IRVING PENN'S PAINTINGS

The photographer Irving Penn (1917–2009) had a long, successful career. From the mid-1940s, he regularly provided the magazine Vogue with fashion and commercial images in his characteristically terse and almost minimalist style. Penn did practically all his work in the studio, in order to have total control, achieving technical perfection over the years. Many photographers have been inspired by his pictures and his approach. Thanks to several generous donations, Moderna Museet has one of the finest collections of Irving Penn’s photographs outside the USA.

While studying at the Philadelphia Museum and School of Industrial Art, Penn started drawing and painting, but he destroyed everything apart from a few drawings. In his ensuing career as a photographer, he based his compositions on sketches. After a retrospective in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Penn began painting again and developed a method inspired by his experiences from platinum-palladium printing, and he often experimented with various materials and techniques. In the new millennium, Penn went back to using ink and watercolours on digitally scanned drawings, but he also did freehand drawing without photographic or printing processes. Among his themes, we can trace a trajectory from black-and-white still-lifes of jugs, skulls and fruits, over drawings where these objects are vaguely discernible, to more abstract and organic shapes, akin to the bright C-prints he produced late in life.

Irving Penn’s links to Sweden go back a long way, and many Swedish photographers had the opportunity to work as his assistants when they were young. In 1995, he donated a collection of one hundred photographs to Moderna Museet, in memory of his Swedish-born wife, the model and artist Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn. This collection includes examples of all his motifs, such as the elegant fashion photographs, portraits of small trades and celebrities, travels and close-ups of cigarette butts and other scraps. For the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the photographer, the Irving Penn Foundation decided to donate a further eight photographs to Moderna Museet, all from the first years of the 21st century, and in 2021 they also donated six of Penn’s works that he called “Paintings”. This screen shows a selection of these, together with one of his many famous fashion photographs of Lisa and a few of his still-lifes in colour and black and white.

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