Irving Penn valuation
Sat everyone in the same plain corner and printed in platinum for sixty years.
Irving Penn was born at Plainfield in New Jersey in 1917, trained under Alexey Brodovitch, and spent almost his entire career with Vogue from 1943.
What a work by Irving Penn is worth
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Bio
Irving Penn was born at Plainfield in New Jersey in 1917, trained under Alexey Brodovitch, and spent almost his entire career with Vogue from 1943. The method was reduction: a plain grey or white backdrop, natural north light, and a subject given nothing to lean on — or, in the famous series, an actual narrow corner built from two flats into which sitters from Duchamp to Stravinsky were wedged. He photographed fashion, still life, cigarette ends and street debris with the same attention, and travelled to photograph tradespeople and, in the field, communities in Peru, Dahomey and New Guinea. He died in 2009.
Penn revived platinum-palladium printing in the 1960s and made those prints himself, coating the paper by hand and often mounting it to aluminium; they are physically distinct from his gelatin silver prints of the same images and are the ones most sought. Process, print date and edition therefore identify a work, not the image alone. Signature, edition number and stamps are normally on the verso. The Irving Penn Foundation holds the archive. Platinum prints are robust but the mounts are not, and edge damage is common.
At a glance
- Born
- 16 June 1917, Plainfield
- Died
- 7 October 2009, Manhattan
The series, and the back of the print
Some of Penn's best-known pictures come from series he made alongside his magazine work. Small Trades, begun in Paris in 1950 and continued in London and New York, shows working people in their work clothes, holding their tools, against the same plain backdrop. The Cigarettes, platinum prints of cigarette ends picked up from the street, followed in the 1970s. A promised gift of more than 150 photographs from the Irving Penn Foundation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, covering every period of his career, formed the core of the centennial exhibition there in 2017.
The back of a Penn print usually says a great deal. Prints of pictures made for Vogue carry a stamp crediting Condé Nast as well as Penn, with a line forbidding reproduction without permission, and the edition number and the date the print was made are written in pencil, often with a reference number. A platinum print made in the 1970s from a negative of the 1940s is a later print of an early picture, and the inscription is what shows it. A print without these markings takes more work to place.
Saks, the ambulance service and Lisa Fonssagrives
Before Vogue, Penn succeeded Alexey Brodovitch as art director at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940, and then spent a year painting and photographing in Mexico. Alexander Liberman took him into Vogue's art department to work on layouts and asked him to try photography, and his first cover appeared in October 1943. A year later he volunteered for the American Field Service, drove an ambulance with the British Eighth Army in Italy, and photographed camp life in India before sailing home in November 1945.
In 1950 he married the Swedish model Lisa Fonssagrives, whom he had met at a shoot in 1947 and who is the subject of Harlequin Dress, one of the best known of his fashion pictures. The Art Institute of Chicago received his paper and photographic archives in 1995 and holds more than 200 of his prints, and in 2013 the Irving Penn Foundation gave 100 photographs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which built the touring exhibition Beyond Beauty around them.
Best auction results
- Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn) $355,600
- Platinum-palladium print, 1950, printed 1979, number 25 of 30 · New York · 4 April 2023
- Publicly reported
- Above its high estimate of $300,000.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
