Irving Penn (June 16, 1917October 7, 2009) was an American photographer known for his

fashion photography Fashion photography is a genre of photography that portrays clothing and other fashion items. This sometimes includes haute couture garments. It typically consists of a fashion photographer taking pictures of a dressed model in a photographic ...

portraits A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face is always predominant. In arts, a portrait may be represented as half body and even full body. If the subject in full body better re ...

, and

still life A still life (: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, human-m ...

s. Penn's career included work at '' Vogue'' magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and

Clinique Clinique Laboratories, Limited liability company, LLC () is an American manufacturer of skincare, cosmetics, toiletries and fragrances, usually sold in high-end department stores. It is a subsidiary of the Estée Lauder Companies. As of 2019, C ...

. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.

Early life and education

Penn was born to a

Russian Jewish The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest po ...

family on June 16, 1917, in

Plainfield, New Jersey Plainfield is a City (New Jersey), city in Union County, New Jersey, Union County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Nicknamed "The Queen City",

, to Harry Penn and Sonia Greenberg. Penn's younger brother,

Arthur Penn Arthur Hiller Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010) was an American filmmaker, theatre director, and producer. He was a three-time Academy Award nominee for Academy Award for Best Director, Best Director, and a Tony Awards, Tony Awa ...

, was born in 1922 and would go on to become a film director and producer. Penn attended Abraham Lincoln High School where he studied graphic design with Leon Friend. Penn earned a diploma in 1938 from the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (later the University of the Arts), where he had studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts under

Alexey Brodovitch Alexey Vyacheslavovich Brodovitch (also Brodovich; , ; 1898 – April 15, 1971) was a Belarusian-American photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine ''Harper's Bazaar'' from 1934 to ...

. While still a student, Penn worked under Brodovitch at ''

Harper's Bazaar ''Harper's Bazaar'' (stylized as ''Harper's BAZAAR'') is an American monthly women's fashion magazine. Bazaar has been published in New York City since November 2, 1867, originally as a weekly publication entitled ''Harper's Bazar''."Corporat ...

'' which published several of Penn's drawings.

Career

Penn worked as a freelance designer for three years, taking his first amateur photographs before assuming Brodovitch's position as the art director at

Saks Fifth Avenue Saks Fifth Avenue (Colloquialism, colloquially Saks) is an American Luxury goods, luxury department store chain founded in 1867 by Andrew Saks. The first store opened in the F Street and 7th Street shopping districts, F Street shopping distric ...

in 1940. Penn remained at Saks Fifth Avenue for a year before leaving to spend a year painting and taking photographs in Mexico and across the US. When Penn returned to New York,

Alexander Liberman Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman (September 4, 1912 – November 19, 1999) was a Ukrainian-American magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor. He held senior artistic positions during his 32 years at Condé Nast Publicatio ...

offered him a position as an associate in '' Vogue'' magazine's Art Department. Penn worked on layout for the magazine before Liberman asked him to try photography. Penn's first photographic cover for ''VOGUE'' magazine appeared in October 1943. The art department of the Office of War Information in London offered him a job as an "artist-photographer" but he volunteered with the American Field Service instead. After arriving in Naples with a boatload of American troops in November 1944. Penn drove an ambulance in support of the

British Eighth Army The Eighth Army was a field army of the British Army during the Second World War. It was formed as the Western Army on 10 September 1941, in Egypt, before being renamed the Army of the Nile and then the Eighth Army on 26 September. It was cr ...

as it alternately waited out weather and slogged its way north through a miserable winter in the Italian

Apennines The Apennines or Apennine Mountains ( ; or Ἀπέννινον ὄρος; or – a singular with plural meaning; )Latin ''Apenninus'' (Greek or ) has the form of an adjective, which would be segmented ''Apenn-inus'', often used with nouns s ...

. In July 1945, he was transferred from Italy to India. He photographed the soldiers, medical operations, and camp life for the AFS, and various subjects while bivouacked in India. He sailed back to New York in November 1945. Penn continued to work at ''Vogue'' throughout his career, photographing covers, portraits, still lifes, fashion, and photographic essays. In the 1950s, Penn founded his own studio in New York and began making advertising photographs. Over the years, Penn's list of clients grew to include

General Foods General Foods Corporation was a company whose direct predecessor was established in the United States by C. W. Post, Charles William (C. W.) Post as the Postum Cereal Company in 1895. The company changed its name to "General Foods" in 1929, a ...

De Beers The De Beers Group is a South African–British corporation that specializes in the diamond industry, including mining, exploitation, retail, inscription, grading, trading and industrial diamond manufacturing. The company is active in open-pi ...

, Issey Miyake, and

. Penn met Swedish fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot in 1947. In 1950, the two married at Chelsea Register Office, and two years later Lisa gave birth to their son, Tom Penn, who would become a metal designer. Lisa Fonssagrives died in 1992. Penn died aged 92 on October 7, 2009 at his home in

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

.''New York Times'' obituary by Andy Grundberg, October 8, 2009
/ref>

Photography

Best known for his fashion photography, Penn's repertoire also included portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from around the world;

Modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

still-life works of food, bones, bottles, metal, and found objects; and photographic travel essays. Penn was among the earliest photographers to pose subjects against grey or white backdrop and he effectively used its simplicity. During his early years at Vogue, the magazine's art director, Penn developed a bold graphic sensibility that complemented Penn's chic images and embodied modern taste. His use of monochromatic backdrops of black, white, or gray allowed him complete control of natural lighting conditions and enhanced the visual simplicity of his photographs. In an era when elaborate artificial lighting was the norm, his work stood out from the rest and influenced subsequent fashion photography. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included

John Hersey John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993) was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to no ...

Martha Graham Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer, teacher and choreographer, whose style, the Graham technique, reshaped the dance world and is still taught in academies worldwide. Graham danced and taught for over s ...

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, ; ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Pica ...

Pablo Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...

Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 March 6, 1986) was an American Modernism, modernist painter and drafter, draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "M ...

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, ...

, and

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...

. Beginning in 1964, Irving Penn began experimenting with

platinum print Platinum prints, also called ''platinotypes'', are photographic prints made by a monochrome photographic printing, printing process involving platinum. Platinum tones range from warm black, to reddish brown, to expanded mid-tone grays that are ...

ing. Penn had spent his career up to that point making photographs that were seen almost exclusively in reproduction within the glossy pages of magazines and in his pivotal 1960 book Moments Preserved. Penn set himself the challenge of producing photographic prints that would surpass the technical limitations of reprographic media and deliver a deeper visual experience. He was drawn to the antiquated platinum process for its long grayscale – its ability to display a seemingly infinite array of gradations between pure white and absolute black. The platinum process requires direct contact with the negative, without enlargement, so Penn first needed to create flawless negatives the same size as the desired print. He then hand-coated paper with platinum emulsion. When dry, the paper was sandwiched with the negative and exposed to light before processing. Rigorous experimentation revealed that recoating a print with a secondary emulsion and making a second or third exposure of the same image on a single sheet of paper yielded prints of greater depth and subtlety. Penn solved the problem of aligning and re-aligning the negative and the print surface over multiple exposures by borrowing a technique from the graphic arts: he mounted his paper on a sheet of aluminum with a series of registration guides along the top edge. Penn was guarded about the preparation of his emulsions and his precise formulations varied considerably. He frequently introduced palladium and iron salts into his coatings to achieve desired effects. Penn's still life compositions are sparse and highly organized, assemblages of food or objects that articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume. Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminum sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth that untoned silver prints lacked. His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp look. While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn also ventured beyond creative boundaries. The exhibition ''Earthly Bodies'' consisted of series of posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949 and 1950, they were not exhibited until 1980. He continued to capture collections by his favorite designers, such as John Galliano for Dior, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and Christian Lacroix, for Vogue, incorporating these darker themes into his images.

Exhibitions

*1975: ''Irving Penn: Recent Works, Photographs of Cigarettes'', Museum of Modern Art, New York *1975: ''I Platini di Irving Penn: 25 Anni di Fotografia'', Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Turin *1975: ''Irving Penn: Platinum Plates'', The Photographers' Gallery, London *1977: ''Irving Penn: Street Material. Photographs in Platinum Metals'', The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York *1980: Exhibition at the Center for Visual Arts, Oakland, California *1984: ''Irving Penn'', a retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art, New York *1986: ''Irving Penn: Printemps des arts de Monte Carlo'', Monte Carlo *1990: ''Irving Penn: Master Images'', National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. *1990: ''Irving Penn: Platinum Test Material'', Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona *1994: ''Irving Penn: Collection Privée/Privatsammlung'', Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Fribourg, Switzerland *1995: ''Irving Penn Photographs: A Donation in Memory of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn'', Moderna Museet, Stockholm *1997: ''Le Bain: Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco'', Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris *1997: ''Irving Penn: A Career in Photography'', The Art Institute of Chicago *2001: ''Irving Penn: Objects (Still Lifes) for the Printed Page'', Museum Folkwang, Essen *2002: ''Dancer: 1999 Nudes by Irving Penn'', Whitnew Museum of American Art, New York *2002: ''Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–1950'', The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York *2004: ''Dahomey (1967)'', The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston *2005: ''Irving Penn: Platinum Prints'', the

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in ...

, Washington, D.C. *2008: ''Close Encounters'', Morgan Library & Museum, New York *2009: ''The Small Trades'', J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: a collection of 252 full-length portraits by Penn from 1950 to 1951 *2010: Exhibition at the

National Portrait Gallery (London) The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is an art gallery in London that houses a collection of portraits of historically important and famous British people. When it opened in 1856, it was arguably the first national public gallery in the world th ...

: an exhibit of over 120 portraits of people from the worlds of literature, music and the visual and performing arts *2012: ''Irving Penn: Diverse Worlds'', Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Museet), Malmö, Sweden *2013: ''Irving Penn: On Assignment'', Pace Gallery, New York City, New York. *2015-2016: ''Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty'', career retrospective of 146 photographs at the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

. *2017: ''Irving Penn: Centennial'',

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

, New York City; ''Irving Penn - Le Centenaire,''

Grand Palais The (; ), commonly known as the , is a historic site, exhibition hall and museum complex located in the 8th arrondissement of Paris between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, France. Construction of the began in 1897 following the demolitio ...

, Paris.

Major collections

The Art Institute of Chicago holds the Irving Penn Paper and Photographic Archives, which were donated to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries and the Department of Photography in 1995. In addition, the Art Institute of Chicago has more than 200 of Penn's fine art prints in its collection, and has mounted several exhibitions of work by the artist including the retrospective ''Irving Penn: A Career in Photography'' (1997–1998) which traveled internationally as well as ''Irving Penn: Underfoot'' (2013). The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) possesses a large collection of Penn's works, including a silver gelatin print of Penn's ''The Tarot Reader'', a photograph from 1949 of Jean Patchett and

surrealist Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

painter Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

Bridget Tichenor.The Tarot Reader (Jean Patchett and Bridget Tichenor) - New York 1949 by Irving Penn SAAM
/ref> In 2013, the museum received 100 images as a gift from the Irving Penn Foundation, significantly increasing the number of Penn's works in the collection to 161 images. The Irving Penn Foundation's gift formed the basis of the exhibition, ''Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty,'' which was shown at SAAM before traveling to other museum venues around the United States.

Art Market

In the April 2023 Phillips Photography auctioned "''Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn)''" (1950) for the third highest price of the entire auction at $355,600. "''Cuzco Children''" (1948) also sold for above hight-estimate $95,250.

Awards

*1987: The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography (DGPh)The Cultural Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh)
. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie e.V.. Accessed 7 March 2017.

Bibliography

*''Moments Preserved''. 1960 *''Worlds in a Small Room''. 1974. *''Inventive Paris Clothes, 1909–1939''. 1977. *''Flowers''. 1980. *''Passage''. 1991. *''Drawings''. 1999. *''The Astronomers Plan a Voyage to Earth''. 1999. *''Irving Penn Regards The Work of Issey Miyake''. 1999. *''Still Life''. 2001. *''A Notebook at Random''. 2004. *''Photographs of Dahomey''. 2004.

References

External links

Irving Penn FoundationVoguepedia Irving PennIrving Penn Archives
at the Art Institute of Chicago
Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty
- online image gallery from 2015 to 2016

exhibition
Irving Penn: Small Trades at the J. Paul Getty Museum
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Penn, Irving 1917 births 2009 deaths American fashion photographers Food photographers Interior photographers American portrait photographers Photographers from New York (state) American people of Russian-Jewish descent Artists from Manhattan People from Plainfield, New Jersey 20th-century American photographers 21st-century American photographers 20th-century American male artists 21st-century American male artists Photographers from New Jersey 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni American Field Service personnel of World War II The New Yorker people Jews from New Jersey