Irving Penn (1917–2009), known for his iconic fashion, portrait, and still life images that appeared in Vogue magazine, ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and influential photographers. The first retrospective of his work in 20 years, Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty conveys the extraordinary breadth and legacy of the American artist and will be on view at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened on February 24 and will run until May 29, 2017.
Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Merry Foresta, the museum’s curator of photography from 1983 to 1999, the exhibition contains more than 140 photographs, including the debut of 100 photographs recently donated by The Irving Penn Foundation and several previously unseen or never-before-exhibited photographs.
Penn’s renown as a fashion photographer is matched by the recognition of his innovative and insightful portraits, still lifes, nudes, and travel photographs. The exhibition features work from all stages of Penn’s career, including street scenes from the late 1930s, photographs of the American South from the early 1940s, celebrity portraits, fashion photographs, and Penn’s stunning late color work.
In a career that spanned nearly 70 years, Penn’s aesthetic and technical skill earned him accolades in both the artistic and commercial worlds. He was a master of both black-and-white and color photography, and his revival of platinum printing in the 1960s and 1970s was a catalyst for significant change in the art world.
He successfully crossed the chasm that separated magazine and fine-art photography, narrowing the gap between art and fashion. “Penn adopted a workmanlike approach to making pictures,’” says Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala. “But even in his most commercial images, he upended convention with a penchant for formal surprise.”
Schooled in painting and design, Penn eventually chose photography as his life’s work. His portraits and fashion photographs defined elegance, yet throughout his career he also transformed mundane objects—storefront signs, food, cigarette butts, street debris—into memorable images of unexpected, often surreal, beauty.
Also currently at the Frist, Claire Morgan: Stop Me Feeling will be on display in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery through May 7, 2017. The exhibition will present recent works exemplifying the internationally acclaimed artist’s ecologically minded artistic practice. In her intricate and beguiling installations, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, Morgan stages dramatic encounters between humans and nature that capture both the elegance and beauty of life, but also the senselessness and shock of death.
Morgan finds animals after they have been killed by cars, pest control, or pets, or have died from natural causes. “The reverence with which she preserves the dead animals through taxidermy sharply contrasts with the carelessness of other humans toward them while they were alive,” says Frist Center curator Trinita Kennedy. “Morgan is an exceptionally sensitive and acute observer of the creatures that live in our midst, and her novel constructions open our eyes to both their beauty and our own destructive ways.”
