Le monde selon Penn

From the 1940s to the early 2000s, “Le monde selon Penn” traces Irving Penn's journey in Galerie 2 through an exceptional collection of photographs from the Pinault Collection.

As part of the exhibition “Remember Me”, Galerie 2 brings together nearly 450 photographs by Irving Penn from the Pinault Collection.

In an unprecedented configuration, the installation “Le monde selon Penn” offers a rare opportunity to embrace the immensity of a production created between the 1940s and the early 2000s.

Irving Penn (1917-2009), a major American photographer of the 20th century, is renowned for having profoundly renewed fashion photography and portraiture by imposing a sober, direct, and timeless aesthetic.

Rather than a chronological or strictly thematic journey, this is an immersion into the heart of the artist's visual universe, where portraits of personalities, fashion photographs, ethnographic reports, nude studies, still lifes, and floral compositions freely converse with each other.

These juxtapositions reveal the constants of his work: the rigour of composition, attention to materials, a taste for purity, as well as a unique ability to capture human presence and the beauty of the simplest forms.

The famous Corner Portraits stand alongside cigarettes, withered flowers, and fashion silhouettes, forming a vast visual mosaic that invites visitors to enter Irving Penn's mental studio.

Through this unprecedented installation, the coherence and modernity of a body of work that constantly redefined the possibilities of photography and our way of looking at the world are unveiled. Perfectionist, humanist, and eclectic.

This is how one could describe, if one had to summarise them, the work and immense photographic career of Irving Penn. Irving Penn is above all a studio photographer.

The “neutral zone” he methodically designed there using a simple canvas or white paper background bathed in natural light defines a spatial framework that decontextualises and at the same time highlights the physical presence of his multiple subjects.