Around the time Irving Penn made 1950’s The Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), one Vogue reader declared that his pictures were so intense that “they burned on the page.” Nearly 75 years later, it remains among the magazine’s most celebrated fashion photographs and, surely, Penn’s masterpiece. The picture was a collaborative affair between the image-maker and his model, who, as the title reveals, he would soon marry. Her eyes follow you like the Mona Lisa’s—to whom Time magazine had already compared her—compelling you to stare back.
An exceptional version of it can be seen this spring as London’s V&A opens the Sainsbury Gallery, its biggest space, for an epic new exhibition of photographs. At more than 300 artworks, “Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection” is the largest photographic show in the museum’s history and a glimpse into one of the finest collections in private hands. It starts at 1950, Penn’s annus mirabilis, and goes bang up to now. (“We’ve somehow managed to squeeze in a 2023 cyanotype by Meghann Riepenhoff,” says Furnish.)
In the early 1990s and just beyond, Sir Elton made several of those volte-faces that have often punctuated his collecting career. He sold nearly everything—cars, jewelry, paintings, Dresden figurines, art deco bronzes, Italian silver—to concentrate instead on acquiring photographs. Penn’s tour de force was one of his first buys.