Irving Penn | American, 1917 - 2009
Irving Penn was born in 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey. In 1934 he enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where he studied design with Alexey Brodovitch. In 1938 he began a career in New York as a graphic artist. His first color photograph of a still life arrangement became a cover for Vogue magazine, leading to 164 additional Vogue covers throughout his illustrious career. He was a recognized master of portraiture, fashion, and the still life, bridging the gap between commercial, editorial and fine art work.
In the 1960s Penn started exploring 19th century printing techniques. By the following decade, Penn had perfected a sophisticated and complex system for printing in platinum and palladium.
Monographs on Penn's work include: Moments Preserved (1960); Worlds in a Small Room (1974); Inventive Paris Clothes (1977); Flowers (1980); Passage (1991); Still Life (2001); Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes 1949-50 (2002); A Notebook at Random (2004); Irving Penn: Platinum Prints (2005); Irving Penn Small Trades (2099); Irving Penn: Centennial (2017/2024).
His photogrpahs have been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including a 1984 retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which traveled to museums in twelve countries. In 2017 a retrospective exhibition of the photographer's work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in celebration of the centennial of the artist's birth, and most recently his work was the subject of the solo exhibition, Irving Penn at the de Young Museum in 2024.