Irving Penn: Thoughts at the End
by Phyllis Tuchman
OCTOBER 22, 2009 TAGS:
Months after his wife of 42 years, Lisa Fonssagrives, died in 1992 at age 80, the great photographer Irving Penn revealed the best way he knew how just how lost he was.
He had long ago moved away from the fashion photography that made his reputation -- and those magnificent images he shot in the 1950s with his wife as his model. Now he reconceived earlier themes, flowers, portraits, with a new emotional intensity, and supervised solo exhibitions to feature different facets of his seven decades-long career. Ever the perfectionist, he meticulously orchestrated how later generations would view his life’s work.
The elderly Penn conveyed what it means to grow old. The man who had captured blooms in their radiance now found poetry and poignancy in drooped and wilted petals. Some of the fruits he photographed, such as the cut bananas in the August issue of Vogue, were no longer ripe. A portrait he took of artist Robert Rauschenberg, published in the New Yorker, called attention to the painter’s gnarled hand, damaged in a stroke.
In July 1992, he made "Irving Penn, Photograph of Self." In it the artist is unrecognizable. He presents himself as a befuddled, perplexed married man — his wedding band a prominent element in the image. Here his fingers pinch his cheeks, lips, and chin into a troubled expression that belies the man of achievement and confidence. Penn’s eyes search for an answer they cannot find. One ear is so distorted it looks as if it belongs to a mythic creature, some elfin forest-dweller. The shadows clouding his face and hand underscore the work’s emotion. Grief has transformed him.
In February 1993, he portrayed himself again, another "Irving Penn, Photograph of Self." His face now seems to melt before us, the one eye left intact looking heavenward. What sound is coming from his abject, open mouth? Is he screaming, beseeching, incapable of any sound at all? The lines that cross his forehead clash with the shadows dividing his face. This is an image of horror.
Both self-portraits are searing depictions of grief. By comparison, Albrecht Durer’s epic "Melancholia" looks merely downcast. Sixteen years later, in 2009, when Penn himself died, to accompany his obituaries his studio released photos of a younger man with dark hair, his future ahead of him. So at his death, ironically, he seemed to appear youthful, in contrast to these self-portraits of a new widower, which depict someone in pain who wonders what has happened, what is about to occur.
Another photo from this dark, mordant period, "Wide Skull" (1993), grapples with death’s finality. Here is the end of the road. Against a deep, jet-black background, Penn depicts three sides of a skull, splayed in such a way as to suggest it’s revolving, calling to us.
Irving Penn studied to be a painter. That was his dream. During the early 1940s, he gave up a good job to go to Mexico to become an artist. That couldn’t have been an easy decision; he was, after all, raised during the great Depression. Yet he returned to New York a year later having failed. He destroyed all the paintings he’d made.
But many of Penn’s subsequent photographs fell into the genres of traditional painters: portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, landscapes. Some of his late works are memento mori, an art history term for works that contemplate death and life’s brevity. Besides photographing flowers and rotting fruit, he focused his lens on surprising subjects that evoke the way things change.
In 1999, Penn made prints of a robust, nude dancer. Her Rubensian proportions stray far from those of the Size 2 models that were once his forte. Interestingly, he showed these images at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, when only blocks away the Metropolitan Museum of Art had in its galleries his Earthly Bodies, the sensual nudes he shot in 1949-50. Consider, he seems to be saying, all that life has to offer.
In 2004, Penn exhibited Underfoot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These photographs feature garbage embedded in the sidewalks of New York. Penn shows us what we step on when we forget to look where we’re going. In this wonderfully moving series from his late period, he transforms wads of chewing gum into craters on the moon. Detritus scattered along concrete slabs becomes lunar landscapes and intriguing abstract compositions.
In his last years, Penn had his legacy in mind. He carefully entrusted his spare, elegant work -- portraits of chic models and talented writers and artists, engagement rings, far-flung places, skilled craftsmen, radiant flowers, debris, mud gloves, and fish made from fish -- to museums in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles. These repositories reveal the range and intelligence manifest throughout his career, his talent, technique, wit, and generous, discerning eye.
Phyllis Tuchman writes for Obit about art and artists.
He had long ago moved away from the fashion photography that made his reputation -- and those magnificent images he shot in the 1950s with his wife as his model. Now he reconceived earlier themes, flowers, portraits, with a new emotional intensity, and supervised solo exhibitions to feature different facets of his seven decades-long career. Ever the perfectionist, he meticulously orchestrated how later generations would view his life’s work.The elderly Penn conveyed what it means to grow old. The man who had captured blooms in their radiance now found poetry and poignancy in drooped and wilted petals. Some of the fruits he photographed, such as the cut bananas in the August issue of Vogue, were no longer ripe. A portrait he took of artist Robert Rauschenberg, published in the New Yorker, called attention to the painter’s gnarled hand, damaged in a stroke.
In July 1992, he made "Irving Penn, Photograph of Self." In it the artist is unrecognizable. He presents himself as a befuddled, perplexed married man — his wedding band a prominent element in the image. Here his fingers pinch his cheeks, lips, and chin into a troubled expression that belies the man of achievement and confidence. Penn’s eyes search for an answer they cannot find. One ear is so distorted it looks as if it belongs to a mythic creature, some elfin forest-dweller. The shadows clouding his face and hand underscore the work’s emotion. Grief has transformed him.
In February 1993, he portrayed himself again, another "Irving Penn, Photograph of Self." His face now seems to melt before us, the one eye left intact looking heavenward. What sound is coming from his abject, open mouth? Is he screaming, beseeching, incapable of any sound at all? The lines that cross his forehead clash with the shadows dividing his face. This is an image of horror.
Both self-portraits are searing depictions of grief. By comparison, Albrecht Durer’s epic "Melancholia" looks merely downcast. Sixteen years later, in 2009, when Penn himself died, to accompany his obituaries his studio released photos of a younger man with dark hair, his future ahead of him. So at his death, ironically, he seemed to appear youthful, in contrast to these self-portraits of a new widower, which depict someone in pain who wonders what has happened, what is about to occur.Another photo from this dark, mordant period, "Wide Skull" (1993), grapples with death’s finality. Here is the end of the road. Against a deep, jet-black background, Penn depicts three sides of a skull, splayed in such a way as to suggest it’s revolving, calling to us.
Irving Penn studied to be a painter. That was his dream. During the early 1940s, he gave up a good job to go to Mexico to become an artist. That couldn’t have been an easy decision; he was, after all, raised during the great Depression. Yet he returned to New York a year later having failed. He destroyed all the paintings he’d made.
But many of Penn’s subsequent photographs fell into the genres of traditional painters: portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, landscapes. Some of his late works are memento mori, an art history term for works that contemplate death and life’s brevity. Besides photographing flowers and rotting fruit, he focused his lens on surprising subjects that evoke the way things change.
In 1999, Penn made prints of a robust, nude dancer. Her Rubensian proportions stray far from those of the Size 2 models that were once his forte. Interestingly, he showed these images at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, when only blocks away the Metropolitan Museum of Art had in its galleries his Earthly Bodies, the sensual nudes he shot in 1949-50. Consider, he seems to be saying, all that life has to offer.
In 2004, Penn exhibited Underfoot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These photographs feature garbage embedded in the sidewalks of New York. Penn shows us what we step on when we forget to look where we’re going. In this wonderfully moving series from his late period, he transforms wads of chewing gum into craters on the moon. Detritus scattered along concrete slabs becomes lunar landscapes and intriguing abstract compositions. In his last years, Penn had his legacy in mind. He carefully entrusted his spare, elegant work -- portraits of chic models and talented writers and artists, engagement rings, far-flung places, skilled craftsmen, radiant flowers, debris, mud gloves, and fish made from fish -- to museums in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles. These repositories reveal the range and intelligence manifest throughout his career, his talent, technique, wit, and generous, discerning eye.
Phyllis Tuchman writes for Obit about art and artists.
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