The Brooklyn Rail

Within the doctrines of modern photography, Irving Penn (1917–2009) is of singular significance. His work helped dismantle tenacious segregation between photographic art and commerce, and hastened the photograph into the creed of “fine art.” He did so by laboring for the pinnacles of what would now be termed content providers: corporate advertising, fashion, international mass media, and a nascent art market. The subject of three prior and capacious museum retrospectives since a MoMA exhibition in 1984, each accompanied by scholarly catalogs, and separate monographs devoted to themes in the work, Penn’s recognition has been thorough. Still, much can be discovered.

The Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation in A Coruña, Spain has revised Irving Penn: Centennial, a 2017 retrospective originating at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Trimmed by forty photographs, the pictures are now given nobility and breath on soaring walls in the exhibition space, making the galleries in New York, in retrospect, seem miserly. The installation, curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim, encourages new gestures and cadences between the various constellations of work. The gallery walls are painted an enveloping sienna, a suitable choice given the Iberian location, drawing out the often rustic and earthen character of the work. The prints are preceded by a galvanizing introduction of video projection filling the contours of an enormous entry hall.

Under the patronage of magazine juggernaut Condé Nast, Penn crafted a particular kind of twentieth-century, postwar romanticism that bridged European refinement and American description. Contradictions animate the work: precision and improvisation; tactility of the opulent as much as the coarse and worn; an antiquarian sensibility that forged a mid-century modernity; austerity and excess. Often, the wit of the work is camouflaged by its monastic demeanor.

As the custodian of the artist’s prolific seventy-year career, the Irving Penn Foundation maintains a familiar consensus of images, the collection from which most of the photos on view derive. Portraiture in various iterations is pervasive; Penn’s infamous corner portraits, consisting of a sitter placed within a narrow V-shaped enclosure, open the show. Regrettably termed in the wall text and catalog as “existential” and often interpreted as a coercive maneuver, they now seem, simply, an astute armature for a performative response: Marcel Duchamp as a lithe and avuncular pipe-smoker; boxer Joe Louis in the familiar corner of the ring. Throughout the work, Penn seems uninterested in deep space, and the V-shape is thus an efficient device to curtail it. Elsewhere, a gamine Yves Saint Laurent is as vulnerable as a startled fawn, and Alfred Hitchcock a contrite bad boy, a black mass on lumpen bulk. It is tempting to contrast the high cultural accomplishments of the literary and theatrical community in this oeuvre to the genre of celebrity portraiture now—a narrative spectacle gratuitous and fleeting.

Part of Penn’s originality was studio renderings of what had previously been considered ethnographic portraits, an unexpected hybrid of Vogue and National Geographic magazines. Penn photographed citizens of New Guinea, Morocco, Peru, and Dahomey (Benin), as well as various tradespeople of Britain, France, and the US, reframing their personas and adornment as fashion costume. The complex ideology of considering Indigenous peoples or laboring classes in the pages of a totemic fashion magazine may be seen as either a gesture of inclusion or colonialism, depending on one’s perspective.

The incorporation of physical copies of Vogue magazine throughout the exhibition is useful reminder of Penn’s translation of his pictures from color to black and white, all the more to assert their qualifications as art. (It is said that the copyright for the color images remains with Condè Nast, the photographic object with Penn.) One recalls that under the disguise of scholastic interest, the Black and brown tribal body was once displayed in mainstream print in ways that would have been unthinkable with a white body.

Examples from all Penn’s bodies of work are present for revived esteem. The fashion work is suitably blithe, an interpretation of couture with an ornithological appreciation and an insistent, black Motherwellian shape and line and silhouette. Two self-motivated series of work have a contemporary resonance that is perhaps augmented by their rejection by tastemakers in their day. “Nudes” (1949–50) in shimmery, blanched platinum prints assert a morphology of the female body whose corpulence is distant from the still-narrow confines of taste. “Cigarettes” (1972) scrutinizes cigarette butts gathered from the street, enlarged to figurative proportion; papery husks that ratify photography’s ability to determine aesthetic value in the least obvious. The squashed street debris is the utmost flattening of pictorial space—the photograph like a photocopy, ink on paper. Separated by decades, both indicate the subversion lurking beneath Penn’s veneer of tender grace.

The plurality of Penn’s activity is unified by his relationship to the material world, a contemplation of its texture and shape and weight, its ethereal draping, the crumpled patina of time, preserved by the photograph. His sense of craftmanship, his printmaking impulse, was not only an aesthetic calculation but an affection for labor. Penn was a formalist and a humanist, and the polarities in the work hinged class, ethnicity, and race, an affirmative vision of humility and courtesy. From here, at the end of 2024, it seems of an attitude, a virtue, quite far away.