Lot 24 D

Penn worked for Vogue for more than sixty years, during which time he created countless fashion and portrait shots, including many cover pages for the magazine. For his portrait studies, Penn preferred soft natural daylight and the sheltered and controlled environment of a studio, where he could omit anything not essential to his compositions and fine tune his motifs. In his striking and concise portraits, he repeatedly used plain, monochrome paper sheeting to isolate and stage his respective subject, freed from disturbing elements in the background - be it Marlene Dietrich (1948), the American President John F. Kennedy (1960), a Tambul warrior from Papua New Guinea (1970) or, almost thirty years later, top model Gisele Bündchen.
Particularly in his portraits of famous women, Penn reserved the right to show them in an elegiac moment: Dietrich anxiously looks into the camera an not even Gisele Bündchen features as a radiant and glamorous fashion icon, but rather as an exhausted beauty after a strenuous day at work, as if she needed to withdraw into herself into herself for a moment after a power-sapping photo session and gather her thoughts. Her head is lowered with a serious look; the hand reaches into the voluminous hair cascading over the shoulder at the neck. The motif Gisele B froms the coutenpart to the motif Gisele, which was created on the same day, in which the model poses in the classic sense with her hand on her hip and her mane of hair tossed back. The present variant is perhaps the more typical Penn and at the same time, if one considers the elegant lighting and fine grey tones, a nude photograph of exquisite brilliance an beauty.