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Lot Essay
‘As the show moves along, it retraces a brilliant, productive career of nearly 70 years, revealing the unwavering consistency of a vision fixed on form and beauty in their many guises: extensive fashion work for Vogue; portraits of cultural luminaries and tradesmen, as well as of indigenous Peruvians and New Guinean tribesmen; nearly abstract close-ups of overly voluptuous nudes; and colossal cigarette butts magnified to suggest Roman columns, tombstones and even corpses.’
ROBERTA SMITH, APRIL 2017, THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWING THE EXHIBITION AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
Over a career that spanned seven decades, Irving Penn became known as a photographer of overwhelming beauty and oversized talent. His work in the fashion and editorial world was legendary, and deservedly so. He spent his days directing, staging and photographing the world’s most beautiful models and some of society’s most important creative geniuses.
Penn cut his teeth in the magazine world as an assistant to the legendary Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, and went on to become one of Vogue’s most celebrated photographers. It was something of a surprise then when, in the early 1970s, Penn showed John Szarkoski at The Museum of Modern Art a set of pictures of garbage.
The artist had collected the refuse and detritus of New York City streets in order to photograph it in his spotless studio. In 1972, the artist asked a studio assistant to collect some discarded cigarette butts from the streets. Three separate outings were made and hundreds of cigarette butts were collected. Using an 8x10 inch view camera and lenses intended for extreme close-ups, Penn made fifty images; only twenty-three were ultimately chosen to be printed. The Cigarettes series was the first series exclusively printed in platinum (Irving Penn: Cigarettes, Hamiltons Gallery, London, 2012, p. 54)
“Graphic and photographic beauty are not surprising qualities in the work of Irving Penn,” Szarkowski wrote in 1975 in his introductory text to the exhibition of Penn’s photographs of cigarettes at The Museum of Modern Art. “The capricious and frankly inconsequential nature of the nominal subject matter, in conjunction with its ambitious and enormously sophisticated handling, constitute a clear statement of intention: these photographs can be considered only as works of art.”
Of the twenty-three images in the series, Cigarette No. 37, the work you see here, is one of only three images that Penn decided to print greatly enlarged as a four-panel mounted platinum print. As such, it holds an elevated position within the overall body of work, and has graced the walls of numerous museum walls.
ROBERTA SMITH, APRIL 2017, THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWING THE EXHIBITION AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
Over a career that spanned seven decades, Irving Penn became known as a photographer of overwhelming beauty and oversized talent. His work in the fashion and editorial world was legendary, and deservedly so. He spent his days directing, staging and photographing the world’s most beautiful models and some of society’s most important creative geniuses.
Penn cut his teeth in the magazine world as an assistant to the legendary Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, and went on to become one of Vogue’s most celebrated photographers. It was something of a surprise then when, in the early 1970s, Penn showed John Szarkoski at The Museum of Modern Art a set of pictures of garbage.
The artist had collected the refuse and detritus of New York City streets in order to photograph it in his spotless studio. In 1972, the artist asked a studio assistant to collect some discarded cigarette butts from the streets. Three separate outings were made and hundreds of cigarette butts were collected. Using an 8x10 inch view camera and lenses intended for extreme close-ups, Penn made fifty images; only twenty-three were ultimately chosen to be printed. The Cigarettes series was the first series exclusively printed in platinum (Irving Penn: Cigarettes, Hamiltons Gallery, London, 2012, p. 54)
“Graphic and photographic beauty are not surprising qualities in the work of Irving Penn,” Szarkowski wrote in 1975 in his introductory text to the exhibition of Penn’s photographs of cigarettes at The Museum of Modern Art. “The capricious and frankly inconsequential nature of the nominal subject matter, in conjunction with its ambitious and enormously sophisticated handling, constitute a clear statement of intention: these photographs can be considered only as works of art.”
Of the twenty-three images in the series, Cigarette No. 37, the work you see here, is one of only three images that Penn decided to print greatly enlarged as a four-panel mounted platinum print. As such, it holds an elevated position within the overall body of work, and has graced the walls of numerous museum walls.