Irving Penn

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents Irving Penn, an exhibition that sheds light on the artist’s mastery of photographic portraiture, from his early existential portrait of Marcel Duchamp to his photograph of an exultant Elizabeth Peyton in the final decade of his life. Penn decisively contributed to elevating photography to the status of high art and his portraits rival paintings in their technical expertise and emotional gravitas. The exhibition will coincide in Paris with PENN & FASHION at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Remember Me at the Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection and Look ! 40 ans de mode au musée at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. 

As the exhibition highlights, much of the twentieth-century vanguard stared straight into Penn’s lens. In one overhead shot, John Cage folds over a grand piano as if probing the instrument’s heartbeat, while in another close-up, a 79-year-old Willem de Kooning gazes out of the picture plane, utterly absorbed in thought. In one of his most striking photographs, Penn arrests Pablo Picasso’s likeness with unparalleled psychological acuity. Having initially pretended not to be at his home in Cannes, the modern master granted Penn merely ten minutes for the session, after the photographer’s assistant scaled the locked gate of ‘La Californie’. Picasso appeared clad in a grey sweatshirt, before donning a Spanish cape and hat. Unperturbed by his accoutrement, Penn inched closer and closer until he captured Picasso’s starkly lit face to reveal but a single wide-open eye. As curator Maria Morris Hambourg set forth, Penn ‘carve[d] the essence of the artist out of his coy deflections.’