After much determined negotiation, London’s National Portrait Gallery has managed to secure over one hundred of Irving Penn’s portraits from the closely guarded Penn archive and other collections around the world. Simply presented, these luminous, silvery black-and-white prints make for an unsurpassed body of portraiture which celebrate Penn’s astounding career.
The exhibit introduces us to Penn in 1944, randomly embracing the surrealist Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico on the street in Rome. “To me he was the heroic de Chirico; to him I was a total stranger, probably demented,” said Penn. What followed in the mid-1940s were portraits of numerous painters, sculptors and photographers.
In 1943 Alexander Liberman, then Art Director of Vogue, invited Penn to join the staff in devising ideas for the cover of the magazine. By 1947 he was photographing Vogue’s regular section People Are Talking About. This lead to an extraordinary roster of subjects for Penn, a veritable “who’s who” of art, film, fashion and literature at the time.
Visitors see Salvador Dalí’s sinister, bulging eyes appearing to almost pierce the photograph. In her portrait, Edith Piaf’s head tilts back as though about the launch into her evocatively smoky singing voice. Charles James poses with dress makers’ scissors, lying on the floor beside a mannequin swathed in a half finished, duchess satin gown. Truman Capote, in an oversized coat, seems almost contorted, perching on a chair, gazing knowingly into Penn’s lens.
Penn’s portrait composition made him an iconoclast to contemporary photographers. Abandoning grand and fanciful scenery, he embraced austere and stark settings. Cigarette butts and scraps of string littered the floor of his studios. For his portrait, Alfred Hitchcock sat upon cardboard boxes covered with scrap carpet. Penn sandwiched some subjects (among them Elsa Schiaparelli and the Duchess of Windsor) into tight corners. He didn’t stand for anyone who objected. “One sitter said, ‘You’re going to have to clean that up.’ He went home unphotographed,” Penn once recounted.
As his mastery of portraiture progressed, he began to hone in on his subjects, framing their upper torso and face rather than full figure. This allowed him to focus on the beguiling expressions which he was so adept at extracting from his sitters. This focus was at its height in the 1950s when Penn travelled to Paris.
In typical Penn style, he found a discarded theater curtain and used is as a backdrop. It was during this period that he took his arresting portraits of Picasso, a young Yves Saint Laurent, Colette, Audrey Hepburn and the famed fashion photographs of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives.
The excitement that comes from viewing Penn’s work all at once lies in the element of surprise that comes from each portrait; no two expressions or compositions are the same. Penn disliked calling his days work “a shoot,” preferring to refer to each as a separate “love affair.” Perhaps in this he intended to romanticize the tacit battle between photographer and sitter over the intended outcome of the portrait. Though the directors, playwrights, actors and actresses and fashion designers changed, what remained was Penn’s command of the genre of portraiture.
The simplicity and unassuming nature of this exhibit seems wholly appropriate. After all, how could a body of photographic work that begins with Cecil Beaton with Nude in 1946 and ends with Julian Schnabel in New York in 2007, do anything other than speak for itself?
Above image: Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1947, by Irving Penn. Image courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery
