Colette & Irving 1951
Uit: “FAME” Famous Portraits of Famous People by Famous Photographers
Edited by L.Fritz Gruber The Focal Press London and New York 1960.
Irving Penn, Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Colette 1873 - 1954 French Author.
In his life of her, Paul Goudeket, her husband, writes: “She had an astonishing, revealing forehead; she knew this and would never show it. It was a vast domed brow, like Beethoven’s. Fashions might change and hair be pulled back, she always wore hers hanging down over her forehead. ‘My monstrous forehead’, she used to say. But in a woman who could say: ’Nobody can throw off his skin’, that was more than mere womanly coquetry”.
“This head and shoulders portrait isolates her from her surroundings, from her legend, and shows her to posterity as she was, stripped of her properties. She is shown half sitting, half lying. Above a mass of silks and furs her head emerges, with the chin propped up by a clenched fist. Her expression is stern and tense. Her forehead, which is almost completey uncoverd, is the high, masterful brow of genius.
The picture is striking, but is a betrayal, a violation of a secret. It reveals everything Colette wanted to conceal and of which she was only partly concious herself. One cannot say it is a good likeness. It is sexless, whereas Colette remained feminine to her last breath. The charm, the graciousness and the gently irony which were characteristic of her are missing. It is in reality a portrait of another person, of that hidden being that all of us have within us, of the person who alone could have written certain pages of Colette. What demons, showing favours to photographers, came to Mr. Penn’s help? What instinct guided him?
It is possible that Penn was unfamiliar with Colette’s work and that he was seeing the author for the first time. I cannot believe that it was pure change that helped him. A great portraitist – and there are very few of them – is a kind of waterdiviner, who sees beyond appearances”.
