Irving Penn, The Bath: Special exhibition visit on 9 November at 6.30pm at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais Guided exhibition visit with Tom Penn, Executive Director, and Vasilios Zatse, Deputy Director of the Irving Penn Foundation

A guided exhibition visit of The Bath by Irving Penn will be held on Thursday 9 November 2023 at 6.30pm with Tom Penn, Executive Director, and Vasilios Zatse, Deputy Director of the Irving Penn Foundation. The walk-through in English will be held at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, located on 7, rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris. 

In 1967, Irving Penn travelled to San Francisco to photograph the new youth movement that had formed around the ‘Summer of Love’. There, he came across the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco, founded by Anna Halprin, whose pioneering approach to movement promoted a sense of community through body awareness and improvised interactions.

The 14 photographs on view capture the dancers as they re-staged Halprin’s 1966 choreography The Bath in a studio Penn rented for the occasion. Penn removed the jugs and buckets of water that were used by the dancers to bathe each other in the original performance, focusing on the interaction between the participants.

Considered too daring for publication in the 1960s, the series was printed for the first time in 1995. Upon rediscovering the images, both artists felt that they brought out something new in each other’s work: Halprin remarked that Penn had captured the essence of the performance, and Penn observed that they gave him an unusual sense of ‘serenity’.