Irving Penn

a composition of 4 platinum-palladium prints mounted to one board, each signed, titled, dated, editioned '37/46,' and annotated in pencil, and stamped on the reverse, framed, 1972, printed in November 1977, no. 37 in the total edition of 46 of this image in various formats, one of only 7 in this oversized four-print format in platinum metals

Acquired from Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1977

The single-print version of this image:

Irving Penn: Photographs in Platinum Metals, Images 1947-1975 (Marlborough Gallery, 1977, in conjunction with the exhibition), unpaginated

John Szarkowski, Irving Penn (The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 115

Irving Penn, Passage: A Work Record (New York, 1991), p. 207

Colin Westerbeck, ed., Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (Art Institute of Chicago, 1997), p. 35

Irving Penn and John Szarkowski, Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs 1938 - 2000 (Boston, 2001), unpaginated

These four prints, on Arches paper and affixed to the original Marlborough backing board with hinges on all edges, are in generally excellent condition. This board forms the frame backing as well, and the reverse is age-darkened. There is a Marlborough Graphics, New York, label with typed credit, title, and edition number '37/46' on the reverse of the frame.
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Penn made only 7 four-sheet prints of this image.  These are included within the total edition of 46, the rest of which are platinum-palladium prints in Penn's standard single-sheet format.

Irving Penn began his career at Vogue making still life images, and the genre within his oeuvre has remained a constant to this day.  Detritus within these works played an important role early on, in rendering these photographs more interesting and less sterile; for instance, the inclusion of the pills, a severed cigarette, and stray hairpin in Theater Accident (1947); cherry stems and partially-consumed bread in New York Still Life (see Lot 145); a soiled plate, dirty utensils, crumbs, and crumpled napkin in The Empty Plate (1947), among others.  Detritus as primary subject matter was launched by Penn in the early 1970s with his Cigarette series and reached its ultimate expression in the Street Material series in the mid-1970s.

The Cigarette pictures were conceived by Penn, after lengthy experimentation, to be printed in the platinum-palladium process only.  Seemingly unimportant as subject matter, these objects, in their shallow space, are richly rendered in their detail and tonal range and have become monumental objects reminiscent of classical architectural fragments.  In his introduction to Irving Penn: Photographs in Platinum Metals—Images 1947-1975, John Szarkowski addressed Penn's choices of images to be printed in platinum,

'In Penn's case, one might guess that he has only rarely enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subjects in his pictures. For him the true subject has been not haute couture or cuisine, but line, tone, shape, and patter, and the photographic intuition that will define their just relationship.'

In 1975, photographer Richard Avedon saw The Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Irving Penn: Photographs of Cigarettes, and shortly afterward purchased fifteen of the prints, each number one in the editions.  Included in his choices was the image offered here, Cigarette No. 69.