A new retrospective exhibition at MOP Foundation in A Coruña celebrates the centenary of Irving Penn’s birth
Framed between the shimmering waters of the surrounding port, MOP Foundation in A Coruña is a forbidding piece of architecture. A colossal hunk of concrete, this former industrial site is now home to Galicia’s preeminent cultural space.
Organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ‘Irving Penn: Centennial’ is a new exhibition showcasing an eclectic mix of 175 of Penn’s works, both commissioned and personal. This is the sixth iteration of a touring exhibition and the fourth in a series of retrospective exhibitions held at MOP since its opening in 2022. A comprehensive collection of some of Penn’s most iconic works, the exhibition also includes a selection of his more obscure and less well-known photographs.
What I am first drawn to in the exhibition is a set of street photographs taken by Penn in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, made between New York and Mexico. These small prints depicting street signs and distressed walls tell of Penn’s beginnings with a camera, but also more specifically the influence the likes of Walker Evans had on his work. Jeff L. Rosenheim, the exhibition’s curator, tells me, “Penn clearly must have been looking at the New Deal photographers”. Penn and Evans would later go on to develop a friendship and a correspondence between the two; when Penn’s portraits were first published by Vogue, this demonstrated their shared appreciation for one another’s photography.
After initially working as an art director, Penn set out to change paths and become a painter. In 1941 he headed for Mexico with a plan to spend a year honing his new craft. Whilst there he became captivated with the painted window signs and lettering he saw and set about photographing them. After a year he returned to New York, threw away or destroyed all of his paintings and kept only the photographs. These poetic and gestural prints begin the exhibition and show a side to the photographer that even dedicated Penn aficionados might be unaware of. Silhouette shapes of roughly cut and hand painted lettering float beautifully above an ink black background. ‘Ta Tooin (The Bowery), New York, ca. 1939’ is one such example where letters appear to have fallen from their place and we are left to unravel the puzzle of their meaning, made more curious by a solitary floating eye in the in centre of the frame. Penn’s appreciation for line and abstract form begins here with his early street photography and it is interesting to see how these found arrangements would lead towards the constructed still lives he would later prepare in the studio.
Over the course of his career Penn photographed some of the most notable figures of his era; artists, writers, musicians and other celebrities all came to pose in what was to become one of the most iconic series of photographic portraiture ever produced. With his sparse and uniform backdrop, Penn’s portrait series invite our gaze to closely observe the pose and gait of his sitters. The intention seems to be both as a historical register, but also there is a clear attempt to reveal something of the innate character of his subjects, “through the years I have made many portraits… each in its way a small human drama”. In his portrayal of T.S. Eliot, the 20th Century’s preeminent modernist poet, Penn places Eliot in the centre of his frame, but opts to leave the edges of the backdrop exposed. Perhaps this was in anticipation of an editorial crop, but also it seems an attempt to both reveal the artist’s hand and to show the artifice of his studio setting, reminiscent of the way Velázquez had opted to include his mirror image in ‘Las Meninas’. Eliot stands erect, coat on, briefcase in one hand and an umbrella gripped firmly in the other, as if he had merely stopped for a momentary pause whilst out walking. With a furrowed brow and slightly cocked head, his expression is pensive, as though the burden of both global and personal tragedies weigh heavily on his shoulders. How Penn is able to highlight these small gestures is remarkable. Eliot once wrote, “the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.” What he meant was that the poet [or artist] acts as a catalyst for meaning, the essence of their work derives from the combination of sensitivity with experience and in Penn’s portraits we get to see a glimpse of each subject’s persona transfused through image-making.
As well as showing Penn’s brilliance as a photographer, the exhibition excels in displaying the technical prowess Penn possessed, particularly his platinum-palladium process. In pioneering innovative new ways of printmaking, Penn was able to create an abstraction in his work which sets it apart from other photographers of the era. In his series of found cigarette butts, Penn returns to his early interest with the everyday and elevates small details of urban life to a monumental scale. These blown-out forensic-like prints are both beautiful and alien. Penn’s still lives seem to be less about a particular subject and more about experimentation with form and particularly line. This approach to printmaking was employed by Penn as a means of developing a more surrealist slant to his work. His images are genre bending and convention breaking in a way that perhaps no one prior to Penn had achieved, situating the artist with one of the most consequential photographic legacies of the 20th Century.
Irving Penn: Centennial is on view at MOP Foundation until 1 May 2025
