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Although one cannot compare Penn's magazine still lifes with those that had come before, one can say that their character was parallel to the character of his portraits and his fashion pictures, which is to say that they were very surprising and produced a pleasurable frisson--an awareness that we were suddenly in unfamiliar territory...The still lifes claimed that the quotidian raw materials of cooking and eating--heads of cheese, cleavers, sides of beef, sculpted butcher blocks, and also abandoned demitasse cups, cigarette butts on saucers, lipstick stains on a liquor glass, etc.--if properly seen, contained all the necessary plot elements and the essential hints from which any reasonable reader might construct a story proper to her own circumstance.
John Szarkowski
IRVING PENN (1917-2009)
Two Liqueurs, New York, 1951
Details
IRVING PENN (1917-2009)
Two Liqueurs, New York, 1951
dye-transfer print, mounted on illustration board, printed before 1960
signed, initialed, titled, dated in ink, notation '11390,' annotation 'Smithsonian' in pencil, Penn/Condé Nast copyright credit reproduction stamps, stamped 'dye-transfer print' and 'Signed prints of this photograph not exceeding 16' (on the reverse of the mount)
image/sheet: 18½ x 15in. (47 x 38cm.)
mount: 24 x 20in. (61 x 50.7cm.)
Two Liqueurs, New York, 1951
dye-transfer print, mounted on illustration board, printed before 1960
signed, initialed, titled, dated in ink, notation '11390,' annotation 'Smithsonian' in pencil, Penn/Condé Nast copyright credit reproduction stamps, stamped 'dye-transfer print' and 'Signed prints of this photograph not exceeding 16' (on the reverse of the mount)
image/sheet: 18½ x 15in. (47 x 38cm.)
mount: 24 x 20in. (61 x 50.7cm.)
Literature
Penn, Moments Preserved, Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 150; Penn, Passage, A Work Record, Alfred A. Knopf/Callaway, 1991, p. 107; Penn, Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs, 1938-2000, Little, Brown and Co., 2001, n.p.
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