Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–50
January 15, 2002–April 21, 2002
Drawings, Prints, and Photographs Galleries, The Howard Gilman Gallery, 2nd floor
Now in his mid-eighties, Penn is one of the world’s finest photographers. Famous for portraiture, still life, and fashion work, he is less well known as a superb photographer of the female nude. His most important nudes were made more than 50 years ago when he collaborated with several artists’ models in a series of sittings that were a personal and artistic antidote to the ephemeral, surface world of the stylish ladies' magazines. The nudes are highly unorthodox by mid-20th-century standards: folded, twisted, and stretched, with extra belly, mounded hips, and puddled breasts, their fleshy torsos are sisters of Titian's or Rubens’s Venus. Charged with powerful physical and sexual energy yet somehow chaste, they are among the most ambitious and successful nudes ever made. Never the subject of serious study, the great 1949–50 nudes are accompanied by a volume with 53 plates that display Penn’s love affair with earthly goddesses.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
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