Irving Penn L'Essence du portrait

I have always stood in awe of the camera. 
I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.
— Irving Penn

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents L’Essence du portrait, an exhibition that sheds light on Irving Penn’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 bravura and psychological gravitas. The exhibition coincides with PENN & FASHION at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (until 17 January 2027) as well as an exceptional selection of his photographs at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection as part of the exhibition Remember Me (until 28 January 2027).

Penn’s portraits are penetrating. Photographing personalities from 1943 onwards, he would prepare each sitting by immersing himself in his subjects’ respective oeuvres and routinely conversing with them over coffee in the studio prior to the session. As Penn noted, every sitter arrived ‘armed with an image of himself’ that the photographer strove to transcend. In his early portraits, Penn frequently used a contrived corner as a Hitchcockian entrapment that allowed him to capture his subjects quite literally. This is epitomised by his 1948 photograph of Marcel Duchamp smiling knowingly from the confinement of the studio set’s acute angle. In Penn’s portrait of Yehudi Menuhin, the virtuoso violinist appears lodged within the exiguous space, a bow clenched in his fist and his Stradivarius dangling from the other hand. Relegating the instrument to the tenebrous margins, the photographer illuminated Menuhin’s searing expression, which imbues the chiaroscuro composition with its searching intensity. Penn let ‘the unguarded psyche inhabit the pose, animating it and bringing it to life,’ writes Maria Morris Hambourg, the co-curator of his Centennial exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017.

As the exhibition highlights, much of the twentieth-century vanguard stared straight into Penn’s lens. In one overhead photograph, 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 portraits, 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 Morris Hambourg sets forth, Penn ‘carve[d] the essence of the artist out of his coy deflections.’

Penn peeled away his illustrious sitters’ protective layers until his camera seized something elemental. During his session with Miles Davis, the legendary jazz musician gradually shed his armour of jewels and garments until he posed bare-chested before Penn, metaphorically stripped bare. As art director Eiko Ishioka recalled, ‘I felt that even the breathing patterns of Miles and Irving were reaching a peace, led by the mellifluous rhythm of the shutter.’ In the work on view, Penn isolates Davis’s hand against a flat backdrop, its fingers outstretched behind his trumpet as if an extension of its valves. The instrument’s lustrous geometry contrasts with the glyphs on the musician’s weathered palm, yet Penn visualises the ineffable symbiosis between the trumpeter and his horn in this metonymic portrait. As the photographer would later remark of Davis’s oeuvre, ‘it struck me as being visual art of a most profound kind.’

Through the photographs on display, Penn harnessed the formidable expressivity of the artist’s hand. In his photograph of Luciano Pavarotti, the seemingly stunned operatic tenor brandishes his signature white handkerchief – a gesture that heightens the composition’s theatricality – while in his portrait of Jessye Norman, the soprano rests her head in one palm, her undulating fingers underscoring the image’s formal delicacy. Penn’s disquieting photograph of Yves Saint Laurent peering at the spectator through his splayed, mask-like hand further diverges from his portrait of a nonchalant Gianni Versace clasping his jacket whilst reaching overhead with his other arm in a quasi-Mannerist pose. Reflecting on his portraits, Penn observed that ‘each [is] in its way a small human drama.’

An inimitable graphic purity unites the exhibited portraits. In Penn’s exquisitely composed Vogue cover of 1950, the artist captures Jean Patchett’s ‘New Look’ with absolute formal concision in a veritable portrait of haute couture. Patchett’s plump, pitch-dark lips become the focal point of the composition, like a blown-up embroidered dot on her veil, around which the starkly geometric volumes of her ensemble radiate against the blinding-white ground. Penn avowedly drew on the likes of Honoré Daumier, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Francisco de Goya to deliver a visual punch. Toulouse-Lautrec’s legacy notably surfaces in Penn’s photograph of Silvana Mangano’s precisely delineated profile caught between the flat black mass of her upswept hair and softly sculptural mantle, while Goya emerges in the shadows enshrouding his more unsettling portraits. As Morris Hambourg posits, Penn foresaw his portraits ‘like paintings, weighty and resolved.’