by Patricia Albers
“Astonish me!” commanded Irving Penn’s first mentor, Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar. For over six decades, Penn did just that for, albeit mostly for readers of Harper’s Bazaar’s archrival Vogue. Between the 1940s and 2009, the year of his death, Penn shot 163 covers and thousands of editorial pictures for Vogue. He dazzled the style world, but also, with the magazine’s blessing, roamed far outside the confines of fashion. Organized and inaugurated by the Metropolitan Museum in 2017 and augmented by his Summer of Love series, the Irving Penn retrospective at the de Young Museum until July 21 sweeps viewers into the photographer’s world.
The curators unpack his career by genres and projects. Among the first are four color still lifes from 1947. Although the painter-turned-photographer was only 30 when he did them, they bear the hallmarks of his mature style: rigorous setups, minimal backgrounds, acute graphic intelligence, an eye for art history and a sly sense of humor. Take the artfully artless Still Life with Watermelon. Published in an August issue, it conjures picnic leftovers. A heel of French bread, an elegantly scrunched napkin and scattered seeds and stems surround a bounty of summer fruit. A fly on the lemon takes a cue from 17th-century Dutch still lifes, in which insects may allude to the transience of life. Penn’s offers a carpe diem to Vogue’s late-summer readers.
As for Theatre Accident, it purportedly reveals the spilled contents of a sophisticate’s evening bag. They include an antique watch, a hairpin, a Cartier cigarette case, a broken Camel, and a doorman’s whistle, presumably for hailing taxis. Nearly four decades after Vogue published the picture, Penn reprinted it using the dye transfer process. Matted, framed, and hung on the museum walls, the dye transfer version of Theatre Accident eludes its original purpose: to sell things. Vogue promoted elegant things like Cartier cigarette cases but also a lifestyle that required charm and cultural sophistication. That approach—dictated by Condé Nast’s art director, Alexander Liberman—encouraged Penn’s erasure of the line between commerce and art and kept him at Vogue for over six decades.
Another early assignment was an archive of portraits of cultural luminaries. Dissatisfied with the results of portraying subjects in their own environments, the photographer constructed sets where he had them pose. One was a tight wedge made of stage flats. Some of these portraits—described in the wall text as “existential”—feel contrived; others penetrate both their subjects’ psyches and physical responses to the world. The writer Truman Capote drapes himself and his tweed overcoat across a chair, exuding ennui. The boxer Joe Louis, his shoulders and biceps mashed against the two flats, casts a look suggesting that his patience has limits.
Penn’s fashion work is no less concerned with attitude, gesture and image-making on his own terms. He liked to pick up on something showy about a garment and use it to organize the photographic frame. In Girl with Tobacco on Tongue (1951), it’s a black wide-brimmed hat and halter-necked dress. Their bold shapes play off the pale background and the model’s softly modulated skin. In an irresistibly stylish gesture, the tip of one of her lacquered nails taps the tip of her tongue, supposedly to flick off a flake of tobacco from the cigarette she is holding.
A pre-Christmas fashion assignment in Lima, Peru, prompted Penn’s visit to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital high in the Andes. There, he rented a local photographer’s barebones studio, with its damp stone floor, cloth backdrops, and wash of soft light from a wall of north-facing windows. Using both color transparencies and black-and-white film, Penn took 2000 portraits in only three days. Locals and campesinos in town for the holidays. Porters, beggars, egg sellers, shepherds. Children, young men, mothers with babies slung on their backs. People in ponchos, layered skirts, chullos or bowlers, battered sandals or nothing on their feet. Penn would position his subjects, communicating with gestures, then expose the film, his view camera positioned at a low angle. His subjects unflinchingly return its gaze. The images transpose portraiture with fashion and fashion with colonial photography. They are poetic and stunning.
The Cuzco series sent out sparks that ignited others. One was Small Trades, begun in Paris in 1950 and continued in London and New York. In Paris, Penn rented the top floor of a shabby photography studio without electricity but with skylights, north light, and a mottled old theater curtain that he would use as a
backdrop for the rest of his life. This time, his subjects were tradespeople—a knife grinder, a balloon seller, a street sweeper, and a waiter—wearing their uniforms and carrying their tools. Other photographers had done similar series, but Penn’s stand out for the way his subjects seem to have emerged from a fog to exist in perfect stillness and clarity of purpose.
In the 1950s and beyond, Penn shifted his attention from the type to the individual, from the tradesperson to the cultural superstar. Taking inspiration from the art of Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he aimed for portraits for the ages. That brought sometimes arduous sessions with people unwilling to give up their inner selves to the camera and skilled at not doing so. Penn’s portrait of Francis Bacon (1962) looks into the artist’s tortured soul. That of his colleague, the photographer Cecil Beaton (1950), suggests a squire who’s stepped out of an oil by the 19th-century painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. Across the gallery hangs Penn’s Audrey Hepburn (1951), her guileless glow turning the tables on Beaton’s air of affectation.
The years that followed took Penn from locale to locale, series to series. Among them are fascinating yet problematic ethnographic-style portraits shot in New Guinea, present-day Benin, and Morocco. His photographs of flower children, Hells Angels, and Anna Halprin’s dance collective, done for Look in San Francisco in 1967, belongs to that lineage of kinship groups posing in tribal dress (or undress) and adornment.
In the 1970s, society woke up to the idea that photographs could be art. Galleries proliferated, collectors abounded, and museums exhibited fine art photographic prints. Penn had long thought of photography as a link in a long chain of art. Now, a wider world embraced that point of view. Restless and bored with commercial assignments, he began reinterpreting old images, extracting them from the mass media and experimenting with dye transfer, gravure, platinum, and other techniques.
Cigarettes (1972) is the first series Penn conceived of in platinum, an old-fangled medium that yields luminous and dusty-soft images. Penn had developed his own arduous platinum process involving hand-prepared watercolor paper, a sequence of coatings and printings, and aluminum mounts. Jarringly, he used that expensive and exacting process for closeups of grimy, stained cigarette butts. He gathered them in the streets, photographed them with a microscope lens, and printed them greatly enlarged. Images of detritus made monumental—imagine battered pillars of the Karnak Temple inscribed with words like Camel, Kent and Lucky Strike—the series has a formalist edge. It is easier to admire than to enjoy.
The cigarette butts fit the times. In the 1970s, New York City felt shoddy, tense, and (from where Penn stood) obscenely consumerist. Antismoking campaigns were gaining momentum, Congress had banned cigarette ads on TV, and Vogue had stopped using cigarettes as fashion accessories. (Although cigarettes are everywhere in Penn’s early magazine work, he detested smoking.)
The series also came out of Penn’s itch to do creatively risky work that spoke more deeply about the human condition. One of his models for such a move was the artist Philip Guston, who had abandoned abstraction for figuration. Guston’s cartoonish yet dystopian cityscapes employ a vocabulary that includes Ku Klux Klan figures, the soles of shoes, naked lightbulbs and cigars. Their debut at New York’s Marlborough Gallery in 1970 left viewers shaking their heads and critics sniping. So did Penn’s first show of the cigarette butts at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. “Ugly, disgusting, and very nasty,” wrote one. “Essentially a bore,” judged another.
Over the years, the critical consensus has shifted. So has the consensus about Penn’s zaftig nudes. These date from the late 1940s and 1950s, years also marked by some of his best-known shots of rail-thin fashion models. For the nudes, Penn experimented with paper negatives, positioned his tripod close to the ground, or purposely overexposed, then bleached the print. The effect is sometimes landscape-like, sometimes surreal. One image has been rightly compared to the prehistoric fertility figure Woman of Willendorf (aka Venus of Willendorf), others to charcoal drawings by Henri Matisse.
Like the cigarette butts, Penn’s nudes are both photographs taken and images created. They, too, long met with rejection, and still today they have less crowd appeal than his work for hire. Yet, vital to understanding the man and his vision, they approach photography as a medium for private vision and shed light on the artist Irving Penn was and had always been.
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Irving Penn @ de Young Museum through July 21, 2024.
About the author: Patricia Albers is a Bay Area writer, art historian, and editor. Her books include “Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life” and “Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti.” Her biography of photographer André Kertész is forthcoming from Other Press.
Jeannie O'Connor says
Great review. He had an unerring sense of composition, and made a strong connection with his models. The cigarettes were so powerful when they first came out, but seemed the least interesting to me now. Gorgeous sense of black and white tonality and natural light. And humor- always there.