The Morgan Library & Museum will play host to Close Encounters which is a showcase of sixty-seven portraits of notable artists and writers by the legendary Irving Penn. The exhibition demonstrates Penn’s incredible achievement as a portraitist, and photography’s vital role among the twentieth-century arts. The portrait subjects are chiefly writers and visual artists, with a smaller number of figures from dance, music, theater, and film. The group covers the range of Penn’s portrait production to date, beginning with a 1944 photograph of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, made in Rome, and ending with a remarkable 2006 portrait of the painter Jasper Johns, made in New York. Every decade of Penn’s work is represented in this amazing and intruiging exhibition.

The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016 / January 18 through April 13, 2008