Irving Penn

Photographer, artist, and designer

• Born: June 16, 1917
• Birthplace: Plainfield, New Jersey
• Died: October 7, 2009
• Place of death: New York, New York

A gifted photographer, Penn achieved a rare reconciliation between the worlds of commerce and art, often dissolving the boundary between fashion and fine art.

Early Life

Irving Penn (UR-veeng pehn) was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, about thirty miles from were chosen. Penn’s father was a watchmaker; his mother was an immigrant to America. Penn had a brother, Arthur Penn, who became a noted television and film director in the decades following World War II. In 1925, Irving Penn’s parents divorced. The father remained in Philadelphia, where the family had been living, while the mother and children lived in a succession of locations, including the New York area. After opening a health food store, an unusual enterprise for the time, Penn’s mother became a nurse.

In 1934, Penn enrolled in the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, where he remained until 1938. One of his teachers, art directorAlexey Brodovitch, engaged Penn as an unpaid intern at Harper’s Bazaar during the summers of 1937 and 1938, and several of Penn’s drawings appeared in the magazine. At about this time Penn began to photograph with a Rolleiflex camera. In 1941, he moved to Mexico to continue developing his skills as a painter, but after a year he decided to give up painting and return to New York to work as a freelance designer and art director in the publishing industry.

After working in advertising design at a leading New York department store, Penn joined in 1943 the staff of Vogue, a fashion magazine that remained a mainstay of his professional life for more than a half century. In 1944, Penn volunteered for American Field Service, serving as an ambulance driver in the Allied campaign in Italy. During this time, he also made photographs of groups of military personnel.

Life’s Work

Upon his return to the United States, Penn became the leading fashion and still-life photographer for Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and other magazines. He also undertook many independent projects, including celebrity portraits, which were published in Vogue. Working almost entirely in a studio environment, he created a brilliant succession of images of leading figures in the world of the arts, including painters, sculptors, composers, dancers, and writers. Among his subjects was Pablo Picasso, who sat for Penn’s camera in France in 1957. The modernist painter is photographed in extreme close-up, with his left eye centered in the frame and his right eye hidden in deep shadow, a cyclopean vision of Picasso in keeping with the artist’s near-mythic status in the art world of the time.

In 1948, a series of portraits made in a borrowed studio in Cuzco, Peru, following the completion of a Vogue assignment in Lima, gave rise to a project for Penn of photographing anonymous individuals living outside the mainstream of industrial, urban society. These photographs, collected in a 1974 volume titled Worlds in a Small Room, have been lauded as sensitive documentation of vanishing ways of life but are also criticized as an unwarranted cultural appropriation of the exotic appearance of vulnerable peoples. Less contentious is a series of images made in New York and Paris in 1950 and 1951, titled “Small Trades,” which represents people in their everyday work clothing. Common to these two projects and to Penn’s portraits generally are the use of a minimal studio background and a raking light that yields vivid textures and deep shadows. Many critics believe that the success of these pictures, and of Penn’s work taken as a whole, is due in no small degree to the photographer’s reserved yet generous personality, which put sitters at their ease.

In 1950, Penn married a leading model of the day, Lisa Fonssagrives, a talented woman of Swedish origin who was six years his senior. Several of the best fashion photographs of the twentieth century were a result of their sympathetic collaboration within the constraints of the fast-moving world of fashion publication. The couple enjoyed forty-two years of marriage, during which Fonssagrive forged a second career as a sculptor; they had one son, Tom. Penn survived his wife by seventeen years. He died at home in New York City at the age of ninety-two. In a profession characterized by high levels of achievement by persons of Jewish parentage, Penn—who kept his private life well separated from his career—gave no evidence, within his photography or otherwise, of matters of faith.

Significance

Penn achieved a rare reconciliation between the worlds of commerce and art, often dissolving the boundary between fashion and fine art. An “insider” in the world of photography, he preserved a personal aesthetic and an intellectual point of reference that allowed his work to take unexpected creative turns while remaining accessible to a broad public audience.

Bibliography

Hackert, Virginia A., and Anne Lacoste. Irving Penn: Small Trades. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009. A definitive collection of Penn’s 1950-1951 work in Paris and New York, dealing with everyday occupations and trades.

Hamburg, Maria Morris. Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949-1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Produced by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this presentation of a crucial episode in Penn’s artistic development offers a perceptive essay by a leading scholar.

Keaney, Magdalene. Irving Penn Portraits. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2010. This chronologically ordered selection of thirty images taken between 1944 and 2006 establishes a claim for Penn’s preeminence in the field of photographic portraiture. The reproductions are exceptionally good.

Szarkowski, John. Irving Penn. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Representing the first retrospective of Penn’s work, this catalog is essential reading, though the perceptive essay by the then director of photography is relatively short, considering Penn’s ultimate stature.

Westerbeck, Colin, ed. Irving Penn: A Career in Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. This wide-ranging survey, possibly the best single source for background study of Penn’s work, is based upon the Irving Penn Archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, which was created by the artist’s gift of photographs and related materials.

Woodward, Richard B. “Behind a Century of Photos, Was There a Jewish Eye?” The New York Times, July 7, 2002. This review of the 2002 exhibition New York: Capital of Photography at the Jewish Museum, New York, explains both the value and the limitations of critic Max Kozloff’s observation that Jews have been an important shaping force in American photography for more than a century.