The World According to Penn

As part of the exhibition "Remember Me", Gallery 2 features almost 450 of Irving Penn's photographs from the Pinault Collection. The innovative configuration of the installation "The World According to Penn" offers viewers the rare opportunity to grasp the immensity of his production, ranging from the 1940s to the early 2000s.  

Irving Penn (1917-2009) was a major figure in American twentieth-century photography. He 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: its rigorous composition, careful attention to materials, a bare, stripped down aesthetic, and his singular ability to seize the human presence and the beauty in even the simplest of forms. Thus, the famous Corner Portraits are hung alongside the small trades, cigarette butts, faded flowers, and fashion figures 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 how we look at the world. 

Perfectionist, humanist, and eclectic: this is how we might sum up Irving Penn’s sprawling oeuvre and long photographic career. Penn was a studio photographer, first and foremost. The “neutral area” he methodically conceived using a simple canvas or white paper backdrop bathed in natural light engendered a space that both decontextualised and heightened the physical presence of his many subjects. 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 that were previously shown in 2014-2015, on the occasion of the solo exhibition Irving Penn, Resonance at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.  

Curated by: Matthieu  Humery, photography advisor to the Pinault Collection, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, research director.