Irving Penn The Bath

This exhibition is dedicated to a rarely seen series of photographs by Irving Penn capturing the groundbreaking work of the American choreographer Anna Halprin. Taken in 1967, the carefully composed images are the result of Irving Penn’s collaboration with the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco, which he photographed performing Anna Halprin’s improvisational choreography The Bath.

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The group of 14 photographs, which were printed for the first time in 1995, highlights Anna Halprin’s pioneering approach to movement and reveals a more experimental side to Irving Penn’s practice. In its entirety, the series is exhibited for the first time in the German-speaking world.

The summer of 1967 in San Francisco has become known as the ‘Summer of Love’. Young people converged on the city, drawn to its burgeoning counterculture that broke the taboos of American society, promoting community, altruism, mysticism and free love.

Irving Penn

The Bath (F) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
38.9 x 39.1 cm (15.31 x 15.37 in)
Ed. of 7

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Fascinated by the movement, Irving Penn travelled to the Bay Area the following September to document its participants with a series of group portraits to be published in Look magazine. He wanted, as he termed it, to ‘look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances.’

Irving Penn

The Bath (K) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
38.9 x 39.1 cm (15.31 x 15.37 in)
Ed. of 6

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At the heart of the avant-garde art scene in the 1960s was the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco. Their founder and choreographer, Anna Halprin, was a pioneer of postmodern dance. ‘Dance is breath made visible,’ Halprin said of her approach. Her daring performances were often participatory and rarely took place in traditional stage settings, with one instance leading to a summons for indecent exposure only a few short months before Irving Penn photographed the troupe.

In the original performances of The Bath, the nude dancers bathed each other in fountains or using jugs and buckets of water. ‘The performance of the simple action,’ writes Anna Halprin in her notes on The Bath, ‘the natural action, objectifies what is really going on inside the performer’s self.’ Irving Penn omits the containers in his photographs, although fine droplets of water appear here and there on the dancers’ skin, and wet patches remain on the studio floor.

Irving Penn

The Bath (C) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
38.9 x 39.1 cm (15.31 x 15.39 in)
Ed. of 9

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When Anna Halprin saw the pictures, she observed that Irving Penn’s compositions put forward ‘the absolute purity of a boy and girl relating to each other in the most magical way, and yet it seemed real. What [the dancers] were left with was creating the essence of the bath, but it had nothing to do with actual bathing anymore.’ As Vasilios Zatse, Deputy Director of The Irving Penn Foundation explains, ‘Penn’s influence over this experiment or work was to have those props removed in order to further distil this performance. And I believe even Anna Halprin acknowledged that that was an instrumental decision on Penn’s part.’

Irving Penn

The Bath (H) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
38.9 x 39.1 cm (15.31 x 15.39 in)
Ed. of 8

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The idea of photographing by north light, the artist’s light, the idea is very romantic. It’s something that resonated with Penn. He had photographed by daylight as early as 1948. The simplicity, the purity, the piercing quality of daylight was a type of light that he enjoyed very much, and would always refer back to it or comment on it throughout his career. The sweetness of daylight. He was working by daylight up until the end of his career.

— Vasilios Zatse, Deputy Director of The Irving Penn Foundation

 

Coming in laterally from the window on the north side of the studio, the daylight wraps itself around the dancers’ bodies as they interlace. ‘The pictures are primarily of embraces,’ Irving Penn remarked upon rediscovering the photographs in 1995, ‘beautiful and touching. Here they are without clothes, there’s love, the gestures are tenderly erotic but certainly not pornographic.’

They’re portraits but they can also be viewed, if one looks carefully and objectively, one can say these are also still lifes.
— Vasilios Zatse, Deputy Director of The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn
The Bath (B) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967
Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
39.1 x 39.1 cm (15.39 x 15.39 in)
Ed. of 11

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Irving Penn The Bath (B) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967 Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 39.1 x 39.1 cm (15.39 x 15.39 in) Ed. of 11

Irving Penn
The Bath (J) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967
Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
38.4 x 39.1 cm (15.12 x 15.39 in)
Ed. of 11

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Irving Penn The Bath (J) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967 Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 38.4 x 39.1 cm (15.12 x 15.39 in) Ed. of 11

And yet the photographs were considered too daring to be published in ‘The Incredibles’ essay featured in the 9 January 1968 issue of Look magazine. As Vasilios Zatse explains, they remained unseen for almost three decades until Halprin contacted Irving Penn in 1995 enquiring about the photographs for her archive. He selected 14 negatives and printed them for her, using the gelatin silver process. Although the two never met, Irving Penn stated at the time: ‘I didn’t know Ann[a] Halprin at all, but I know from these pictures, I tell you, I like her very much.’

It is undoubtedly thanks to his affinity for the art form that Irving Penn was able to capture The Bath with such acuteness. Where Halprin found that the photographs brought out the essence of her own work, Irving Penn remarked that they gave him a sense of ‘serenity,’ which he was, in his words, ‘not used to.’ The series, therefore represents a unique confluence between modern photography and postmodern dance and constitutes a rare document of the meeting of two artistic minds.

Dance was a recurring theme throughout Irving Penn’s career. From his photographs of American ballet companies in 1946 to his 1999 series capturing the movements of dancer and choreographer Alexandra Beller, the artist maintained an interest in new and avant-garde forms of performance.

Irving Penn

The Bath (D) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
39.1 x 39.1 cm (15.39 x 15.39 in)
Ed. of 10

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By 1986, Irving Penn had developed an idiosyncratic technique of photographing a drawing to enlarge and print in platinum-palladium, using the result as the underlying structure for a painting. Irving Penn embraced the ability his painting practice gave him to simplify forms and selectively emphasise lines, before introducing subtleties in the surface textures of the pooled inks and pigments. The Bath relates to Irving Penn’s wider interest in exploring movement and organic forms, with this painting, with its entwining shapes, recalling the interlacing bodies of the dancers.

Irving Penn

Untitled, ca. 1987

Ink, watercolor, and dry pigment with gum arabic over platinum-palladium print on paper
59.7 x 48.9 cm (23.5 x 19.25 in)

 

Irving Penn

The Bath (G) (Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco), 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995
38.6 x 37.8 cm (15.2 x 14.88 in)
Ed. of 11

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Irving Penn at Work, Portugal, 1963 © The Irving Penn Foundation

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