Irving Penn: Platinum Prints, currently at the National Gallery
of Art in Washington until October 2, 2005, is a surprisingly
impoverished show despite its literal use of precious metals.
Penn is best known for his work for fashion magazines such as Vogue,
some of which is included here, but this exhibition makes it clear he
wasn’t satisfied solely with a reputation in the trades; having spent
many a season in commerce, he was determined to be recognized as an
artist as well. Despite these loftier ambitions, however, Penn’s work
fails to excite the imagination, and, surprisingly, neither does his
technique, laboriously executed and dutifully recorded in some of his
notebooks that accompany the work.
Walking around this exhibition
one finds numerous clues as to the identities of those artists, not
just photographers, who inspired Penn. Diane Arbus and August Sander
clearly made an impression as did Nadar, Cecil Beaton and Bill Brandt;
but so, too, did nearly the entire Surrealist and Dada entourage as well
as the great still life painter Giorgio Morandi. Despite these rich and
varied sources, the flatterer fails to measure up to the objects of his
desire in nearly every instance. In one particularly feeble example, a
clumsy still life entitled Composition with Skull and Pear, we
even find the “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine
and umbrella” played out by proxies including a typewriter, skull and
other objects. Unlike the image evoked by the Comte de Lautréamont,
Penn’s work falls flat in every regard, vainly substituting clutter for
profundity.
Some time in the 1970’s Penn turned his camera toward
found objects, more residue from his Dadaist leanings. The results were
huge platinum prints of cigarette butts and other urban detritus,
lifted as were the originals, literally from the gutter and displaced
into a context where one expected to see art. But Penn, seemingly
insecure, felt compelled to intervene and fiddle endlessly with the
objects themselves (judging by the notes describing his experimentation
with the platinum process), turning them into prints of enormous
preciousness if not subtlety, unsure whether or not they could stand or
their own or, more likely, afraid his own role would go
under-appreciated were he to allow them to do so.
Nowhere are
Penn’s artistic aspirations more forcefully and unsuccessfully announced
than in his regrettable decision, years after the fact, to take the
test prints he originally made to learn how to control the platinum
process as well as conserve resources (platinum is, after all,
expensive) and assemble them as new collages. Why he felt the need to
share these fragments, simple by-products of the process, remains
unclear. If these were intended to evoke unconscious associations they
fail, monumentally, instead underscoring another self-conscious attempt
to force new readings where none existed, like some sphinx without a
riddle.
The Penn with artistic pretensions is perhaps best known
for his portraits of ordinary folk including Hells Angels, the citizens
of Cuzco, Peru, and tribesmen from New Guinea. The Peruvian portraits
include one of his most famous pictures from the period, that of a very
young brother and sister standing in a barren studio consisting of a
stone floor and drapery and leaning on a pedestal more than half their
size. The visitor to the exhibition is informed that Penn had been in
Peru on another matter, traveled to Cuzco and discovered a local
portrait studio there. He promptly paid the owner to take a vacation for
a few days and leave the studio to him. Once established in his new
temporary quarters, Penn turned the tables on the local subjects who
ventured in for a session by paying them to pose rather than the other
way around. With the exception of the portrait of the two siblings,
which derives its notoriety from the dislocating scale, austerity of the
surroundings and poses by children that seem at once far more mature
than their actual years and much more expressive than those of any of
their compatriots, the portraits from Peru lack the vernacular
authenticity one would expect the titular owner of the studio no doubt
achieved on a regular basis. Penn remains a tourist, fittingly one with
money to spend.
What would a Penn exhibition be without true
celebrity portraits? These are well-represented here with photographs of
Colette, Saul Steinberg, Edmund Wilson, Picasso, and Woody Allen
(dressed as Chaplin) among others. But no matter who the photographer,
celebrity portraits often present us with little more than an
“Ah-ha”experience, affirming previously held perceptions rather than
offering fresh perspectives, and Penn’s certainly are no exception to
that tradition. His portrait of Alberto Giacometti, carefully composed
and scrupulously considered, is nevertheless dull and surprising
lifeless, especially when compared to one of the same subject by Henri
Cartier-Bresson, whose off-handed, spontaneous approach, succeeds in
startling us by seeing Giacometti precisely as one of his own tall,
striding stick-like figures.
Penn’s portraits of workers and
tradesmen are also dim reminders of those who came before him and were
passionate if not consumed by the cataloging impulse. August Sander’s
ambitious undertaking to photograph the entire German nation might have
resulted in stereotypes of the worst sort were he not fascinated by and
intimately familiar with the individuals in front of his lens, not just
the categories they represented. Penn’s portraits, on the other hand,
are mere shells; the people inhabiting the outfits and lugging the
implements of their trades to his studio were merely mannequins on which
to hang their props. Come to think of it, in this regard at least he
finally if unwittingly closed the gap between his own competing
identities.
