LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

27

IRVING PENN (American, b. 1917) ALFRED HITCHCOCK, NEW YORK titled and dated

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IRVING PENN (American, b. 1917) ALFRED HITCHCOCK, NEW YORK titled and dated
IRVING PENN (American, b. 1917) ALFRED HITCHCOCK, NEW YORK titled and dated "ALFRED HITCHCOCK, NEW YORK, MAY 23, 1947" in pencil on verso signed in pencil and stamped "Irving Penn" "EARLY PRINT" inscribed by Penn in pencil on verso "REF. 2775" inscribed on verso 1948 Condé Nast Publications Inc. copyright stamp on verso edition information stamped on verso "14282P-9" inscribed in negative in the upper margin vintage gelatin silver contact print 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) May 23, 1947 this print is from an edition of 21 PROVENANCE Private Collection, LOS ANGELES LITERATURE "Alfred Hitchcock," VOGUE, February 15, 1948, p. 109 (illustrated) Irving Penn, PASSAGE: A WORK RECORD, LONDON, 1990, p. 36 (illustrated) Within a few short years of joining the staff of VOGUE, Irving Penn distinguished himself as a photographer of unique vision. In contrast to the ornamental extravagance that normally cluttered the pages of the magazine in the 1940s, Penn offered strikingly spare portraits of artists, writers, dancers, and other creative personae. The confident economy of his style is certainly apparent in the present portrait of Alfred Hitchcock. Like most of the sitters that Penn photographed during this breakthrough year, the director is isolated in a bare studio, seated on a nondescript bolt of rumpled carpet. This no-frills environment places dramatic emphasis on the sitter, whose impassive body language is relieved by the slightest, smirking smile. As Alexander Liberman has recalled of these early portraits, "The face alone stood out, unrestricted and luminous, giving an immediate reading of character. There was an important additional detail - a small, torn-off piece of carpet lay in the foreground. Penn once said that he hoped through the rough weave and hanging threads to give a grittiness, a texture, an impasto to the portrait: to break through the limitations of celluloid slickness to create a rougher image. But beyond this, the series had a meaning in time. These were existential pictures, the torn rug a memento mori at the feet of the great of the world, who were alone, cornered, as if in Sartre's claustrophobic No Exit. In these pictures, Penn was in harmony with the tormenting isolation of Beckett: All this in the chic Vogue of the forties" (Alexander Liberman, "An American Modern," IRVING PENN: PASSAGE, A WORK RECORD, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, p. 6).
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