Irving Penn: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, review

Irving Penn's portraits are as electrifying and alive as ever, says Lucy Davies. Rating: * * * *

By Lucy Davies 03 March 2010 • 1:36pm

Truman Capote, New York, 1948 by Irving Penn Credit: Photo: © THE IRVING PENN FOUNDATION

The ingredients were simple and constant. A roll of paper, two stage flats, a stool, a piece of carpet, a Rolleiflex camera, a tilt-all tripod. Yet somehow he never repeated himself.

He liked the daylight best, and spoke of its “sweetness… delicious beyond any other illumination”. He cajoled it, let it burrow into crinkled eyelid, tooth enamel, chin bristle, the liquid that settles in the corners of an eye socket.

It is not possible to have a meaningful discussion about portraiture without referring to Irving Penn. He photographed so many leading figures that he became a giant among them. Some 120 of his portraits are on show at the National Portrait Gallery. Half a century on, they are as electrifying as ever. “I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue,” his editor, Alexander Liberman, said. “They don’t like it. They say the photographs burn on the page.”

All of Penn’s work takes the same approach: isolating subjects from their context and raising them to graphic perfection. He spoke of a need “to prune away anything inconsequential”. The NPG aspires to his neatness, with a single line of faces in chronological order, allowing us to appreciate the devices he used to elicit our responses. He was a master of such devices. The most obvious was the backdrop he began using from 1951, which joined two stage flats to create a narrow corner. Liberman likened it to the “tormenting isolation of Beckett” but Penn found “this confinement seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against”.

Seeing several images in quick succession points to other tricks. Geometric shapes form strong lines that act as arrows, stopping our eyes from wandering about. And he was a stickler for printing, devoting hours to platinum palladium coatings. Worth it, you see, when the range of blacks it afforded allowed his sage or grey to act as cushion for inky hues that suck your gaze inward. When you see this show, remember: every picture has a crux, something that everything else exists to complement. The crux was his sitter’s essence: “more rare and wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe”.

Penn’s methods for extracting it were severe: “What does it feel like to realise that this eye looking at you is the eye of 1,200,000 people?” he is said to have asked one sitter. If this seems rather chilling, take heart from the results. It’s as if all the nuances a face has expressed have been distilled into one shot. A handful of sitters strain forward to meet the lens. Others lean back shrewdly or jut their chins in defiance.

Liberman was right, the images are indelible. Seared on to my mind’s eye are, in no particular order: the dirt under Richard Burton’s nails; the food between John Updike’s teeth; Edward Albee’s eyelashes; the sweat icing Anaïs Nin’s upper lip; and the fact that one side of Henry Moore’s face seems sadder than the other. Each takes our measure while allowing us to take theirs, too. And they’re so lifelike, you half expect them to blink.