Le monde selon Penn

From the 1940s to the early 2000s, "The World According to Penn" traces Irving Penn's journey in Galerie 2 through an exceptional collection of photographs from the Pinault Collection.

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

In a unique configuration, the installation "The World According to Penn" offers a rare opportunity to embrace the vastness of a body of work produced 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 establishing a sober, direct and timeless aesthetic.

Rather than a chronological or strictly thematic itinerary, 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 one another.

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

The famous Corner Portraits sit alongside cigarette butts, faded 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 has continually redefined the possibilities of photography and our way of looking at the world are revealed. Perfectionist, humanist and eclectic.

This is how one might 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" that he methodically conceived there using a simple canvas background or white paper bathed in natural light defines a spatial framework that decontextualises while highlighting the physical presence of his multiple subjects.