Saturday, February 3, 2024

Irving Penn The Bath

 



Thaddaeus Ropac

27 January—13 March 2024

This exhibition is dedicated to a rarely-seen series of photographs by Irving Penn. Taken in 1967, the carefully composed images are the result of Penn’s collaboration with the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco, capturing the groundbreaking work of the American choreographer Anna Halprin. In addition to the photographic series, one of Irving Penn’s rare paintings is also part of the exhibition. Penn captured the dancers in his studio as they re-staged Halprin’s improvisational choreography, The Bath (1966). The group of 14 photographs, which were printed for the first time in 1995, highlight Halprin’s pioneering approach to movement and reveal a more experimental side to Penn’s practice. In its entirety, the series is exhibited for the first time in the German-speaking world. The summer of 1967 in San Francisco has become known as the ‘Summer of Love’. Young people converged on the city, drawn to its burgeoning counterculture that broke the taboos of American society, promoting community, altruism, mysticism and free love. Fascinated by the movement, Irving Penn travelled to the Bay Area the following September to document its participants with a series of group portraits to be published in Look magazine. He wanted, as he termed it, to ‘look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances.’ At the heart of the avant-garde art scene in the 1960s was the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco. Their founder and choreographer, Anna Halprin, was a pioneer of postmodern dance. Her practice promoted healing and a sense of community through body awareness and improvised group interactions based on ritual, which radically changed modern dance.


Irving Penn The Bath (G) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967 Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 38.6...

Irving Penn

The Bath (G) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 

38.6 x 37.8 cm (15.2 x 14.88 in)

© The Irving Penn Foundation


Irving Penn The Bath (H) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967 Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 38.9...

Irving Penn

The Bath (H) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 

38.9 x 39.1 cm (15.31 x 15.39 in)

© The Irving Penn Foundation


Irving Penn The Bath (L) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967 Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 39.1...

Irving Penn

The Bath (L) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 

39.1 x 39.1 cm (15.39 x 15.39 in)

© The Irving Penn Foundation


Irving Penn The Bath (M) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967 Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 38.9...

Irving Penn

The Bath (M) (Dancers Workshop of San Francisco), San Francisco, 1967

Gelatin silver print, print made 1995 

38.9 x 39.1 cm (15.31 x 15.39 in)

© The Irving Penn Foundation

What I remember is the purity of the relationship of these young people and an innocence so different from today’s. As I look at these pictures, how the dancers touch each other, how they embrace [...] there’s a serenity that as a photographer I’m not used to. — Irving Penn, 1995 Press Release Irving Penn, The Bath (B) (Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco), 1967.  Gelatin silver print, print made 1995. 39.1 x 39.1 cm (15.39 x 15.39 in)2 ‘

Dance is breath made visible,’ Halprin said of her approach. Her daring performances were often participatory and rarely took place in traditional stage settings, with one instance leading to a summons for indecent exposure only a few short months before Irving Penn photographed the troupe. In the original performances of The Bath, the nude dancers bathed each other in fountains or using jugs and buckets of water. ‘The performance of the simple action,’ writes Halprin in her notes on The Bath, ‘the natural action, objectifies what is really going on inside the performer’s self.’ Penn omits the containers in his photographs, although fine droplets of water appear here and there on the dancers’ skin, and wet patches remain on the studio floor. When Halprin saw the pictures, she observed that Penn’s compositions put forward ‘the absolute purity of a boy and girl relating to each other in the most magical way, and yet it seemed real. What [the dancers] were left with was creating the essence of the bath, but it had nothing to do with actual bathing anymore.’ Although the majority of the dancers remain unnamed, Halprin’s daughter Daria Halprin can be identified throughout the photographs, her powerful gaze highlighted by Penn in one of the series’ most arresting images. Coming in laterally from the window on the north side of the studio, the daylight wraps itself around the dancers’ bodies as they interlace. ‘The pictures are primarily of embraces,’ Penn remarked upon rediscovering the photographs in 1995, ‘beautiful and touching. Here they are without clothes, there’s love, the gestures are tenderly erotic but certainly not pornographic.’



And yet the photographs were considered too daring to be published in ‘The Incredibles’ essay featured in the 9 January 1968 issue of Look magazine. According to Vasilios Zatse, deputy director of the Irving Penn Foundation, they remained forgotten for almost three decades until Halprin contacted Penn in 1995, enquiring about the photographs for her archive. He selected 14 negatives and printed them for her, using the gelatin silver process. Although the two never met, Penn stated at the time: ‘I didn’t know Ann[a] Halprin at all, but I know from these pictures, I tell you, I like her very much.’ Dance was a recurring theme throughout Penn’s career. From his photographs of American ballet companies in 1946 to his 1999 series capturing the movements of dancer and choreographer Alexandra Beller, the artist maintained an interest in new and avant-garde forms of performance. It is undoubtedly thanks to his affinity for the art form that Penn was able to capture The Bath with such acuteness. Where Halprin found that the photographs brought out the essence of her own work, Penn remarked that they gave him a sense of ‘serenity,’ which he was, in his words, ‘not used to.’ The series, therefore, represents a unique confluence between modern photography and postmodern dance and constitutes a rare document of the meeting of two artistic minds. Irving Penn, Untitled, 1987. Ink, watercolor, and dry pigment with gum arabic over platinum-palladium print on paper. 59.7 x 48.9 cm (23.5 x 19.25 in) Irving Penn, The Bath (G) (Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco), 1967.  Gelatin silver print, print made 1995. 38.6 x 37.8 cm (15.2 x 14.88 in) In addition to the photographs, the exhibition presents a work on paper from 1987 that highlights the broad spectrum of Irving Penn’s artistic practice. After his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984, the artist returned to the medium of painting and, inspired by his experience with printing photographs, developed an experimental technique: he photographed drawings and enlarged them as platinum-palladium prints. He then used the resulting prints as a painting surface, which he worked on with a combination of watercolours, ink, dry pigments and gum arabic – materials that lend the works a complex surface structure. The photographic series The Bath relates to Irving Penn’s wider interest in exploring movement and organic forms, a theme that can also be found in his abstract painting; the entwining shapes recall the interlacing bodies of the dancers.4 Born in 1917 to immigrant parents in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts from 1934—38 and studied with Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory. His first photographic cover for Vogue magazine appeared in October 1943 and he would continue to work at the magazine throughout his career. In the 1950s, he founded his own studio in New York and began taking advertising photographs alongside his private, experimental work. In the early 1970s, Penn closed his Manhattan studio and immersed himself in platinumpalladium printing in the laboratory he had constructed on the family farm on Long Island. There he created his innovative Cigarettes series, which was shown in his first exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1975, as well as his Street Material series, shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1977. The first retrospective of Penn’s work was organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1984 and toured internationally to countries including Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Italy and the UK. He donated his archives to the Art Institute Chicago in 1995, and established The Irving Penn Foundation in 2005 to promote knowledge and understanding of his artistic legacy, including the diversity of techniques, mediums and subject matter that he explored.

Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2015), Centennial at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017), which travelled to the RMN - Grand Palais, Paris; C/O Berlin and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo and Irving Penn, Chefs d’œuvre de la collection de la MEP at the Franciscaines in Deauville (2023). From March 2024, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will present the celebrated Centennial-retrospective, including 196 photographs, spanning every period of Penn’s nearly 70-year career.



Weegee Part II

  Weegee Autopsy of the  Spectacle


Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
January 30 — May 19, 2024

Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid
September 24, 2024 to January 5, 2025




Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera, 1950 © International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam.6 Weegee – Alessandra Sanguinetti

There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come  the festive photographs–glamorous parties, performances  by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres– to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter.

The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent. The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle. With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.


Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, 1942 © International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris. 

Exhibition curator Clément Chéroux Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

PUBLICATION The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog in French published by Éditions Textuel. Weegee, Autopsie du Spectacle Éditions Textuel Texts by Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany,  Clément Chéroux et Cynthia Young. 20 x 26 cm 208 pages Published: 17 January 2024 ISBN 978-2-84597-990-1 55 €

The exhibition will also travel to Madrid, Spain, where it will be on view at the Fundación MAPFRE from September 24, 2024 to January 5, 2025. A catalog in spanish will be published  for the occasion. 

BIOGRAPHY  

Weegee was born Usher Felig on June 12, 1899, to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in Western Ukraine. At 11 years old, he joined his father who’d emigrated to the United States. At Ellis Island immigration station, he became Arthur Fellig. Living in the slums of the Lower East Side, he left school at 14 to earn money to support his family. After working in different professions, he became a traveling photographer, worked for photographers Duckett & Adler, then in the ACME Newspictures agency lab.

Starting in 1935, he was self-employed as photo-reporter. Towards 1937, he began using the pseudonym Weegee, and around 1941, started marking the backs of his prints with a stamp in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Weegee the Famous.” For 10 years, his radio tuned to the police frequency, he took photographs, mainly at night, of crime, arrests, fires, accidents and other news items. Though the photographer most certainly had connections within the police, without whom his work would not have been possible, he also frequented left-wing circles. He was very close to the Photo League, a group of independent photographers who firmly believed in emancipation through the image and fought for social justice.

In 1945, he published his best photographs in a book entitled Naked City, which met with great success both in its reception and sales. In the spring of 1948, he moved to Hollywood to work in cinema as  a technical advisor, and sometimes, as an actor.  He photographed the endless party and developed different photographic techniques to create his caricatures of celebrities. In December of 1951, after four years on the West Coast, he returned to New York with no intention of resuming his former practice. Up until his death on December 26, 1968, the majority of his work involved taking advantage of his notoriety to publish other books, go on tour, and promote his photo-caricatures in newspapers.

Images




Holiday Accident in the Bronx, 1941 © International Center of Photography. 

Weegee, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, 1942

 Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, 1942 © International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris.


Weegee, The Critic, November 22, 1942
WeegeeTheCritic,November22,1942©InternationalCenterofPhotography

Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York, 1939 © International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris.




 Booked on Suspicion of Killing a Policeman, 1941 © International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris. 


Sleeping at the Circus, Madison Square Garden, New York, 1943 © International Center of Photography



Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn, 1940 © International Center of Photography. Courtesy Galerie  Berinson, Berlin.



Book: Portrait and Place : Photography in Senegal, 1840–1960

 


When the daguerreotype first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa in the early nineteenth century, local kingdoms still held power in Senegal and the French presence was limited to trading outposts along the coast. The pioneers of photography in Senegal worked within, across, and beyond the borders of colonial empire, expanding the medium’s possibilities and contributing to a global visual language. 

Portrait and Place  explores these unique encounters, providing an in-depth and nuanced look at the images made at the intersection of Black Atlantic, Islamic, and African cultures.

Giulia Paoletti takes readers on a visual journey from the 1840s, when the oldest-surviving daguerreotype from West Africa was made, to the 1960s, when photography became the most popular medium as Senegal achieved its independence. She discusses some of Africa’s most celebrated modernists, such as Mama Casset, and also offers insights into lesser-known photographers like Oumar Ka and once-anonymous figures such as Macky Kane. Paoletti examines both professional and amateur artists in genres ranging from portraiture to landscape and across media such as glass painting and lithography.

Featuring a wealth of breathtaking images published here for the first time, Portrait and Place brings to life the important histories of photography on the African continent.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Swann Galleries: Fine Photographs on Thursday, February 15

 

Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano (White Dunes), silver print, 1936. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.

Swann: a special auction of 100 lots from the Collection of Dr. James and Debra Pearl. Rich in American masterworks, the collection features the premier photographers of the 19th-century American landscape such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and William Henry Jackson, as well as the 20th-century masters, including Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, and Edward Weston, featuring Richard Avedon’s exceptional portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as 6 of Irving Penn’s portraits from his Small Trades series, his portraits of Igor Stravinsky and Truman Capote, as well as imagery from Cuzco, including his iconic Cuzco Children, Peru (1948). Other highlights include Carleton Watkins’ The Domes from Yosemite Valley (1865-66; printed 1870s) and Mirror Lake and Mount Watkins, Yosemite (1861; printed 1870s), Eadweard Muybridge’s Pi-Wi-Ack, Valley of the Yosemite, Shower of Stars, Vernal Falls and Temple Peak (both 1872), Ansel Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm (1938; printed 1959-60) and Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1927; printed 1973-77), and Edward Weston’s rare and vintage Civilian Defense (1942) and Dunes, Oceano (White Dunes) (1936). This collection is a testament to the Pearls’ love and appreciation for the medium’s history as well as their understanding of photography’s unique and indelible beauty. 

Edward Weston, Cabbage Leaf, from Edward Weston: Fiftieth Anniversary Portfolio, 1902-1950, silver print, 1931; printed circa 1951. From the Collection Dr. James & Debra Pearl. Estimate $4,000 to $6,000.

The auction also includes numerous works for a multi-owner section, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard, Paris (1952; printed 1980s); Peter Hujar’s New York: Sixth Avenue (1976); Helmut Newton’s Rue Aubriot (i), Yves St. Laurent, Haute Couture CollectionParis (1975; printed 2000s); Andy Warhol’s Polaroid Self-portrait in Fright Wig (1986); Garry Winogrand’s eponymous portfolio (1960-74; printed 1978); and a stunning oversized Ruth Bernhard Nude in the Box – Horizontal (1962; printed 1992), among much more. 

Irving Penn, Deep Sea Diver, New York, from the Small Trades series, silver print, 1951. $20,000 to $30,000.
Richard Avedon, Portrait of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, silver print, 1958. $30,000 to $50,000.
Carleton E. Watkins, Mirror Lake and Mount Watkins, Yosemite, mammoth albumen print, 1861; printed 1870s. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.
Irving Penn, Breton Onion Seller, London, from the Small Trades series, silver print, 1950. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.

Lot 11: Edward Weston, Civilian Defense, silver print, 1942. Estimate $8,000 to $12,000.