The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
1000 Fifth Avenue (at 82nd Street)
New York, NY 10028
Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has announced that the Museum will present an honorary exhibition of the photographs of Irving Penn (1917-2009) to mark the centennial of the artist’s birth.
He further announced that The Irving Penn Foundation will donate a gift of more than 150 photographs by Penn, representing every period of the great American artist’s dynamic 70-year career. The gifted photographs will form the main attraction of the exhibition that is set to open in New York on April 2017 and then travel internationally, beginning at the Grand Palais in Paris.
More than 200 photographs by Penn will comprise the exhibition, including his iconic fashion studies, color flower studies nudes; portraits of urban laborers, still life and Penn’s beloved studio portraits of cultural figures. The additional works in the exhibition will be drawn from the Museum’s prior holdings of photographs.
This exhibition will showcase the largest public collection of Penn’s work in the world. Tom Penn, the artist’s son, noted that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is well-position to curate his father’s work as they have been exhibiting his work since 1959.
