As part of his vacations dedicated to the collection of gallerist Daniel Varenne on Tuesday, October 22 and Wednesday, October 23, 2019, PIASA auction house presents the American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009).
It’s with the money earned from the publication of his drawings in the prestigious Harper's Bazaar fashion magazine that Irving Penn bought his first camera, a Rolleiflex, in 1938. After three years as the director of Junior League magazine and a trip to Mexico, he gets hired by the artistic director of Vogue Alexander Liberman. One of his Still Life will be publishing on the front page of the magazine on October 1, 1943.
He undertakes several trips to Europe and Peru for the magazine. He then moved to a small studio on Vaugirard Street in Paris. In a scene reminiscent of theatrical scenes, models flock to his lens. Among them, the Swedish Lisa Fonssagrives (1911-1992), model of Christian Dior, who already collaborated with Horst P. Horst (1906-1999), Georg von Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968) or Man Ray (1890-1976). She will become his wife.
Their complicity gives birth to a series of photographs published in the September and October 1950 in Vogue magazine. It will help to establish the notoriety of the photographer. The following year, in New York, London and Paris, he realized, always in studio, portraits of workers with the attributes related to their profession.
Emblematic of his work, this series, published for the first time in the French edition of the magazine, will be exhibited in 2009 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and in 2019 at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation. Thanks to the notoriety he obtained from the mid-1950s, Irving Penn attracted to him the great personalities like Giorgio de Chirico, Truman Capote or Pablo Picasso, Blaise Cendrars.
Irving Penn (1917-2009)
Igor Stravinsky, New York, 22 avril 1948-1976
Tirage argentique
Signé et porte le cachet de l'artiste, titré, daté et situé au dos
23,5 x 18,5 cm
Estimation: 15 000 / 20 000 euros
On the piece sold by PIASA, Igor Stravinsky is portrayed in a very sober staging. Proposed with an estimate of between 15,000 and 20,000 euros, this picture was exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
