Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009) Rochas Mermaid Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris, 1950 Platinum-palladium print, 1980 19 ⅞ × 19 ¾ in. (50.5 × 50.2 cm) Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present 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, opening April 24, 2017, will be the most comprehensive exhibition of the great American photographer's work to date and will include both masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.

Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine, 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 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.

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 will 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.

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 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.


Exhibition Credits

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.

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.

Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009), Nude No. 72, New York, 1949–50. Gelatin silver print 15 ⅝ × 14 ¾ in. (39.7 × 37.5 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 2002 © The Irving Penn Foundation.

• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  After-Dinner Games, New York, 1947
  Dye transfer print, 1985
  22 ¼ × 18 ⅛ in. (56.5 × 46 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972
  Platinum-palladium print, 1975
  23 ½ × 17 ⅜ in. (59.7 × 44.1 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Cuzco Children, 1948 
  Platinum-palladium print, 1968
  19 ½ × 19 ⅞ in. (49.5 × 50.5 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Fishmonger, London, 1950
  Platinum-palladium print, 1976
  19 ¾ × 14 ⅞ in. (50.2 × 37.8 cm)
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
  Purchase, The Lauder Foundation and The Irving Penn Foundation Gifts, 2014
  © Condé Nast Publications, Ltd.
  
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1948
  Gelatin silver print, 2000
  10 × 8 1/8 in. (25.4 × 20.6 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
  
  

  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Mouth (for L’Oréal), New York, 1986
  Dye transfer print
  18 ¾ × 18 ⅜ in. (47.6 × 46.7 cm).
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
  
  
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Naomi Sims in Scarf, New York, ca. 1969
  Gelatin silver print, 1985
  10 ½ × 10 ⅜ in. (26.7 × 26.4 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
  
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, 1957
  Platinum-palladium print, 1985
  18 ⅝ × 18 ⅝ in. (47.3 × 47.3 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
  
  
  

  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Tribesman with Nose Disc, New Guinea, 1970
  Gelatin silver print, 2002
  15 ½ × 15 ⅜ in. (39.4 × 39.1 cm)
  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation to
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
  
  
  
  
• Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)
  Truman Capote, New York, 1948
  Platinum-palladium print, 1968
  15 7/8 × 15 3/8 in. (40.3 × 39.1 cm)
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
  Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith
  Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986
  © The Irving Penn Foundation
• 
  
  
  

  
   
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1964

  Gelatin silver print, 1992

  15 ⅛× 15 in. (38.4 × 38.1 cm)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

  © The Irving Penn Foundation

  
  

  
  

  
   
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Girl Drinking (Mary Jane Russell)

  , New York, 1949

  Gelatin silver print, 2000

  20 ½ × 19 ⅜ in.

  (52.1 × 49.2 cm)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

  Promised Gift of The

  Irving Penn Foundation

  © Condé Nast

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Glove and Shoe, New York, 1947

  Gelatin silver print

  9 ⅝× 7 ¾ in. (24.4 × 19.7 cm)

  The Metropolitan

  Museum of Art, New York

  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

  © Condé Nast

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Three Dahomey Girls, One Reclining, 1967

  Platinum-palladium print, 1980

  19 ¾ × 19 ¾ in. (50.2 × 50.2 cm)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

  © The Irving Penn Foundation

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Ungaro Bride Body Sculpture (Marisa Berenson), Paris, 1969

  Gelatin silver print, 1985

  12 × 9 ⅜ in. (30.5 × 23.8 cm)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  , New York

  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

  © Condé Nast

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Ta Tooin (The Bowery), New York, ca. 1939

  Gelatin silver print

  9 ½ × 7 ½ in. (24.1 × 19.1 cm)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

  © The Irving Penn Foundation

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009)

  Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea, 1970

  Platinum-palladium print, 1976

  20 ⅛× 19 ½ in. (51.1 × 49.5 cm)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

  Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

  © The Irving Penn Foundation