ART REVIEW : Durable Images From a Master : Penn Photos Blend Warmth, Weirdness

If Irving Penn has a problem, it probably resides somewhere in the realm of excess virtuosity and unusual range. Now in his mid-70s, he is still photographing for Vogue magazine, where he has been at it since 1943. That suggests he is a fashion photographer, and that’s right, but that aspect of his work plays but a scant part in the retrospective just opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Good thing, too. There is something about fashion photography that requires a serious artist to save face by making a little fun of what he is doing while simultaneously making the clothes look elegant and desirable.

The show, visiting from the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, is titled “Irving Penn Master Images.” That about sums it up. Everything he does is masterful: portraits, figure studies, nudes and still life. By now there is something classic about the work. It is slightly mannered without being stylized and mannerly without being obsequious. An inevitable comparison to Richard Avedon presents itself. Both men exhale the breath of fashion, both like to isolate subjects against plain backdrops, both managed to cross the recognition Rubicon into serious photography, seriously taken.

Avedon’s virtues lie in a kind of seductive clinical cool. If you like him, he is urbane; if not, he is snotty. Penn is woollier. There is a warmth to him, a sense of the humane that makes it easier to live with day to day than Avedon.

It’s been said Penn is preoccupied with decay. Maybe it’s just a fascination with textures. Either way it serves him well. When he showed a series of still lifes of Gargantuan cigarette butts, mangled paper cups and mud-encrusted gloves back in the ‘70s, they looked like a polite adaptation of the Earthworks and process art of the period. Now, long after Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” has sunk back into the Great Salt Lake, Penn’s process pieces have taken on the aura of something enduring--always a hard trick for photography. They certainly are about decay and decay is about death.

What kind of artist does that make Irving Penn? He’s admired a lot of modern art and let himself be influenced by it. Maybe too much sometimes. He once did a book of isolated images of flowers. None are in this retrospective. Could be he recognized that he’d just gotten too enamored of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers. By contrast, his general attraction to Surrealism has served him well because it remains substructural, lending a cryptic injection of modern weirdness to the work.

All the same, when you try to peg Penn by imagining him as a painter from any historical period you keep coming up with a French Romantic: not Delacroix, one of the more conservative buttoned-up ones who still thought about Ingres; maybe Baron Gros or Theodore Gericault. Photography’s a modern medium but, because it’s stuck with representing things, it often evokes pre-modern art.

Penn’s romanticism shows in his fascination with the exotic. In the late ‘60s he traveled a lot and came up with a quasi-ethnographic pictorial essay collected in the book “Worlds in a Small Room.” He posed indigenous types from Morocco to the Cameroon and from Extremadura to San Francisco against a plain traveling backdrop so that the whole expression is carried by features, costume and body language.

“Man in White, Woman in Black” shows a wife so veiled that only her toes hang out. The husband gets to show his face but its long-suffering countenance proves that the family powerhouse is the one not seen. His shot of Hells Angels in San Francisco is about the last of the West’s renegade outlaws and “Nubile Young Black Beauty of Diamare” would have made Gauguin sigh. Penn was in his 50s when he shot the lot but his empathy gets down the better aspirations of the Flower Power generation. It’s a wonderful collection.

Penn’s Romanticism is further confirmed in his fascination with human types and character. Thank goodness he did a series on ordinary working stiffs in London and Paris. It proves the eloquence of occupational costume and body type. An English fishmonger is rooted to sidewalk and good spirits. A Paris chimney-sweep is a powerful warlock. A pair of flour covered pastry makers make the world understand that copain means “buddy” in any language.

Here, Penn’s composition’s move back to Terborch, sounding a note of Dutch detachment. In doing them he proved something about his portraits.

Numerically, portraits dominate the exhibition, suggesting that Penn regards the genre as containing his best work. But they are all images of celebrities. By themselves they might suggest Penn as a New York society photographer buttering up the rich and famous to fuel his own career. It has happened.

But the excellence of the rest of the oeuvre buys him enough good will that we take a second look and realize the work stands as firmly on its own merit as painted portraits by committed artists.

Among the earliest is a series posing each sitter in a tight wedge-shaped intersection of two walls and floor. They seem to ask the photographic question, “How will this famous person act if backed into a corner?”

Joe Louis in boxing togs looks like a giant shy kid. E. B. White is unflappable, Marcel Duchamp likewise, but Georgia O’Keeffe is completely cowed.

For the rest, it is testament to Penn’s skill that he’s able to convey a sense of his sitters that is so convincing we believe these fleeting images have captured central qualities of their characters.

Everybody fantasizes about meeting celebrities. For those convinced they are a pack of narcissists and megalomaniacs, Penn offers arch images of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote that make one glad to have missed their acquaintance, thank you very much.

More often, he finds qualities in his subjects that would encourage you to have them to dinner any time. Woody Allen is irresistible gotten up as Charlie Chaplin. Henry Moore looks as noble as Mt. Rushmore. John Huston is so puckish that only his grizzled countenance keeps him from being downright cute.

The great strength of painting is that the best of it never seems dated. The great strength of photography is that all of it does. Penn’s suave style now talks of an earlier epoch in American photography, but it never looks quaint or stylized because he gets compassion into the foreground every time.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to Nov. 17. Closed Mondays. (213) 857-6000.