The Errant Æsthete

Sophisticated: Mouth for LOréal (1986) by Irving Penn

“Photographing a cake

can be art.”

From my earliest memory in cultivating an appreciation for art and imagery, the man who captured my fascination and was instrumental in developing my eye, my taste and my sense of composition was Irving Penn. I remember my first trip to New York as a college student and my girlish need to simply glimpse the exterior of his studio from the street, as though sharing the proximity of his very space would somehow endow me with his gifts, so in awe was I of his inimitable talent. I never knew him, of course, but like countless others, I studied his work, marveled at his genius and collected the ads and pages of magazines featuring his imagery. The announcement of his death yesterday at 92 leaves me feeling empty and unbearably sad. It’s curious how we come to know, revere and even love someone through our hopeless and unrequited attachments.

I have profiled his work before on EA with “The Bones of Beauty” and “The Irving Penn Exhibition.”As a talent and as a human being, Penn embodied pure class in every sense of the word. He was truly the master who sought no attention other than what was conveyed in his photographs. He will be missed.

In a way of a tribute, I have assembled some of his more iconic photos, pairing them with excerpts from a variety of sources, including two beautifully crafted obituaries, one from the New York Times and the other, The Los Angeles Times.

Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, was known for his signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism.

His talent for picturing his subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of Vogue readers during his long association with that magazine, beginning in 1943. “At the time, I didn’t know a Balenciaga from a baseball player,” Penn said in a 2007 interview with Vogue.

His career at Vogue spanned a number of radical transformations in fashion and its depiction, but his style remained remarkably constant. Imbued with calm and decorum, his photographs often seemed intent on defying fashion. His models and portrait subjects were never seen leaping or running or turning themselves into blurs.

Penn was the natural heir to Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen, both of whom photographed cultural figures central to the early half of the 20th century for Vanity Fair and other lavish publications of the day. But, while Beaton and Steichen shared an element of theatricality in their portraiture, constructing for their subjects a public persona out of ambient lighting, elegant clothing, and props—chaise lounges, grand pianos, bouquets of flowers, swank cigarette holders, Penn banished the accoutrements. He relied on manner, attitude, and countenance to represent a subject’s legacy.

Instead of offering spontaneity, Mr. Penn provided the illusion of something fixed, his gaze precisely describing the profile of a Balenciaga coat or of a Moroccan djellaba in a way that could almost mesmerize the viewer. Nothing escaped the edges of his photographs unless he commanded it.

His fashion work placed him at the top of that field because of his meticulously crafted, utterly soigné, optically titillating pictures. Regardless of the model, with nothing less than virtuoso skill he rendered the palpability of skin, the texture of fabric, the elegant line of a dress, as if enunciating every detail with breathtaking precision.

His 1947 image “Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period,” a group portrait, includes, at its center, Lisa Fonssagrives.

Fonssagrives later appeared in some of Mr. Penn’s most memorable fashion images …

… among them “Mermaid Dress” and “Woman With Roses,” both taken in 1950, the year she became his wife. Historian Diana Edkins, a former curator of photography for Conde Nast Publications, once noted that “The Penns’ romance lasted their whole life together.”

He captured the famous of his time including Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Truman Capote.

He is also celebrated for his portfolio of fleshy abstractions of the human nude (Kate Moss).

Penn was equally at home photographing Peruvian peasants or bunion pads.

Merry A. Foresta, co-organizer of a 1990 retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery and what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum, wrote that his pictures exhibited “the control of an art director fused with the process of an artist.”

A courtly man whose gentle demeanor masked an intense perfectionism, Penn adopted the pose of a humble craftsman while helping to shape a field known for putting on airs.

Schooled in painting and design, he chose to define himself as a photographer, scraping paint off his early canvases so they could serve a more useful life as backdrops to his pictures.

Unlike Richard Avedon, the other important new fashion photographer of the postwar period, Mr. Penn expressed himself and his subjects best through a Shaker-style restraint. Avedon made the streets his studio and loved movement and expression. Penn brought “poetry to immobility,” as one admiring critic, Rosamond Bernier, said of his style.

Passing the age of 65 without a thought of retirement, Penn devoted himself increasingly to still lifes. He was a consummate technician, known equally for the immaculate descriptive quality of his still-life arrangements and for his masterly exploration of photographic materials.

“What Penn does with an honesty that few of his peers can muster, is remind us that a body, rounded and grounded, is one of the more enthralling objects on earth,” Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker magazine in 2002.

A notorious perfectionist, he traveled widely, carrying his own studio to the ends of the earth to photograph Peruvians in native dress, veiled Moroccan women or the Mudmen of New Guinea. Many of his personal photographs are collected in his books, luxurious objects in their own right.

Those who worked with Penn said his apparent effortlessness wasn’t at all as it appeared. “There is the famous story of Irving photographing a lemon,” Babs Simpson, a former Vogue fashion editor, said in 1990 in Vanity Fair.

“First, you had to buy 500 lemons for him to pick the perfect one. Then he had to take 500 shots of that lemon until he got the perfect one.”

The results were what counted, Penn’s longtime boss at Vogue, Alexander Lieberman, told Vanity Fair. “A Penn photograph,” he said, “will always be a great photograph.”

Exalted though the name Irving Penn may be in the worlds of fashion and photography, the man himself has always preferred the flip side of fame—privacy almost to the point of anonymity.

In his 60-odd-year career, Penn has rarely given in to the curiosity of a journalist and has almost never allowed himself to become the subject of a photograph, even one of his own—all too wary, perhaps, of just how much can be revealed in a click. “I don’t want to be a ‘personage,’ ” he explained.

From the beginning, however, he has been unusually open about one thing: the secrets of his craft, discovered through a love of experimentation with light and long hours in the darkroom, secured, perhaps, by the thought that the most important ingredient in capturing a soul—whether it belongs to a dress or a person or a piece of meat—is part of the same mystery that can’t be known.

I draw your attention to a beautifully crafted and elegant eulogy to Irving Penn by Owen Edwards who experienced and enjoyed the pleasure of his company.

Continue reading ‘RIP: Penn, The Grand Master’

1938 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Autobahnkurier Coupe

Giving new meaning to the term, rare, this classic 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Autobahnkurier Coupe is the sole surviving example of only two of its kind ever built. The Autobahnkurier was a fast touring car, incorporating the most advanced automotive engineering of the time.

There’s good reason why the Autobahnkurier caused a sensation. It’s long hood, sweeping lines and refined elegance were little matched. And when combined with one of the best pre-war chassis, it was also hard to ignore. To maintain brand recognition Mercedes-Benz insisted that this fastback retain the standard front radiator. It also featured the first Mercedes-Benz curved rear-quarter windows. Some production cars have become iconic, but it takes a higher level of distinction to have a single car create equal impact. The word recherche comes to mind.

 

Details

Gourmet Magazine Cover, February, 1947

The Magazine of Good Living closed this week after a 68-year run, leaving behind a rather chichi reputation. Its pages shimmer with luxe ads for Cartier watches, champagne and the occasional feature on a palatial hotel or “where our critics would dine with $1,000.” The magazine is being condemned in some quarters as irrelevant in the current economy, a victim of its own food snobbery — its long features and sometimes-difficult recipes out of touch with a “yummo” world dominated by 10-minute meals and Rachael Ray. In today’s New York Times, Kim Severson writes that Condé Nast’s decision to keep the recipe-packed, ad-rich sibling Bon Appetit alive while shuttering Gourmet was a “gut punch” for the “food elite — especially of an older generation.”  Former Julia Child editor Judith Jones sniffed, “Gourmet got away from the things that are going on in people’s homes, and seemed to be for an elite that got smaller and smaller.” …

Outgoing editor Ruth Reichl is bristling at intimations of elitism, and rightly so. After all, before this decade’s stint running Gourmet she was the woman known for wearing disguises as a critic for the New York Times. She publicly dressed down swanky Le Cirque after being treated like a pauper while in cognito. In her memoir “Garlic and Sapphires” she recounts how readers (and many in the highbrow food world) howled for her head when she began to review — gasp — sushi restaurants and noodle shops instead of French or Italian restaurants. “Elite” has got to sting.

 

Salon

As a former ad person (well after Sterling Cooper’s Don Draper) and just before one of the most legendary ad campaigns of all time (Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh, 1984), I have a real fondness for imaginatively conceptualized and well executed ad campaigns.

This one by M&C Saatchi in London for Dixons.co.uk is modestly thrilling. The Dixons’ ads cheekily encourage shoppers to check out products in certain department stores and then go and buy them online instead. Unabashedly clever, I’d say.

The Advertising Rationale is best summed up like this: Eschewing Dixons' usually bland ad approach, the posters acknowledge the brand's position in the electronics market, which is pretty much at the bottom. The ads brilliantly consider a habit that many of us may recognise with some guilt – that we will get advice about expensive goods at a more upmarket store, but then nip online to make the actual purchase, where it is cheaper.

Although we’re accustomed to hearing about how brands are going to be more transparent in the modern age, it is a pleasant change to actually see such candor and self-knowledge put at the center of an ad campaign. Agreed?

A culture obsessed with celebrity is certainly not a twenty-first century phenomenon. While tabloids cater to the rabid curiosities of the undiscriminating on the lives, loves and secrets of the celebrated, an excellent scholarly and diverting compendium for the more sensibly minded high-brow intelligentsia has just made its debut in the publishing world. Described by Disraeli as “a roost for every bird,” Lived in London: The Stories Behind the Blue Plaques edited by Emily Cole, profiles the lives of such luminaries as Vincent Van Gogh, Mark Twain, Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia Wolfe and Winston Churchill.

The proof of their time spent living in London is to be found in the blue plaque on the wall of each of their homes. Those familiar tablets — introduced by the Royal Society of Arts in 1866 and continued by the London County Council, the Greater London Council and now English Heritage — are elegantly and comprehensively covered honoring a program that connects people and place, drawing out the human element of the historic environment and helping to save a number of London’s buildings from demolition. What’s particularly fascinating is that each individual is given a potted biography with an anecdote or two relevant to that address.

A few choice excerpts:

39 Westmoreland Road

Once the home of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Condemned as degenerate by the Nazis, he ended up in Barnes by way of Oslo and internment on the Isle of Man. He achieved widespread recognition only after his death in 1948. “English people don’t understand art at all,” he once observed gloomily.

14 The Terrace

Overlooking the river, this former home was the domain of Dame Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, who in her declining years was sometimes seen drinking a pint of beer while reading the papers on a Sunday morning in the garden of the Coach and Horses round the corner.

23 Tedworth Square

Mark Twain spent much of a nine-year sojourn in Europe (1891-1900) almost unnoticed — he and his wife were so distressed by the death of their daughter Susy in 1896 that they lived in “complete seclusion” there, seeing few friends.

1 Orsett Terrace

Exiled political thinker and “father of Russian socialism” Alexander Herzen made his home here for several years playing host to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and the anarchist Michael Bakunin. It is rumored he found London life “about as boring as worms in a cheese”.

No. 20 Baron’s Court Road

Nineteen-year-old Mohandras Karmchand Gandhi lived here while studying law at the Inner Temple in the late 1880s. It seems that his landlady, who charged him 30 shillings a week, had her work cut out to cater to his vegetarian diet. He described her meals as “third rate” and said he was often hungry.

87 Hackford Road

A 20-year-old Vincent Van Gogh lodged in these quarters from August 1873 until the following summer while working for an art dealer. He had yet to find his way as a painter. It is told he fell hopelessly in love with his landlady’s daughter, Eugenie Loyer who was, alas, already spoken for, and subsequently left, dejected, to find new lodgings. In farewell, the love-struck young man gave his beloved a drawing of the front of the house, which now, faded and stained, shows no sign in its execution of the genius to come.

He was called the vibrant new voice of his generation — the avatar of the Beat movement. In 1957, on the heels of the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a literary rock star, lionized by his fans and devotees. But along with sudden fame and media hype came his unraveling, and, by 1960, Kerouac was a jaded cynic, disaffected from the Beat culture he helped create and tortured by self-doubt, addiction and depression.

He secretly retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s rustic cabin in the Big Sur woods. But his plan is foiled by his own inner demons, and what ensues that summer becomes the basis for Kerouac’s gritty, yet lyrically told, semi-autobiographical novel, Big Sur.

Maybe it was those years spent living in southern California or perhaps it was simply my appreciation for clean, sleek, beautiful lines that comprised the whole of modernist photographer Julius Shulman’s career, but as someone recently noted, “Once you have seen his images, they will be engrained in your head forever.”

Think Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960 (above) for example. Shulman’s atmospheric image of two young women in white cocktail frocks, sitting in the corner of a flat-roofed, glass-walled house designed by Pierre Koenig, perched precariously in the Hollywood Hills atop the twinkling lights of L.A. at dusk, the most reprinted of his photos and viewed as a metaphor for L.A. itself. The result is a photograph that is both time-specific and timeless. With its scenic setting, romantic sensibility and strong perspective, it seems to capture the best of modernism.

Or Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, 1947 (the second most reprinted), a glimpse of the Neutra house, shaped like a cross with walls of glass and rock, a sumptuous pool, and a view over the desert to the mountains.

In 1999, Eric Bricker, working in L.A. as an art consultant, was tracking down some archival prints when he met Shulman, at that time a spry 89-year-old. Bricker recalls walking into Shulman’s studio – “a glass-walled treasure vault filled with photos, books, magazines, and sculptures” – and meeting the man who reminded him of his grandfather and would open a door to a Los Angeles that he did not know existed. The film that Bricker made (Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman) with the help of a very talented team is a terrific, nuanced exploration of the interplay of craft, aesthetic, history, and personality.

The personality of a still-vibrant, hail-fellow-well-met Shulman, filmed at the age of 98 (Shulman died earlier this year), sets the tone of Visual Acoustics, as he walks (very slowly) and talks us through the decisive moments of his extraordinary career. We learn, from an assortment of talking heads, the context and significance of Shulman’s visual style and photographic oeuvre: his understanding of shifting light, his use of perspective, the perfect props and people, and his genius for distilling a building’s architectural line.

Some of the more amusing anecdotes come from the clashes that were absolutely inevitable when two “egocentric” professionals go toe to toe in high-stakes collaborations – the architect who hires the photographer to transmit his work to the world and the photographer with his own ideas of how that should be done, his status resting upon how well and distinctively he does that. Apparently, the Shulman-Neutra show was a classic scrimmage for artistic control. Neutra would typically insist upon dangling a eucalyptus branch right in front of Shulman’s lens, to “suggest vegetation,” while to Neutra’s horror, Shulman would insist upon including the carefully arranged “everyday life” props that he carried around in his car, this being something for which he would become famous. And, of course, the two would take turns moving the camera – when the other wasn’t looking.

Much has been written on the luminous photographs of homes and buildings by Shulman that brought fame to a number of mid-20th century modernist architects and made him and them household names in the architectural world.

But personally speaking, I always favored the humanity and the staged settings that Shulman created in telling his stories of a house. Writing on these fantasies of modern glass houses in Palm Springs and Los Angeles Newsweek magazine’s Cathleen McGuigan noted that they “are so redolent of the era in which they were built you can practically hear the Sinatra tunes wafting in the air and the ice clinking in the cocktail glasses.”

Distributed by Arthouse Films and narrated by Dustin Hoffma, Visual Acoustics opens Friday, October 9, in New York, and October 16, in Los Angeles. It has won the Mercedes-Benz Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Lone Star International Film Festival and Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking from the Newport Beach Film Festival. It will also be made available on Netflix.

Julius Shulman, Self-Portrait

Fred Astaire—Top Hat in Funny Face, 1927. Photo: Edward Steichen (MOMA)

The celebrity portraitures of famed photographer Edward Steichen have been enjoying a resurgence of late thanks to exhibits, reissued publications and a grudging admiration for his unparalleled talent in creating a visual language of glamor that is fused to this day with celebrity. What’s of particular interest was his habit of utilizing the very techniques for the domain of Hollywood that he had previously developed so effectively in selling fashion. (See Edward Steichen: In High Fashion)

Witness the momentous flair in making use of dramatic lighting to enhance the theatricality of his subject, in this case Fred Astaire, silhouetting him against a neutral backdrop to create an alternate shadow that’s “larger than life.”  Steichen relied on artificial illumination for dramatic oppositions of light and dark to lend a look of modernity and elegance in accordance with Hollywood glamor and the streamlined art deco design aesthetic of the late 1920s and 1930s.

The staging of the Astaire photo was faithfully detailed to include the accoutrements of luxurious living — top hat, tuxedo, cigarette holder, polished walking (in Fred’s case, dancing) cane, boutonniere, pocket square and the heedless stance of a man without care or concern in the world. Note, too, how the pose reinforces the fantasy that was emblematic of Hollywood at the time—men were dashing; women unimaginably glamorous.

Steichen eschewed avant-garde touches in his commercial photography, preferring instead to develop a pragmatically professional visual aesthetic that never looks “arty” and never seeks to impress. His way with Hollywood “glamor shots,” with film stills and eroticised portraits of Broadway stars was similarly aloof. His style is that of a man of the world, the elegantly chilly eroticism of art deco.

So assured was his style, he had the confidence to demand that Condé Nast publish his work exclusively under his name, with his signature as its “auteur”.

Edward Steichen, photographed by Fred Holland Da

When something powerfully captures you at your very core, you can do no less than share it with others. A dear fellow traveler, blogger and friend, Miss Whistle, posted an extraordinary commentary recently, written by filmmaker and child rape survivor, Allison Anders on the Roman Polanski extradition affair. Entitled “Art is not Enough” this compellingly written and eloquently argued piece is one of the finest I’ve read on this troubling topic.

Have you ever found yourself feeling a strong connection to an image that leaves you feeling hopelessly confounded and stupidly bewildered as to the source of its magnetism? What is it about the pull of emotion attached to an image you’ve never laid eyes on? When I stumbled upon this photograph of Prague, I knew precisely why I was drawn to it and why I wanted to hold onto it in my subconscious. It set the mood for the story I’ve been researching. A story on vampires.

So even though my attachment was known to me, it was no less fatal in the force of its gravitational seduction. This image so beautifully captured the dramatic narrative of what I’ve been envisioning that it left me nearly breathless in imagining the sweep and scope of a story that would unfold with this scene at the heart of it; its medieval architecture, its regal bearing, the softly lit curves of the arches, statues, and arc of the dome of the cathedral and the feeling of both enchantment and foreboding that seems to quietly murmur throughout its shadowed somberness.

Some may find fault that Transylvania was not my featured destination, but why be so obvious? My vampire bride, extraordinary in her beauty and unorthodox in her behavior, is a heroine as captivating as any who have moved through time and legend. And in this historical milieu where vampires are revealing themselves in the most pedestrian of places like JFK’s seventeen thousand acre cargo hold, where sleeping passengers entombed in their crypts are safely shuttled to and fro {For the engrossing details, read The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan], it is clear to even the most remotest of devotees that a whole new dawning or evening, if you will, of blood supping looms on the horizon.

Back to Prague, a magical place that boasts hundreds of architectural landmarks, including two visible in this evening shot: the 14th-century, statue-decorated Charles Bridge (Karluv Most)—from which the photo was taken—and the domed Church of St. Francis. Any thoughts on how you might spend an evening here? And who you might like to meet up with? I assure you, she won’t bite, only beguile.

 

Photograph by René Jakl/Spectrum Pictures for National Geographic.