josef chladek

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Irving Penn - Momenti (Moments Preserved), Domus, 1960, Milano

 

Hardcover, cloth bound with dust jacket in slipcase. Introduction by Alexander Liberman.

"Irving Penn's first book, Montents Preserved, is an overview of an astonishingly busy career — one that began in earnest when he was hired by Alexander Liberman in 1943 to be the art director's assistant at Vogue. Penn had studied briefly with Alexey Brodovitch, but it was Liberman who molded and promoted his work and made him Vogue's ruling artistic presence; he also provides a generous introduction here. The book's uncredited designer is Penn himself ("That's part of the whole process," he says), but his crisp pacing, graphic precision, and vivid use of color could easily be mistaken for Liberman at his most lucid. Penn spent a month in Lucerne, Switzerland, overseeing the printers at C. J. Bucher, who had produced Avedon's Observations the previous year. For Moments Preserved, they worked with gravure, letterpress, and offset processes on separate paper stocks and had casts of Condé Nast's original engraving plates flown in from New York for the book's color reproductions. When the first gravures didn't have the requisite depth, those pages went back to press and another image layer was laid on top of the originals. The book's first edition print run of 20,000 was divided into French, Italian, German, and English editions and sent back to press again for a separate text run in each of those languages. ... Though most of these sections include fashion studies, still lifes, and impressionist scenes (like the shimmering mirror image of a solitary boater that decorates the book's slipcase or the pointillist baseball action shot on one double spread), they have in common the photographer's deftly understated portraits, printed here in the subtlest gravure. Penn reinvented the classic daylight studio portrait for a more casual time, undercutting its formality but heightening its potential as a revealing performance. His texts, written in collaboration with Rosemary Blackmon, are often wry annotations of those performances. Evelyn Waugh, he notes, "was somewhat less than endearing," while the Duchess of Windsor, staking out one of Penn's tight corners like a guardsman, "wears history as coolly as she wears her impeccable clothes". (A. Roth, The Book of 101 Books).

Pages: 184
Place: Milano
Year: 1960
Publisher: Domus
Size: 25 x 34 cm (approx.)


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Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)

Irving Penn Momenti (Moments Preserved)




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Hardcover, cloth bound with dust jacket in slipcase. Introduction by Alexander Liberman.

"Irving Penn's first book, Montents Preserved, is an overview of an astonishingly busy career — one that began in earnest when he was hired by Alexander Liberman in 1943 to be the art director's assistant at Vogue. Penn had studied briefly with Alexey Brodovitch, but it was Liberman who molded and promoted his work and made him Vogue's ruling artistic presence; he also provides a generous introduction here. The book's uncredited designer is Penn himself ("That's part of the whole process," he says), but his crisp pacing, graphic precision, and vivid use of color could easily be mistaken for Liberman at his most lucid. Penn spent a month in Lucerne, Switzerland, overseeing the printers at C. J. Bucher, who had produced Avedon's Observations the previous year. For Moments Preserved, they worked with gravure, letterpress, and offset processes on separate paper stocks and had casts of Condé Nast's original engraving plates flown in from New York for the book's color reproductions. When the first gravures didn't have the requisite depth, those pages went back to press and another image layer was laid on top of the originals. The book's first edition print run of 20,000 was divided into French, Italian, German, and English editions and sent back to press again for a separate text run in each of those languages. ... Though most of these sections include fashion studies, still lifes, and impressionist scenes (like the shimmering mirror image of a solitary boater that decorates the book's slipcase or the pointillist baseball action shot on one double spread), they have in common the photographer's deftly understated portraits, printed here in the subtlest gravure. Penn reinvented the classic daylight studio portrait for a more casual time, undercutting its formality but heightening its potential as a revealing performance. His texts, written in collaboration with Rosemary Blackmon, are often wry annotations of those performances. Evelyn Waugh, he notes, "was somewhat less than endearing," while the Duchess of Windsor, staking out one of Penn's tight corners like a guardsman, "wears history as coolly as she wears her impeccable clothes". (A. Roth, The Book of 101 Books).

Pages: 184
Place: Milano
Year: 1960
Publisher: Domus
Size: 25 x 34 cm (approx.)


Latest updates
 

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