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article titled “Irving Penn Is Difficult ‘Can’t You Tell?’”, Vicki Goldberg unearthed of his character, “Beneath Mr. Penn’s gentle, almost courtly manner and quiet calm lie hints of the stubbornness, the uncompromising determination and perfectionism bordering on obsession that have driven his natural gifts and earned him an international reputation.” Laser-like and austere, the portraits, “wiped the slate clean of comfortable home environments and clues to the professions of his famous subjects,” Goldberg observed. Maria Morris Hambourg, an Independent Curator who knew Penn well, points out, “The amount of freedom he had was extraordinary. The magazine was his playing field, and he could also progress because he had to work every day – for 60 years. He would describe to me the moment of taking those pictures – how he was so taken with what he was doing that he wanted to go on and on until, as he put it, something godly would happen.” It was legendary editorial director Alexander Liberman who hired Penn as an assistant at Vogue in 1943 – specifically to suggest cover ideas – and the Russian-American was a champion of modernism, ahead of his time by pushing conceptual boundaries. Even so, eventually, “Liberman said to me, ‘I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don’t like it. They say the photographs burn on the page’. After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman...” Penn recounted. He eventually conformed, “I began to do that… Up to that point I had been trying to make a picture. Then I began to try to make a commodity…” There are two understated components to his celebrated portraiture. First is Penn’s technical expertise of not only lighting and lens but of print – silver gelatin prints created a moody early look, and were replaced in the 1960s by platinum printing upon handmade paper, and never was a shortcut taken. “Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect 30