Phillips to Offer Prints of Irving Penn’s Harlequin Dress, Cindy Sherman Self-Portraits, and More

A 1979 platinum palladium print of Irving Penn’s iconic portrait of his wife, titled Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), takes center stage in Phillips’ upcoming Photographs sale. The famed Vogue photographer took this picture in 1950, just months after his marriage to Lisa Fonssagrives, a Swedish painter, sculptor, ballet dancer, and model. Penn experimented with platinum printing starting in the 1960s. He sought the gray scale complexities offered by the antiquated method, yielding brilliant whites and soft grays. Phillips notes that platinum palladium printing was an expensive and technically challenging task that Penn embraced in his endless pursuit of photographic mastery. On the back of this print, Penn noted that he coated and exposed the work twice on Rives paper.  

Another notable work in this sale is Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #546, a 2010 photo pair that was printed in 2012. These self-portraits are set against an Icelandic backdrop. The piece was commissioned by POP magazine. Sherman’s characters—posing awkwardly in vintage Chanel—appear larger than life in the close foreground. Notable black-and-white works in the catalog include a gelatin silver print of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico and Sohei Nishino’s high-angle view of New York City from 2006. The latter work belongs to Nishino’s dizzying Diorama Maps series. To create the available work, the artist took thousands of photos of New York from various angles, constructed a massive collage using the raw material, and then photographed the final product to create a wall-sized print. The effect is a composite view of the city as both location and living organism. Additional lots of interest include prints by Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and Peter Beard. Visit Phillips auction to view the full catalog and register to bid in this Photographs sale.