Past Exhibitions

Irving Penn : "The Bath"
Dancers' Workshop of San Francisco, 14 septembre 1967

Irving Penn is a naturally daring photographer. He was a daring young man (though perhaps unwittingly so) when he started out as an unknown photographer in the forties. Fifty years on he is the undisputed master of his art, and although hundreds of exhibitions, books and articles have been devoted to him, his work is still as daring as ever. It seems fitting to pay tribute to an artist who, though famous, resists being 'monumentalized' and whose ability to amaze - or even to shock - remains intact. It is singularly appropriate that such a tribute should be paid to Irving Penn by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, one of whose galleries is dedicated to him, and that the museum itself should be in Paris. Irving Penn owes much to France, but Paris and the world of art and fashion also owe a great deal to Penn's photographic eye.

Penn and I met just after the war. We were both working for Vogue - he as a photographer, I as a writer. Together we set off around France and Italy in search of old glories and newcomers to the scene: artists, designers, writers, people working in theatre and film. All were the survivors of a conflict that was like some bloody preamble to the end of the world, and Penn's admirable portraits of them mirrored a period that would long remain scarred by the memory of those cruel days. Pictures of Colette, Picasso, Balthus, Jean Rostand, André Derain, le Père Couturier, Arthur Honegger and Louis Jouvet were followed by Italian portraits, Rossellini, Manzù, Vittorini and Visconti. All caused an instant sensation: never before had people seen such a desire for truth or such a spare, uncluttered style. The photographer's perception was nothing short of anthropological. By 1950 Irving Penn had become one of the major figures of contemporary photography.

As time went on, Penn continued to bring these qualities of acute perception and spareness of style to bear in all aspects of his work - nudes, street scenes, vanishing urban trades, primitive peoples in remote locations (New Guinea, Nepal, Peru and Dahomey), hippies, tattooed rock bands, scary San Francisco bikers, not to mention the most beautiful flowers and the most beautiful women in the world. And then, of course, there is Penn's fashion photography, which depicts that most prestigious embodiment of elegance, French haute couture. He made masterpieces of fashion design into photographic masterpieces which, once published, were acquired by private collectors and museums where they can still be admired today. Dance is another art form that has fascinated Penn from an early stage of his career. Fourteen photographs of nude dancers from the San Francisco Workshop, taken in 1967, have been donated to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie by Irving Penn and can now be seen in this exhibition. They had been lost and were thus never published - indeed they had been completely forgotten until they were fortunately rediscovered. These pictures say a great deal about this particular aspect of Penn's work. Indeed, in the course of his career, Penn has produced a unique series of portraits of great choreographers and dancers from 1946 to the present, many of which one wishes could be published in a single volume as a tribute to the glory of dance. They include Penn's early photographs of Alicia Markova crowned with roses, of Alexandra Danilova in a white tutu bending over to adjust the ribbons on her slippers and, most beautiful of all, the pas de trois where André Eglevski, Nora Kaye and Alicia Alonso are magical silhouettes made unreal and impalpable by the photographer's transcendent eye.

In the same vein, although in a different spirit, there are sturdy portraits of Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, and the great George Balanchine accompanied by Maria Tallchief with a star in her hair...not forgetting a later portrait of a young dancer who had recently escaped from the USSR, a certain Rudolf Nureyev, whose legs provided inspiration for a study by Penn in 1961.

Penn's interest might easily have been restricted to classical ballet, by far the most spectacular form of dance, but this was by no means the case. As we know, he also followed the activities of young American companies whose work was considered very shocking at the time. There was no voyeurism involved in the way he took these pictures: he simply concentrated on capturing the way the bodies moved, observing the melancholy grace of young, naked couples, recording their tender gestures and shy glances as they bathed together. We are reminded of Isadora and her wish for a return to barefoot dancing. Like her (though with different means and without her frenetic vitality and joie de vivre), young choreographers in 1967 shocked the defenders of classicism by attempting to liberate the dancer's body, ridding dance of its ceremonial straitjacket and throwing off the fetters of leotards and tight slippers.

Perhaps Penn's fondness for contrast explains why he has chosen to dedicate his San Francisco Workshop photographs not to Matisse's La Ronde but to Cézanne's robust Bathers partaking of the joys of sunshine and water in the glorious light of the Provençal countryside. Suddenly Penn's own daring seems close to that of Cézanne.

Edmonde Charles-Roux de l'académie Goncourt
Translation: Martyn Back