Irving Penn unhinged

By George Pendle

For 66 years Irving Penn took photos for Vogue magazine. He photographed clothes and food with an intimacy usually reserved for one’s beloved, and portrayed models and celebrities with the precision and impersonality of a butterfly collector pinning a specimen to a board. He was the world’s best-known fashion photographer, yet the fact that he was also one of the most daring and innovative artists working in the medium is often lost in the smog of glamour. A fascinating new show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, brilliantly reveals the experimental nature that lay at the foundation of his commercial vision.

It does so head-on. The first image you see in the gallery (and on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue) is a photograph of the head of a mannequin with bright red lipstick encased in ice (detail above). But the ice has been shattered, blurring and fracturing our vision, deforming the flawless visage of the dummy, and making us uncertain if this is a painting or a photograph or something in between. Astonishingly the photo dates from 2002, when Penn was 85 years old. It was wittily, if somewhat prosaically, used to illustrate a Vogue article on the benefits of cold water on one’s skin. However, the effect is akin to a Francis Bacon portrait of the supermodel Gisele Bündchen – a clash of beauty and deformity.