Irving Penn and the Paris Curtain

To Coruña,

In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York commemorated the centenary of the birth of Irving Penn with an extensive retrospective, “Centennial”, which reviewed the seventy-year career of the American photographer, always linked to fashion and always far beyond of her: he paid meticulous attention to his compositions, which he often drew beforehand, and to every detail of the impressions of his images; He also articulated a minimalist and very personal aesthetic that made his works widely recognizable.

That anthology, which incorporated works from all of his fundamental series and was the most exhaustive by this author to date, has just landed at the MOP Center at the Battery Pier in A Coruña: Penn is the fourth fashion photographer to be part of the programming of this space, the only Spanish venue for the exhibition. It is not the first time, however, that an American-made Penn exhibition has arrived in our country: in 1987, the Juan March Foundation hosted another from MoMA that then reviewed his work between the 1940s and 1980s, including some works in color, of which he was one of the pioneers.

Popular recognition came to Penn from his work for the magazine Vogue for six decades: his first images of haute couture gradually established a new standard for photographic representations of this genre in the middle of the last century, and he recorded the cycles of fashion year after year in exquisite creations, strikingly expressive and brilliantly formal; His trademark was compositional rigor, minimal but not unimportant backgrounds, and diffuse lighting.

However, fashion would be only the most prominent of his specialties: Penn became an original portrait painter, capable of letting us see beyond the face and the human figure to encompass complete codes of behavior, certain meanings for ornament and artifact; and there are those who find in his treatment of volumes, polished by light, an almost sculptural sensitivity that he would also apply to studies of nudes and his explorations of still life, themes in which he developed his entire life. Conventionally, Penn has been appreciated autonomously as a portrait painter, as (more commonly) a fashion photographer or as a virtuoso of still life, but the latest examinations of his work seem to vindicate him as a master of all trades, capable of improving any journalistic text. regardless of its section in the papersincluding, of course, advertising.

This exhibition does not wish to subscribe entirely to either of these two currents, although it may offer a certain tendency towards the second: it presents us with Penn the portrait painter, the fashion photographer or the good still life maker, drawing a map of the general geography of his production. and highlighting the reasons and campaigns in which they allowed themselves to work more creatively. The organization of the tour follows to a certain extent the pattern of development of his career, respecting the structure of his work, its internal coherence and the air of time in which he lived.

Irving Penn: Centennial. Courtesy of the MOP Foundation

In A Coruña we will contemplate his projects on traffic signs in New York, the south of the United States or Mexico; many focused on fashion and style, including classic photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the dancer who became the artist’s first supermodel and wife; portraits of indigenous people from Cuzco, urban workers from Small Trades and cultural figures such as Truman Capote, Joe Louis, Picasso (just one of his eyes communicates enough), Colette, Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman or Joan Didion; his still lifes of spent cigarettes; portraits of the people of Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea and Morocco; recent still lifes that refer to Morandi; voluptuous nudes and powerful flower studies, also in color. His approach to one issue or another had to do with the demands of the press that employed him, but also with the changes in fashion itself and in the editorial approach over the years, with the economic ups and downs of the graphic press in the era of television, with its own demands apart from the commercial, with its individual moral conditions, the consolidation of photography as an art in the seventies and eighties or the proximity of his death (he died in 2009). All of these threads of meaning are, more or less explicitly, embedded in the images: a network of deep and complex ideas that seem to contrast with the apparent spontaneity of what is represented.

Nothing further: Penn generally worked in a studio or in a traveling tent that served the same purpose as the workshop, and preferred to resort to a simple background of white or light gray tones. His favorite backdrop, in fact, was an old theater curtain found in Paris that had been softly painted with fuzzy gray clouds; That fabric accompanied him throughout his career and we will see it in the exhibition, along with issues of the magazine Vogue that illustrate the original use of his photographs and that, at times, demonstrate the difference between those brightly colored journalistic presentations and the later reuse of the images that Penn reconsidered.