Irving Penn Photos in U.S. Museums
Morgan Library & Getty Museum Acquire American Artist's Prints
New York's Morgan Library & Museum and Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum own superlative collections of works on paper by American photographer Irving Penn.
Both North American coasts can now boast unique collections of seminal works by legendary American photographer Irving Penn (b. 1917). New York's Morgan Library & Museum received 67 prints by Mr. Penn in 2007. And Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum announced its recent acquisition of 252 full-length portraits, the artist's series called The Small Trades (1950-1951), on February 6, 2008.
Irving Penn
A native of Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn worked in the 1940s as a photographer for Vogue magazine in New York. He relocated there after having studied design at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. Penn's modernist compositions are simple, austere and direct studies of his subjects. They employ smooth gray or white backdrops, studio or natural light and minimal props. After almost seven decades, the artist continues to work in fashion and advertising photography for Vogue and other commercial clients, both domestically and abroad.
Close Encounters: Irving Penn's Portraits...
The Morgan Library & Museum's 67 gelatin silver prints by Mr. Penn, obtained in 2007, are the institution's first major holdings in 20th-century photography. Of the insightful iconic images in Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers (January 18-April 13, 2008), 35 were donated to the museum by Penn. The remaining 32 prints were procured through the efforts of Morgan director Charles E. Pierce, Jr., trustee and vice president Richard L. Menschel and Peter MacGill, president of Pace/MacGill Gallery and Penn's longtime representative.
Close Encounters... chronicles six decades of Irving Penn's career. Photographs of artistic giants captured by Penn's lens and on exhibit include: Giorgio de Chirico (1944); Salvador Dalí (1947); Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers (1947); Truman Capote (1948); Georgia O'Keefe (1948); Pablo Picasso (1957); Arthur Miller (1983); Louise Bourgeois (1992); and Jasper Johns (2006).
Many of the Morgan's books, drawings, manuscripts and musical scores by Penn's subjects are now ideally complemented by the photographer's images. Some of them have been on display since January 2008 in Highlights from the Morgan's Collections.
The Getty Museum's Prints
Recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the master set of Irving Penn's The Small Trades is comprised of 252 full-length portraits of European and American skilled tradespeople. Taken between 1950 and 1951 in Paris, London and New York, each stylized print presents an appropriately attired worker with the tools of his or her profession. A partial gift from Mr. Penn to the Getty, this remarkable series will remain intact and displayed as a whole for the first time in September 2009.
The effortless look of The Small Trades is deceptive. In fact, the demanding Penn's meticulous development of his subjects' images occurred in carefully calculated multiple stages. After assistants identified suitable representatives from various trades while at work, they were posed upright in the artist's studio and photographed against a neutral background. Penn exposed the negatives from his tripod-mounted camera on high-speed roll-film to produce a slightly grainy gray effect. He returned to this body of work numerous times throughout the decades, refining the prints time and time again.
Source:
Westerbeck, Colin (ed.), et al. Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (exh. cat.). Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1997.
