NEW YORK — Irving Penn’s photographs may be as close as photography has gotten to philosophy. They’re like Platonic ideals — pure, stripped down, impossible to imagine in any other way — form as final, definitive function.
The absolute simplicity of, say, “Glove and Shoe,” from 1947, is almost breathtaking. It’s a study in nothing more elaborate than the play of light and dark and the gracefulness of three disparate shapes. Yet if Plato’s cave has a closet, that black shoe and that white glove are guaranteed shelf space. That crook of elbow belongs in there, too.
So it’s fitting that “Irving Penn: Centennial,” which runs through July 30 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is pretty much an ideal retrospective.
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Very large, the show includes more than 220 items. Suitably varied, it offers ample representation of Penn’s work in fashion, portraiture, still life, nudes, his “Small Trades” and “Cigarettes” series, and from his travels to Peru, Africa, and New Guinea. That’s a long list, but Penn had a very long career. He was still working at 92, when he died, in 2009.
The variety extends beyond subject matter. The first thing a visitor sees is one of Penn’s Rolleiflex cameras. Later there’s a home movie of him at work in Morocco. Also on display are vintage copies of Vogue — he shot 165 covers between 1943 and 2004 — and the canvas backdrop he used for more than half a century. It’s so situated that visitors can pose before it. Expect the line for selfies to reach Fifth Avenue.
There are also surprises. Yes, we get the famous one-eyed Picasso stare and the gauzy frou-frou of the arm covering in “Large Sleeve (Sunny Harnett).” But portraits of Rachel Carson — and Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Marlene Dietrich seeming slightly cowed? The surprises keep the show from feeling overly familiar, familiarity being otherwise hard to avoid with not only one of the foremost photographers of the 20th century but also one of the most widely disseminated.
“There’s very little art in the real world,” Diana Vreeland, that supreme doyenne of high style, once said. “What there is is splendid, but let’s not confuse it with fashion.” Penn never did. Instead, he very consciously created an unreal world, one where he could make high art out of high fashion, squaring the aesthetic circle — square being the shape of a Rolleiflex negative.
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Penn’s photographs offer enclosure without confinement: a stylization of stylization. elevating fashion and celebrity to a plane where style became its own substance. For the early portraits, Penn would put together two stage flats at an acute angle — or throw a rug over a couple of boxes — and shoot his subjects in that setting. Soon enough, he bought that backdrop, in Paris (where else?), and it became a constant in his work, as much a presence as northern-exposure light. His wife, the fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives, posed in front of it. Audrey Hepburn posed in front of it. So did a Hell’s Angel, straddling his chopper. It wasn’t so much trademark as environment. Even far from his studio, Penn took it with him. He had it with him in Morocco and New Guinea, where he shot inside a specially made tent.
In a sense, every Penn photograph is a version of still life. “A still life,” he once said, “is a representation of people.” As a description of his work, the reverse is even more accurate. Order and arrangement define his artistry. This makes for an endless creative tension with the detailing and excess intrinsic to fashion — and the personality and unpredictability intrinsic to portraiture.
That’s true of the foreign-culture photographs, too. They’re an eager survey of appearance and personality, at once respectful and coolly appraising. They appreciate unexpected and exotic appearance. The only sense of superiority comes from the fact that the person clicking a shutter always has the upper hand over the person being clicked at. Still, they leave a funny taste. Penn’s indigenous subjects weren’t complicit in the enterprise — as the fashion models and writers and movie stars were. Or even the anonymous workers in the “Small Trades” series.
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Penn could be quite witty, if usually mordantly so. The wit can be specific. Igor Stravinsky cups his ear in a portrait. It can be conceptual, as in the juxtaposition between the fashion models — “skinny girls with self-starved girls” (Penn’s phrase) — with the beyond-Rubens voluptuousness of his nudes — and their absence of attire, too. But there’s almost no humor here. The clearest exception — it’s quite wonderful, in fact — is the big smile on the face of a London butcher. He knows exactly what’s going on. Getting back to the issue of complicity, what’s meat for the artist is meat for the subject.
Penn began as a photographer facing outward, heading down city streets. He had a taste for vernacular signage worthy of Walker Evans’s. After returning from wartime service, he moved his photographs inside, creating a world in his studio that looks restricted in space (it was) and feels outside of time (if only!).
The first photographs in the show — given priority even over the earlier street scenes — are three color still lifes. They declare their maker’s fascination with pattern, texture, and arrangement. An enduring fascination, it lasted as long as Penn lived. All involve spillage: the interplay between arrangement and (seeming) happenstance. That’s not a bad metaphor for the relationship between art and life. To get the arrangement he wanted, Penn would often sketch a design for a photograph before taking it. Several appear in the show.
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A love of texture is a very useful thing in a fashion photographer, someone charged with conveying a sense of the tactile as well as visual. With Penn, it took a further form. The darkroom was much more than a means to a visual end. It became a forum for further creativity. The show includes four versions of “Girl Drinking (Mary Jane Russell),” and it’s an education to see the gradations. They’re almost four different pictures. Always he was searching for perfection, that (yes) Platonic ideal. Another form that search took was his adopting a printing process that had been popular decades earlier, palladium platinum. The painstaking attention required didn’t matter to Penn. The lustrous results did.
As master of fashion photography and portraiture both, Penn has a single counterpart and peer: Richard Avedon. They are coinciding artist pairs, like Gainsborough and Reynolds or Debussy and Ravel: similar yet different, impossible to choose between, the achievement of each enlarging that of the other.
Fashion is a form of fantasy. Avedon made it a fantasy of energy and incongruity. Models hopped off curbs, roller skated, posed with elephants. Penn made it a fantasy of theorem and containment, paring everything to its essentials, banishing any hint of the distracting or hectic. The remark “Elegance is refusal” has been attributed to both Coco Chanel and Vreeland. No one in the realm of couture has demonstrated it as clearly as Penn.
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He was a classicist, as Avedon was a romantic. He wasn’t a moralist (as, oddly enough, Avedon was). He was a fatalist. A sense of mortality shadows the work. As Penn knew perfectly well, the French term for still life, “nature morte,” literally translates as dead nature. The lusciousness of red flesh in “Still Life With Watermelon” makes it easy to overlook the presence of a fly; but it’s there. The black-veiled models in “The Tarot Reader (Bridget Tichenor and Jean Patchett)” could be angels of death. More than just perverse variations on still life, Penn’s close-up shots of street trash and discarded cigarette butts are memento mori. So is the contrast between the two famous portraits of Truman Capote. What a difference 17 years, and a lot of liquor and pills, can make. Don’t forget the backdrop, now visibly frayed, nicked, and worn. Look closely, selfie takers: Irving Penn has left you a reminder of what awaits us all.
IRVING PENN: CENTENNIAL
At Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, through July 30. 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.