The World According to Penn

The installation Le monde selon Penn (The World According to Penn) features almost 450 photographs by Irving Penn from the Pinault Collection. It provides a rare opportunity to experience the immensity of his production, which stretches from the 1940s to the early 2000s.

Irving Penn (1917 – 2009) was a major American twentieth-century photographer, renowned for having thoroughly reinvented fashion and portrait photography with a style that is sober, unflinching, and timeless. Rather than adopt a chronological or thematic structure, the installation provides a full immersion in this artist’s visual world, in which portraits of public figures, fashion photographs, ethnographic reportages, nudes, still lives, and floral compositions engage in a free and open dialogue with one another. These correspondences reveal the essential characteristics of his work: the rigorous composition, the careful attention paid to materials, the bare, stripped-down aesthetic, and his singular ability to seize human presence and the beauty of even the simplest forms. Thus, the famous Corner Portraits are hung alongside the small trades, cigarette butts, faded flowers, and fashion shots to compose a vast visual mosaic that invites the viewer into the studio of Irving Penn’s mind. This novel installation reveals the consistency and modernity of an oeuvre that constantly sought to redefine photography’s potential as a medium, as well as the way in which we look at the world.

Perfectionist, humanist, and eclectic: this is how we might describe Irving Penn’s immense oeuvre. Primarily a studio photographer, he methodically constructed a “neutral zone” using a simple backdrop of canvas or white paper that he flooded with natural light. He retained this approach to making work, remarkably modest in its execution, throughout his career.

An invaluable legacy for the world of photography, Irving Penn’s work is represented in the Pinault Collection by an extensive holding of his images, some of which were previously shown in 2014 – 2015, on the occasion of the monographic exhibition Irving Penn. Resonance at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

(opens in a new window) Learn more at pinaultcollection.com.