PENN A LA CARTE.(Irving Penn)(Biography)

Happy pictures are all alike. Every perfectionist is unhappy in his own way, and his art reminds us that life is a losing battle. Fashion, on the other hand, is the domain of promise, where youth and beauty are perpetually solvent. The conventional purpose of fashion photography is to excite envy (the wellspring of desire) while promoting the illusion that there is almost nothing one can't have. In that sense, the fashion world is an alien habitat for an artist, and the most gifted guest workers who make a living there often attempt to flee its balminess to a more congenially cold climate: an anti-Eden where the perfect couple bicker and decay.

The photography of Irving Penn is one of the twentieth century's most important bodies of work. Penn makes a distinction between his art and the pictures of clothing or accessories, which he dismisses as "commodities," but even though the fashion photographs exist to celebrate the salable, there is always something eating at them, implacably. A disembodied tongue; a splayed peach; a grotesquely slathered maw; an insect; a spoonful of caviar glistening obscenely--all are ready to consume or to be consumed. The nude women in the black-and-white pictures that Penn was discouraged, for decades, from exhibiting (for no better reason, it appears, than that the women were headless and fat) seem to be melting under his lights like ambitious confections whose contours have only half jelled, or are half decomposed. The will, like the flesh, must sag, they suggest.

Penn was a failed painter when he embarked on his career in fashion, as an assistant art director at Vogue, sixty-one years ago. He took up a camera because the staff photographers couldn't execute a picture that he had designed for the October 1943 cover. Alexander Liberman, the senior art director, told him to give it a try. Penn produced a somewhat busy, Braque-ish still-life that evoked the front hall table of a horsey matron, and he has experimented with the genre more subversively ever since. The fastidious clutter disappeared and was replaced by the detritus of louche nights on the town; memento mori; and--in some of his most famous images--cigar butts and sodden gutter swill. Employed to purvey opulence and joie de vivre (which Penn did and does better than almost anyone else living), the modern artist out of his element and homesick for discomfiture makes an aesthetic of it. In the great pictures of Penn's wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, modelling the couture of the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, he was the first to strip the fashion photograph of a context and props. For the portraits that he took for Vogue in the same period (of nearly everyone grand and notable at mid-century), he backed his elegant subjects into a shabby corner--the acute angle formed by battered wooden panels. He photographed native warriors in masks and feathers against a drab dropcloth, as if they were Fonssagrives or Giacometti. Beauty, Penn implies, makes him claustrophobic, but he has never been able to escape it.

He is now eighty-seven, and a widower. Most of his intimates refer to him in conversation not by his first ...