Irving Penn

Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs 1938-2000 | More information
HB,144 sivua."Irving Penn is one of the twentieth century's most distinguished practitioners of the time-honored genre of still life. Following the venerable tradition of Chardin and other great still life painters, Penn brings his own astute and austere eye to the subject in photographs taken over the past sixty years. From his innovative and ongoing work for the editorial pages of Vogue to the harsher personal work of his later years, which explores the visual intrigue of such inconsequential objects as street trash, bones, and cigarette butts, he has created images that have a wit, simplicity, and edginess that set his work apart. These are photographs that can shock as well as delight.

In his insightful introduction, John Szarkowski notes that "for more than forty years Penn's pictures celebrated the pleasures of this life, even while always acknowledging the worm in the apple.... Some of his more recent still lifes seem in contrast to have less to do with pleasure than with something like cultural reportage."

Penn has personally overseen every detail of this elegant book's design and production. An extraordinary effort has been made to create on the printed page reproductions that have a fidelity to the brilliance of the color images and the nuances and subtlety of the platinum prints. This is the first book devoted solely to Irving Penn's still life work.

85.00 €

Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50 | More information
HB,96 sivua.From the legendary photographer Irving Penn comes this rarely seen collection of female nudes, which will be the subject of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art opening in January 2002.

A departure from Irving Penn's fashion and editorial work for the pages of Vogue, this virtually unknown collection depicts the unfettered form of the female nude.

Famous for insightful portraiture, surprising still life, and other commercial work, Irving Penn is less well known as a superb photographer of the female nude. His most important pictures in this genre were made in 1949-50 when the then young photographer engaged several artist's models in a number of intense sessions modeling only their unadorned bodies. The women Penn chose and the ways he viewed them produced nudes that were highly unorthodox by mid-twentieth century standards: folded, twisted, and stretched, with extra belly, mounded hips and puddled breasts, their fleshy torsos are sisters of Titian's or Ruben's Venus, while their mother in prodigality was the archaic fertility idol. Charged with powerful physical and sexual energy yet somehow chaste, they are among the most ambitious and successful nudes ever made.

Maria Morris Hambourg, curator of the upcoming Penn exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, contributes an insightful essay on Penn's extraordinary nude photographs.

75.00 €

A Notebook At Random:Irving Penn | More information

65.00 €