Irving Penn: New and Unseen / Process - Softcover

MacGill, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1878283871 ISBN 13: 9781878283870

Publisher: Pace Gallery, 1999

Synopsis

Now available in paperback
Irving Pennâ s photographs have become iconic documents of an eraâ â from his fashion and commercial editorials to his series of nudes and portraits of artists, musicians, writers, celebrities, and tribesmen of New Guinea, Peru, and Morocco. Originally published in 1997 to accompany an exhibition celebrating the Irving Penn Collection and Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago, this book examines Pennâ s remarkable and wide-ranging career and his uncompromising artistic vision. With nearly 200 captivating photographs that span the entire scope of his artistic productionâ â including poetic portraits of Cecil Beaton, Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Elsa Schiaparelli, Georgia Oâ Keeffe, and Truman Capoteâ â the book features essays by distinguished scholars and reflections by individuals who have known him well or collaborated with him. They also discuss Penn's particular genius for demonstrating how a profound and humane art can be created at the center of a society increasingly dominated by and enthralled with mass media.

About this title

About the Author

Colin Westerbeck is Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. Contributing are the art-world editor, biographer, and lecturer Rosamond Bernier, who was Penn's first editor at Vogue in the early 1940s; fashion designer Issey Miyake; anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who advised Penn on his photographic expedition to New Guinea in 1970; Colin Eisler, Robert Lehman Professor of Fine Arts at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, who composed a catalogue for Penn's first show at the Marlborough Gallery over 20 years ago; and the English historian of fashion and photography Martin Harrison.

From Booklist

The occasion that inspired this retrospective of one of the century's most captivating and stylish photographers is Penn's donation of his professional archives and a hand-picked collection of his work to the Art Institute of Chicago. This is cause for celebration, and Westerbeck, the museum's curator of photography, and his contributors, including former Vogue editor Rosamond Bernier and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who represent the two extremes of Penn's photographic universe, explain why in their essays. In his fashion photographs, Penn combines glamour and wit; in his portraits of artists and writers (the series of such notables as Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, and Georgia O'Keeffe wedged into a cleverly constructed corner set are especially compelling), Penn reveals both the drama and the danger of the creative life; in his nudes, he discovers the body's eternal mystery; in his portraits of New Guinea tribesmen, he further explores the body as sculpture, attire as art. Even when Penn casts his eyes on something as classic as a tulip, or as commercial as cosmetics, he makes magic. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Pace Gallery
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1878283871
• ISBN 13: 9781878283870
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 58