Irving Penn: between the stars and the gutter

Like the bulbous flesh of Irving Penn’s nudes, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s centennial survey of his astonishing career swells uneasily within its tight frame. The exhibition should have been allowed to unfurl into an expanse big enough for viewers to absorb the wizardry at eye-level. Instead, photographs jam together and sometimes climb the wall so that the eye strains to focus.

Penn, who died in 2009 at 92, juggled contradictions, venerating decay and perfection in equal measure. He could, in the same year, swing his lens from Audrey Hepburn’s smile to a New York sewer cleaner, endowing both with monumental grace. He shot rotting flowers and street dirt but also birdlike women in Balenciaga gowns. Spectacles of cosmopolitan Europe dovetailed with Africans in tribal feathers and Peruvian peasants in ponchos. Penn brought a fashion photographer’s eye even to scummy still-lifes, always sculpting elegance out of light. “Even a cake can be art,” he said. He described his own photos as “beatitudes”, able to elevate ephemera into timeless profundity.

Penn was born to a watchmaker and a nurse in Plainfield, New Jersey, and his parents’ example of hands-on practicality eventually led him to the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art. There he encountered the Russian émigré and design guru Alexey Brodovitch, whom he followed to Harper’s Bazaar. While freelancing for various magazines, Penn tootled around New York with his camera. He made DIY Atgets, Walker Evans knock-offs, and slightly derivative surrealist street pictures. By the time he was installed as staff photographer at Vogue in 1946, however, Penn had developed a refined simplicity that had no immediate antecedents but deep historical roots.

The Met show opens with a trio of colour still-lifes in the Dutch tradition. A fly perches on a perfect lemon, which is garlanded by blackened, funereal leaves. The watermelon has just begun to desiccate, pits lined up in its inflamed flesh like rotting teeth. The sumptuous party — life itself — is consumed by time, but Penn has frozen that moment of incipient ebb, preserving it forever.

Soon he began to explore the ways that different people respond to similar constraints. He invited dozens of cultural celebrities to his studio, then squeezed each one into a narrow niche that he made out of moveable walls. By asking them to fill a tight space however they wished, he obtained a stunning psychological range. Marcel Duchamp is linear and severe, angled against one wall like an artfully placed sculpture. Brilliantined hair, cheekbones as chiselled as a supermodel’s, the creases in his perfect suit arranged with expensive nonchalance — all this attention to detail suggests a man comfortable with his secrets. Only the pipe he clutches in his white fist defies the man’s urbane self-containment.

George Grosz looks literally cornered. In his youth he channelled the queasy political atmosphere of Weimar Germany into brutal drawings, but by 1948 he had withdrawn into an exile’s discomfort. Jammed into a battered wooden college chair, he hunches, knees pressed together, torso twisted in an attitude of timidity. He seems lost without the fury that drove him in Europe. That same year, a very young Truman Capote drapes himself over the same chair in the same corner, looking like a dissipated child. He is swaddled in a roomy herringbone overcoat, his bow tie fetchingly askew — an ambitious boy wonder, bruised and hungry, hemmed in by boundaries he would soon punch through.

Capote posed again in 1965, a year before he published In Cold Blood and hosted the notorious Black and White Ball, aka the “party of the century”. After 17 years, boyish flexibility has succumbed to middle-aged thickness. Eyebrows have grizzled and skin has coarsened. With his face pressed into his hands, he looks tired and troubled — less a man dancing on the brink of success than one poised for failure. Penn was prescient. After the mega-success of In Cold Blood, Capote slammed into a writer’s block that killed his career.

Penn’s nudes erupted in the summer of 1949. He chose lithe subjects at first, but gradually edged toward flabbier models whose breasts and bellies rise, white and pliant as dough. Their magnificent corpulence harks back to primitive icons of fertility like the 20,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf. Penn sets earthiness against abstraction, opposing voluptuousness and cool aestheticism. The nudes might push some viewers to rethink the clichés of beauty that Penn, in his fashion work, embraced with gusto. But even as he continued to experiment with imperfection, he never returned to this fanciful anti-classicism.

The mortal coil seemed to tighten around Penn in the 1970s, when he made cigarettes the focal point of his art. He scanned the gutters for butts, collecting these emblems of the flailing city’s grime and immortalising them in hand-coated platinum prints. He could read nicotine-stained discards the way a dog decodes a fire hydrant, registering seemingly invisible information. A stubbed cigarette, he once said, “tells the character, it tells the nerves . . .  the taste of the person”.

Penn’s images elevate each fag end to the scale of a person; the paper decomposes like skin. New York Times critic Gene Thornton found them “revolting, ugly, disgusting and very nasty” when they first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. He couldn’t reconcile the prints’ opulence with the slow death they represented. Once again, Penn snatched permanence from the mouth of mortal corruption.

You might look upon Penn’s career as a life-long obsession with memento mori. Like the Dutch painters of the 17th century, he delighted in the seductive texture of things, but let visual pleasure bleed into the symbolic language of vanitas: the sparkling droplet of moisture on a lemon’s rind or the downy plumpness of a cheek stand for life’s transience. Penn ensured that an image would remain long after its subject and its maker had both faded away. He might have agreed with the anonymous 18th-century Italian who painted a lush pink rose nestled beside a polished skull and subtitled the scene: “We are both unreal, I am also death.”

To July 30, metmuseum.org