Lot 70
Irving Penn(1917-2009)Four Guedras (Morocco)
4 October 2021, 14:00 EDT
New YorkUS$40,000 - US$60,000
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Irving Penn (1917-2009)
Four Guedras (Morocco), 1971
Platinum-palladium print, flush-mounted on aluminum, printed November 1985, signed, initialed, titled, dated, numbered '11/18' in pencil, stamped 'Hand-coated by the photographer' and Penn/ Condé Nast copyright credit and edition stamps on the flush-mount verso.
sheet /flush-mount 22 3/4 x 19 5/8in (57.8 x 49.8cm)
Platinum-palladium print, flush-mounted on aluminum, printed November 1985, signed, initialed, titled, dated, numbered '11/18' in pencil, stamped 'Hand-coated by the photographer' and Penn/ Condé Nast copyright credit and edition stamps on the flush-mount verso.
sheet /flush-mount 22 3/4 x 19 5/8in (57.8 x 49.8cm)
Footnotes
Provenance
With Michael Shapiro Gallery, San Francisco
Literature
Foresta and Stapp, Irving Penn: Master Images, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990, cat. no. 44, p. 57
Lehnherr and Blanchard, Irving Penn: Collection Privé, Privatsammlung, Musée d'art et d'histoire/ Éditions Benteli, 1994, cat. no. 64, p.89
Foresta, Irving Penn, Beyond Beauty, Smithsonian American Art Museum/ Irving Penn Foundation/ Yale University Press, 2015, cat. no. 119, p.173
Celebrated for sixty years of masterly work at Vogue magazine beginning in the 1940s, Irving Penn was a superb photographer of style. From 1967 to 1971 he traveled with a bespoke tent studio and made field portraits from Morocco to Melanesia, from Crete to Nepal. As he wrote, "The studio became, for each of us, a sort of neutral area. It was not their home, as I had brought this alien enclosure into their lives; it was not my home, as I had obviously come from elsewhere, from far away. But in this limbo there was for us both the possibility of contact that was a revelation to me and often, I could tell, a moving experience for the subjects themselves, who without words—by only their stance and their concentration—were able to say much that spanned the gulf between our different worlds."
Although sensitive to the impending loss of the cultures he visited, Penn was not an anthropologist. His focus was meeting and depicting others, an experience of authenticity that gratified and grounded him. The portraits also satisfied his Vogue editor, Diana Vreeland, whose zeal for countercultural fashion trends was served by these studies of unfamiliar costume and bodily adornment.
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, note to accompany its own print of this important work.)
