Irving Penn: A Career in Photography
It’s Penn’s special gift to communicate that aplomb consistently in his photographs while reminding us that, beyond the camera’s frame, life is a mess. Sometimes a mouse or a beetle will creep across the still lifes he arranged for Vogue in the 50s–which resemble nothing so much as 17th-century Dutch paintings, with foodstuffs galore amassed to prove how close the sensual and aesthetic appetites can be. In the midst of his own perfectionism–which clearly knows few bounds–Penn allows, even invites these reminders of chaos and decay, of the life-taking, life-giving forces his artistry cannot control.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Art Institute’s show of the 80-year-old artist’s lifework is as elegant as his photos but, like them, leaves a few loose ends hanging for effect. The 135 prints the photographer has donated to the museum are the centerpiece of its current Penn exhibition, but it also includes samples from the archive he donated, including test prints, tear sheets, and notes on his working habits from the past 50 years. The show begins with one of Penn’s most famous 1950 fashion shots: it shows the model he would later marry, Lisa Fonssagrives, in a painfully slender Lafaurie dress with a plump band of roses around her arm. Though the fashions have dated, the picture hasn’t. No longer the portrait of a dress, it’s a portrait of a 40-year romance, ended by the model’s recent death. Here she’s girlish but full of personality, coaxing the shy photographer out of himself. Compared to today’s fashion shots, Penn’s are both sexually restrained and formally daring. The life of elegance recorded in his early work resides in the ballroom, not the bedroom. Yet that ballroom is a visibly raw space, in this case a Parisian garret.
Penn also gifted and was exhibited by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden–his wife’s homeland–in 1990; in 1984 he had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he lives and continues working. Given all this attention, it’s hard to make sense of curator Colin Westerbeck’s assertion in the catalog that this show redresses the art world’s recent neglect of Penn, though certainly it provides a valuable opportunity to reinterpret his imposing legacy. Rising to the challenge, Westerbeck arranges Penn’s seemingly distinct genres with a freedom boldly in tune with the photographer’s own intuitions.
Penn defies the traditional separation between an artist’s commercial and “creative” work, challenging the viewer to discover a distinction. Of course the difference is obvious when a product is being advertised, but much less so when beauty and decay–which this show makes clear are Penn’s ongoing themes–are at stake. Perversely, beauty and entropy are the values of commerce as well as art. “They’re chasing us back to the fine arts,” Penn lamented at a gathering of professional photographers in the late 60s, when the magazines so many of them had worked for fell into decline. His inversion of the usual hierarchy of personal and professional is typical of his tongue-in-cheek defiance. If all commercial studios produced work of Penn’s wit and finesse, we could abandon the distinction entirely.
