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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Readers of Vogue know what they want from a photograph. Leaf through the recent December issue, for instance, and you will come across Mario Testino in spanking form. Italian locations, winter-busting sunlight, and a trunkful of everyday essentials, including low-slung Gucci jeans and a Vera Wang evening dress in "ivory georgette," which sounds like a rising porno star. The lucky few who manage to clamber into the crisscross black swimsuit by Michael Kors are urgently advised to "Go bronze with Neutrogena's Sunless Tanning Foam in Deep." As for the model, what can you say? Loveliness, like namelessness, is part of the deal, and, while nobody would be so cruel as to call her thin, I like to think that, should the modelling jobs ever dwindle, she could carve out a second career as a spring onion.
There is, however, another option open to you. Stroll over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and confront the work of another regular from Vogue. Consider "Nude No. 98," an image so ferociously up to the minute that it can only have been taken at least half a century ago. This model is equally nameless, but she is headless, too, and, as she lies on her side, she is cut short, along the left-hand frame, just at the meeting of her thighs. As for her clothes, she is at that unutterably fashionable stage of wearing none at all. And this is what we find: breasts the size of boxing gloves that slump away from the rib cage, plus a crease of flesh along the upper stomach, matched farther down by a kind of long smile where the navel must be concealed. If this lady ever got hold of the Neutrogena, she could Foam in Very Deep Indeed. Finally, the pubic area is tucked away in the discreet bay of shadow formed by the surrounding hills: a touching show of unwitting decorum. All in all, you might have trouble squeezing this woman into Vera Wang, and, although she gives off a sexual languor, the person most qualified to seduce her, Marcello Mastroianni, is no longer with us to try his luck. The photographer, it goes without saying, is Irving Penn.
The Met show is entitled "Earthly Bodies," and it brings together a selection of Penn's nude studies from the years 1949 and 1950. Anyone who knows anything of Penn's career will be moved to ask not "Why did he take these pictures?" or "How do they feed the flow of his aesthetic career?" but "Where on earth did he find the time?" By the summer of 1949, Penn, who was born in 1917, in New Jersey, was hitting his indefatigable stride. Having moved on from posts at Saks Fifth Avenue (where he was the advertising art director) and at Harper's Bazaar, he was now -- under the aegis of Alexander Liberman -- a formidable fixture at Vogue. Readers had already been treated to his covers, one of which had served as the first still-life to front the magazine; his great series of portraits had unveiled the royalty of the art world and other cultural domains -- Miro, Balthus, Capote, Cocteau, Graham, Schiaparelli, and a couple of heavyweight sluggers called Nathan and Mencken. Yet here he was, sneaking away to make peculiar art from women who bore neither the stamp of perfection nor the burden of fame. There were at least eight sessions, with a number of different models; Penn toiled at his task during the evenings and weekends, in the way that more diffident souls practice their woodwork or their golf swing. You don't give up the day job when the day job is at...
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