Around 1948, Penn began a series of minimalist portraits, inspired by creative director Alexander Liberman, who wanted the intellectual and artistic scene of postwar New York portrayed for Vogue. Penn had Georgia O'Keefe, Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and Truman Capote, among others, pose in a corner with white, lightly scratched partitions to lure them out of their usual poses against this mercilessly neutral background. The angle of the corner was less than 90 degrees. An old rug covered the floor. Penn placed individual fringes and threads on it (visible at the bottom in this portrait), giving texture to the monotonous surface, like a painter with a brush. It is exciting to see how the sitters related to this unforgiving and reduced backdrop. Marcel Duchamp took a positive view of the bottleneck and leaned against the wall, relaxed, all dandy, with elbow bent and pipe in hand. What the portraits have in common is the calm concentration that allows the viewer to have a serene, non-judgmental, sober, but precisely also compassionate look at the person in the picture.

LITERATUR Irving Penn, Moments Preserved, New York 1960, p. 128; John Szarkowski, Irving Penn, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1984, pl. 13; Irving Penn, Passage. A Work Record, New York 1991, p. 57; Irving Penn. A Career in Photography, Chicago 1997, p. 67.