Irving Penn trained in commercial art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art while working as a freelance artist at Harper's Bazaar from 1937 to 1939. He tried his hand at a number of jobs, and spent a year painting in Mexico, but his big break came when Alexander Liberman, art director of Vogue magazine, hired him as his assistant. Penn's first cover, published in 1943, launched his career as a photographer; quickly, he became the most influential and important fashion photographer of the postwar period. His work - described in McDowell's Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion as 'simply beautiful' - has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and is held in many public collections, including those of the Museum of Modem Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Australia (which holds over 100 photographs) to name but three.
