Earthly Forms: Irving Penn’s Nudes

If you ever doubt that your body is a beautiful, sacred thing, go see Irving Penn's photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit, titled "Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50," is the first major exhibition of Penn's nude photographs.

Penn made a name for himself as a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine after World War II but found time on weekends and holidays to indulge himself in private, intimate sessions with female models stripped of the superficial modes of style. The result is a series of 60 silver and platinum prints that capture light caressing flesh, allowing the viewer the privilege of a voyeur who never has to stop looking.

The photographs in "Earthly Bodies" are particularly extraordinary in the unconventional way that Penn places these figures in the frame of space they occupy. The soft shades of black and white have a grainy texture that lend an illusory, cinematic quality to Penn's photographs, as if his models have never quite stopped moving. Heads, feet, and hands are all absent from these pictures, but the sense is that one might glimpse a finger or toe if one looks long enough. Often the model's form is twisted to expose skin streched taut against the pelvis or a breast rolling across a clavicle. In No. 42, for example, the model's torso spirals down towards the surface on which she lies, one hip jutting abruptly into space as the light crawls slowly across the twisted mound of a belly.

Another remarkable aspect of Penn's photographs is immediately evident in the models he chose to work with, whose bodies diverged greatly from post-war fashion standards. Although his earliest photographs are of slender, androgynous bodies similar to those he worked with at Vogue, most of Penn's nudes are of round, fleshy women referred to in the wall text as "full-bodied sisters of the Venuses of Titian and Rubens." No. 1 is an especially vivid example. This photograph is placed next to a picture of the Venus of Willensdorf figurine, wrought in stone around 20,000 BCE. The Venus is a small fertility figure from the Neolithic era, with pendulous breasts, a round full belly and plump thighs. Although this comparison is presented by the curators of the exhibit, Penn's photograph is clearly informed by this image, down to the its very texture, whose granularity resembles the stone of which the Venus is made.

In No. 63, the model twists, her mass of belly flesh coaxed by gravity and light that reveals stretch marks on her side like fissures in the earth. The mole on her hip is like a beauty mark on a face, a mark that distinguishes this model in several of Penn's photographs. No. 150, featuring the same model, is printed twice: once as a bronzed sort of "negative" version and again as the original black and white picture. At the center of No. 150 is the model's navel, a slit, like a mouth, in the full mound of her belly. In No. 98 and No. 105, the navel is contorted by the model's twisting spine. Her flesh simultaneously submits to and defies gravity.

The beauty in Irving Penn's photographs is a refreshing divergence from the contemporary notions of beauty to which we are all relentlessly subjected. The "Venuses of Titian and Rubens" and the "Venus of Willensdorf" are beautiful in the same ways that Penn's photographs are beautiful. Not because they are voluptuous, but because they are timeless.

Irving Penn's photographs demonstrate the durability of beauty--the kind of beauty that forgoes fickle trends for the sensuality and sincerity with which these models simply absorb and emit light with their bodies.

Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50 is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 21, 2002. A selection of Penn's more recent nude photographs, Dancer: 1999 Nudes by Irving Penn is on display at the Whitney Museum through May 12, 2002.