"Irving Penn Portraits" Opens At The National Portrait Gallery

Written by Winston Chambers Tuesday, 12 July 2011 21:35

LONDON - Irving Penn (1917–2009) was one of the great photographers of our time. Focusing specifically on his portraits of major cultural figures of the last seven decades, Irving Penn Portraits is a glorious celebration of his work in this genre. The exhibition is brought together from major international collections and includes over 120 silver and platinum prints, many vintage, ranging from his portraits for Vogue magazine in the 1940s to some of his last work. On view at the National Portrait Gallery through 6 June, 2010.

Penn photographed an extraordinary range of sitters from the worlds of literature, music and the visual and performing arts. Among those featured in the exhibition are Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, Christian Dior, T.S. Eliot, Duke Ellington, Grace Kelly, Rudolf Nureyev, Al Pacino, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso and Harold Pinter.

This fascinating survey brings to light the significance of Penn's visual language and provides a rare opportunity to explore his innovative use of composition, light and printing techniques.

Irving Penn was the emperor of understated glamour. He tested the territory in the 1950s with his beautifully austere black and white Vogue fashion photographs, and he planted his flag in it in the 1960s when he began making his radiant still lifes, his palpably voluptuous nudes and, perhaps best known of all, a series of portraits of an almost primitive simplicity that masked their deep and enduring glamour.

Penn, who died last year at the age of 92, was a colossus of photography with a singularity of vision that stretched across a wide body of work. He was distinguished and innovative in many genres, but he raised the game consistently as a portrait photographer. Half a century after many of them were taken, these portraits still stand out for their element of surprise, that pleasurable little jolt that makes the viewer register that they are on unfamiliar territory.

In an era, 50 years ago, when photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Horst and Erwin Blumenfeld set out to create portraits full of elaborate gesture (while gratifying the vanity of their subjects through the deft retouching of cowardice and pimples), Penn set out to register the reality of the life behind the achievement. Along with his great rival, Richard Avedon, Penn broke the tacit compact between photographer and sitter. His sitters were placed in an environment devoid of luxuries and textures, without theatrical glamour, without stagey lighting, elegant props or even an identifiable social ambience. What remained were stark portraits of people, distilled to their absolute essence; and the results were often startlingly sensuous.

Founded in 1856, the aim of the National Portrait Gallery, London is ‘to promote through the medium of portraits the appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture, and ... to promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media’.The Gallery holds the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. The Collection is displayed in London and in a number of locations around the United Kingdom, including several houses managed by the National Trust. Visit : http://www.npg.org.uk/

The exhibition will tour to Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome from 1 July to 19 September 2010.