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

© Condé Nast

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 

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

October 5, 1999 - January 9, 2000

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents an exhibition of 98 images by CARLETON WATKINS (1829-1916), America's greatest landscape photographer. Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is the first large-scale examination of an often under-recognized artist. The exhibition includes more than 85 mammoth prints, including work from his famous series of the pristine and then virtually unknown Yosemite Valley, as well as many other lyrical views of the American West.

At the height of his career, Carleton Watkins was a leader in his field. His photographs helped convince Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Bill in 1864 — a tacit recognition of the necessity of natural conservancy in a climate of rampant development, and an important precedent in establishing the present system of national parks. The photographs were exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exposition, where they were awarded a first-prize medal, and were later seen by Napoleon III. More than a century later, his images still create a visceral impact, effectively pulling the viewer into the scene by means of artistic devices such as radical framing, deep-space perspective, and intruding foreground objects — the same devices used contemporaneously by modernist painters such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.

The photographs in the exhibition are drawn from museum, corporate, and private collections throughout North America. In addition to Carleton Watkins's large-format prints, the exhibition includes several immense panoramic pictures — works made of large prints placed side-by-side to orchestrate a vast sweep of visual terrain — and many stereo views. Stereographs — two small photographs mounted together that, when placed in a special binocular view, give the illusion of three-dimensional depth — are displayed in the exhibition not only in original Victorian-era stereoscopes, but also and more extensively in a novel interactive computer presentation.

Born and raised in Oneonta, New York, Carleton Watkins settled in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, taking up the still-new medium of photography in the mid-1850s. On the East Coast, reports of the massive California landscape had taken on mythic proportions, and accounts of colossal mountains, giant trees, expansive deserts, and a vast ocean were considered improbable by many. Watkins himself was struck by the immensity of the Western landscape, and aspired to capture the vastness and grandeur of its space and scale. As confirmation of stories emerging from the West — and to help render comprehensible the size and proportions of the trees, rock formations, mountains, and waterfalls in his photographs — statistical measurements of these natural wonders often accompanied his images or were included in their titles.

In the early 1860s, Colonel John Frémont, the explorer who mapped the American West with his friend Kit Carson, enlisted Carleton Watkins to photograph his land and mines. It was this association with Frémont that first led Watkins to photograph Yosemite, resulting in some of his most famous work. Recognizing that the scale of the valley required exceptional preparations, Watkins had a cabinetmaker fashion a huge camera capable of holding negatives 18 by 22 inches in size. The resulting pictures were lush in detail, visually coherent, and psychologically compelling. By December 1862 the views were the talk of New York. There, and in San Francisco, they were displayed in galleries and collected by scientists, investors, mining engineers, homesteaders, and tourists.

"Watkins managed to capture the physical magnitude and visual textures of Yosemite with a grace and intelligence unsurpassed today," said Maria Morris Hambourg, who curated the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and is Curator in Charge of its Department of Photographs.

In 1867 the photographer traveled to Portland, Oregon, and up the Columbia River, making several images that have since become icons of Western landscape photography. Views such as Cape Horn near Celilo (1867) express the faith of Carleton Watkins's generation of Americans in the continuing westward advance of civilization. More than just an illustration of Manifest Destiny of the local railroad's route, it achieves an artful balance between the valley etched by the river and the railroad laid down alongside it, recognizing the providential harmony of nature and man in this particular place.

Through his childhood friend Collis Huntington, he became the unofficial photographer for the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads in the 1870s and 1880s and was allowed to travel free along their lines. As the rampant laying of railroad tracks penetrated the continent, Carleton Watkins aligned his photography with the changing perceptions the train brought to the landscape.

With increased competition and the economic crash of the mid 1870s, Carleton Watkins's financial fortunes turned. In the wake of his bankruptcy he spent long periods on assignment out of San Francisco, traveling to Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Agricultural assignments in Sonoma, the San Gabriel Valley, and Kern County resulted in such memorable images as Arbutus Menziesii Pursh (1872-78) and Late George Cling Peaches (ca. 1887-88), both of which document the thriving new industry made possible by irrigation farming in areas serviced by new rail lines.

He continued to expand the range of his activity in the 1880s, and his abstract vision found new, unconventional subjects for a broadening audience. One of his last commercial projects involved documenting the new dams and waterways of the Golden Gate and Golden Feather mines in Butte County, California, in 1891. For these final images he returned to his trademark mammoth camera and wet-plate negatives. One of the views stands out as a remarkable symbol of the intrepid Carleton Watkins: at the foreground of Gold Feather Mining Claim, No. 9 (1891), silhouetted by the bright sun, is the shadow of the photographer himself in a rare self-portrait with his giant camera.

Stereo Views: The 19th Century Meets the 21st

With the exception of photography itself, the most important and popular visual technology of the 19th century was the stereograph. Watkins made more images in stereo than in any other format, inventing pictures with spectacular three-dimensional effects. In the 1850s, stereo views were a widespread, inexpensive, mass-marketed form of entertainment, and a stereo viewer and basket of cards was to be found in every proper Victorian parlor. A selection of original stereo cards are displayed in the exhibition.

The Howard Gilman Gallery, the final room of the exhibition, also contains 12 computer viewing stations that utilize cutting-edge technologies — designed especially for this exhibition — to simulate the stereoscopic effect. The viewing stations provide access to approximately 200 stereo cards by Watkins, organized by year, subject matter, and region. Using special eyeglasses with liquid crystal lenses that synchronize with the computer via a transmitter, visitors see the selected images in three dimensions. The software interface for this unusual presentation was designed by the multimedia firm Perimetre Design using stereo-imaging technology developed by StereoGraphics, creators of the stereo-viewing system for the Mars Pathfinder, essentially employing 21st-century innovations to bring 19th-century images back to the broad public for whom they were originally created. Silicon Graphics 320 Visual Workstations and StereoGraphics CrystalEyes Eyeware were contributed for this exhibition.

Publication: Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is accompanied by a catalogue featuring over 100 tritone plates — including four gatefolds illustrating Watkins's rarely reproduced panoramas — and 20 duotone illustrations. An introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg, a scholarly essay by Douglas R. Nickel, Associate Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and biographical material by Peter E. Palmquist, an independent scholar and Watkins biographer, are included. The catalogue is available in softcover ($35) in the Metropolitan Museum's book shop. A hardcover edition ($60), copublished with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., is also available at US booksellers.

Exhibition itinerary: The exhibition originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and subsequent to its New York viewing will be shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from February 6 through April 30, 2000.

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and with special cooperation from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception was curated by Douglas R. Nickel and Maria Morris Hambourg.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org