhibition. They are joined by some 50 prints selected from the 145 Penn prints already in the Museum's collection. These include a suite of 65 nude studies from 1949–50 donated by the artist in 2002 and featured that same year in The Met's exhibition Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–50 and its publication. More recently, in 2014, 64 platinum prints from the artist's celebrated Small Trades series, 1950-51, depicting laborers with the tools of their trades in Paris, London, and New York, were acquired with funds from an anonymous donor.

Individual photographs by Irving Penn were first acquired and shown by The Met in 1959 in the context of Photography in the Fine Arts exhibitions. The Museum has presented two monographic shows of the artist's works: in 1977, Curator of Modern Art, Henry Geldzahler, organized Irving Penn: Street Material. Photographs in Platinum Metals, 1975–76; and, in 2002, Maria Morris Hambourg, working closely with the artist, curated Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–50.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a 372-page book with 365 illustrations, including full-page reproductions of all the photographs exhibited, by Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim. A probing introduction to the artist, his concerns, and the evolution of his work is provided by Hambourg, followed by lively in-depth studies of the central themes and episodes of his career, an illustrated chronology, and notes on Penn's printing by Hambourg, Rosenheim, and guest authors Alexandra Dennett, Philippe Garner, Adam Kirsch, Harald E.L. Prins, and Vasilios Zatse.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
www.metmuseum.org

24/06/12

Irving Penn: Diverse Worlds, Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden

Irving Penn: Diverse Worlds
Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden
16 June - 2 September, 2012

For the first time in the Öresund region, a rich selection of IRVING PENN’s photographs from some of his most famous serial photography are presented. His innovative fashion features, portraits and still-lifes made Irving Penn one of the leading photographers of our time. Spanning more than 60 years, his career is characterised by a cool, minimalist approach to the medium. With a selection of nearly 90 works and samples from his assignments for numerous publications, the exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö covers a broad spectrum of Irving Penn’s oeuvre.

Irving Penn (1917-2009) is regarded as one of the leading photographers of our time. He was active in both the commercial and artistic fields. In 1985, he won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In his terse serial works, Irving Penn developed a style that is distinguished by its sharpness, detail, meticulousness and minimalist imagery. The exhibition Diverse Worlds presents photographs from his most famous series and spans more than half a century. Most of these works were donated to Moderna Museet in 1995 by Penn himself, in memory of his wife, Swedish-born Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn.

Diverse Worlds is a broad resumé of Irving Penn’s oeuvre, revealing clearly the consistent style that is characteristic of his photographs. His output is typically imbued with an inquisitive eye and attention to detail, whatever the subject matter. A discussion of the commercial-artistic dichotomy seems rather pointless in the case of Irving Penn, who balanced constantly between the two, allowing one to benefit the other. His experience and background as a painter, for instance, came in handy when he was commissioned by established fashion houses to create their advertisements for publications such as Vogue – a magazine Penn worked for throughout most of his career.

In post-war New York, many cultural celebrities visited Irving Penn’s studio. The turmoil that prevailed after the Second World War was illustrated by portraying these ostensibly immortal icons trapped in a narrow corner. Penn has also related how this corner was created in his studio to counteract his own feelings of inferiority in relation to the celebs he portrayed. The less famed were also captured by Irving Penn’s camera, including small tradesmen in London and Paris, and members of Hell’s Angels in San Francisco. Life’s transience is distinctly visualised in many of the still-lifes Penn made in his career – often commissioned by fashion houses but also as part of his own projects.

Despite the variation in these pictorial series, Irving Penn’s oeuvre, and the presentation in Diverse Worlds, reveals a consistent curiosity and desire, and a wish to depict the divergent subjects in the same sensitive and detailed way. He achieved this by placing them all in the same setting. Different image worlds meet and are literally constructed in the same neutral space – Irving Penn’s studio.

Curators: Andreas Nilsson and John Peter Nilsson

Moderna Museet Malmö

Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö
www.modernamuseet.se

22/11/10

Expo Photos Irving Penn, Les petits métiers au Musée de l’Elysée à Lausanne

Irving Penn, Les Petits métiers
Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne
Jusqu'au 16 janvier 2011

IRVING PENN, Chestnut Vendor, New York, 1951
Copyright by The Irving Penn Foundation

LES PETITS METIERS A TRAVERS L'OBJECTIF D'IRVING PENN

Pendant plus de soixante ans, IRVING PENN (1917-2009) a marqué l’histoire de la photographie par ses images de mode, ses natures mortes et ses portraits. Photographe pour le magazine Vogue, Irving Penn a réalisé au début des années 1950 Les Petits Métiers –Small Trades. Recrutés dans les rues de Paris, Londres puis New York, les vendeurs de journaux, marchands de rues, chiffonniers, ramoneurs posaient en tenue de travail pour le photographe new-yorkais qui était convaincu que nombre de ces activités allaient disparaître. Envoyé à Paris par Vogue en juin 1950 pour couvrir ses premières collections de haute-couture, Irving Penn saisit l’opportunité d’entreprendre ce projet personnel basé sur son admiration pour ces petits métiers, incontestablement associés à l’image de la ville.

Recrutés dans la rue, les modèles se rendaient au studio du photographe, dans leurs tenues de travail. En plus des petits vendeurs traditionnels, Penn photographiait également les gens de la classe ouvrière du quartier Mouffetard, comme les sculpteurs bohêmes ou la chanteuse Benoîte Lab. Irving Penn poursuivit son projet à Londres en septembre de la même année et continua son exploration des métiers de retour à New York. Ayant à l’esprit combien ces ouvriers s’identifiaient à leur travail, il a sciemment inclus leurs outils (de même que leurs tenues) dans ses portraits. Afin de créer des compositions équilibrées et élégantes qui mettent en valeur leurs spécificités, il mettait en scène avec précaution les travailleurs et leurs outils. En convoquant « les petits métiers » dans le territoire neutre du studio, Penn démontrait ainsi son intérêt pour l’individualité des modèles plus que pour leur milieu social. Après avoir publié dans un premier temps des extraits de chaque série dans les éditions française, anglaise et américaine de Vogue, Penn rassembla 91 portraits tirés des Petits Métiers dans l’ouvrage Moments Preserved (1960) et inclut 10 portraits dans la publication World in a Small Room (1974) où il fit ce commentaire:

« Eloigner les modèles de leur environnement naturel et les installer dans un studio face à l’objectif n’avaient pas seulement pour but de les isoler, cela les transformait. »

IRVING PENN ET LE TIRAGE AU PLATINE

Au milieu des années 1960, Penn commença une période d’expérimentations approfondies qui lui permit d’abord de maîtriser et ensuite de perfectionner la technique de tirage au platine. Ce procédé diffère significativement du tirage gélatino-argentique : pour le procédé au platine, la couche sensible à la lumière est absorbée dans les fibres du papier du support qui reste donc visible. Alors que dans les tirages gélatino-argentiques, les particules sensibles à la lumière sont suspendues dans une émulsion de gélatine qui masque le support.

Irving Penn a testé d’infinies variations du procédé, y compris en combinant deux ou plusieurs négatifs de contrastes variables, ou en recouvrant le tirage de diverses combinaisons de platine et de palladium et en l’exposant une nouvelle fois sous le même négatif ou sous un autre. Relativement fort en contraste, les tirages gélatino-argentiques décrivent bien les tenues et les outils, modelés par la lumière naturelle. Les tirages au platine sont plus resserrés sur les figures et leurs dimensions sont plus grandes que les tirages gélatino-argentiques, ce qui donne aux modèles une monumentalité quasi sculpturale. Les tirages qui en résultent sont très expressives, révélant une gamme de tonalités allant des gris nuancés aux noirs profonds.

IRVING PENN, LES PETITS METIERS : LES PUBLICATIONS

L’année de leur création, plusieurs sélections des Petits métiers de Paris, Londres et New York apparurent dans les éditions internationales de Vogue. Les portraits des artisans réalisés par Penn démontrent non seulement la diversité des métiers découverts dans chaque ville, mais aussi les différentes attitudes des travailleurs face à leurs activités. Dans l’ouvrage Worlds in a Small Room de 1974, Penn fit l’observation suivante:

« En général, les Parisiens doutaient que nous ferions exactement ce que nous avions promis. Ils pensaient que quelque chose de louche allait arriver, mais ils arrivaient au studio plus ou moins comme convenu – motivés par le cachet. Les Londoniens étaient assez différents des Français. Il leur semblait tout à fait logique d’être photographiés en tenues de travail. Ils arrivaient au studio, toujours à l’heure et se présentaient devant l’appareil photo avec un sérieux et une fierté tout à fait remarquables. Des trois, les Américains étaient les plus imprévisibles. En dépit de nos recommandations, quelques-uns arrivèrent aux séances changés de pied en cap, rasés de frais et parfois même dans leurs costumes sombres du dimanche, convaincus de faire leur premier pas vers Hollywood. »

IRVING PENN : L'EXPOSITION AU MUSEE DE L'ELYSEE A LAUSANNE

L’exposition est organisée en collaboration avec le J. Paul Getty Museum de Los Angeles, qui a acquis en 2008 l’ensemble le plus complet de cette série. Conçue par Virginia A. Heckert et Anne Lacoste, conservatrice associée et conservatrice adjointe du département de photographies du J. Paul Getty Museum, elle comporte une centaine de tirages montrés pour la première fois en Suisse. En outre l’exposition propose une confrontation des différents procédés d’impression utilisés par Penn en comparant les tirages originaux gélatino-argentiques avec les tirages plus tardifs au platine de ses séries.

BIOGRAPHIE : IRVING PENN (Plainfield/USA, 1917 - New York, 2009)

Né en 1917, Irving Penn s’oriente d’abord vers la peinture et le dessin. Il étudie le graphisme auprès d’Alexey Brodovitch à Philadelphie. En 1938, il s'installe à New York où il travaille en free-lance. Il débute véritablement sa carrière au début des années 1940. En 1941, il réalise ses premières photographies de mode pour le Harper's Bazaar. En 1943, il fait la couverture pour l’édition américaine de Vogue magazine avec la photographie d'une nature morte en couleur. De 1943 à 1948, ses photographies paraissent régulièrement dans Vogue et d'autres magazines. Plus de 150 photographies sont publiées durant cette période. En quelques années seulement, Irving Penn invente sa lumière dans un souci d’authenticité. Il se confronte également à des sujets académiques comme le nu ou la nature morte. En plus des séances photo pour Vogue, il photographie les plus grands ; actrices, écrivains, mannequins (Picasso, Colette, Marlène Dietrich…). Décédé en 2009, Irving Penn a imposé pendant plus de soixante ans une nouvelle façon de voir.

CATALOGUE : IRVING PENN, SMALL TRADES

Textes de Virginia A. Heckert et d’Anne Lacoste, conservatrice associée et conservatrice adjointe du département de photographies du J. Paul Getty Museum. Publié par le J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2009), 272 pages, 259 illustrations. Edition anglaise. CHF 59.- à la librairie du Musée de l’Elysée.

IRVING PENN - LES PETITS MÉTIERS
MUSEE DE L'ELYSEE, LAUSANNE - SUISSE
9 octobre 2010 - 16 janvier 2011
www.elysee.ch