Photography review

IRVING PENN: Beyond Beauty

Lunder Arts Center, Lesley University, 1801 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, through Nov. 19. 617-349-8002, irvingpenn.gotolesley.org/

CAMBRIDGE — For six decades, two names dominated portrait and fashion photography: Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Imagine the crowd that would have gathered in the Condé Nast Building if they’d arm-wrestled to see who was first among equals. “Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty,’’ with its reminder of how far Penn’s reach extended beyond those genres, hints at who might have won. It runs at Lesley University’s Lunder Arts Center through Nov. 19.

Actually, not all of the show is at Lunder. A section consisting of Penn’s early work — it’s a real revelation — hangs next door, at the exhibition space in Lesley’s University Hall. “Beyond Beauty’’ (not the best title) requires three spaces because it’s so big. Its 143 photographs range in date from the late 1930s to 2007. Most are black and white, but with multiple striking exceptions, such as “Bee,’’ from 1995. Genres include self-portraits, nudes, still lifes, and cityscapes, as well as portraits and fashion work.

There are familiar Penn images here — the checkerboard bravura of “Harlequin Dress’’; the 1977 color still life of blocks of frozen food, like Popsicles reimagined by Richard Serra; portraits of Salvador Dali and of Truman Capote, the latter seen first as young and dangerous, then as aged and endangered. Many more images are not so familiar. The sculptor Henry Moore blurrily pedals his bicycle, in 1962. A Berber shepherdess presents a lamb for inspection, in 1971. A very red rooster has a profile more baronial than birdlike, in 2003.

The least familiar are three dozen or so from Penn’s apprentice years, in his native Philadelphia, as a budding graphic artist in New York, then traveling: in the American South, Mexico, Europe, Asia. It took a decade for his photographs to look like what we’ve come to think of as Irving Penns. Already, though, he had excellent taste in influences. The early work alternately resembles Atget, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans (the Southern ones). They demonstrate the eye for oddity and the telling detail that would make his portraits and fashion work so distinctive.

The early photographs, all in black and white, show a young man looking outward. The postwar years chart a journey to interiority. There’s the famous procedure Penn arrived at for portraits: putting his subjects in a corner, with a neutral background. His fashion work is comparably, even more effectively, self-contained. “Dorian in a Corner,’’ from 1947, featuring the fashion model Dorian Leigh, exalts the claustral, its title amounting to a reductio ad absurdum of Penn’s artistic process of the time.

Even when Penn ventures into the world, he makes it an extension of his own environment. The palatial setting in “Woman in a Moroccan Palace (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn),’’ from 1951, with his wife as model, looks practically riotous compared to Penn’s standard studio settings. But note how controlled every element is. The decorativeness is nearly arithmetical in its order.

No matter how much is going on within Penn’s frames — as in “Cuzco Street With Five People,’’ from 1948, or the thready ruination of “Camel Pack,’’ from 1975 — the images are never busy. He presents arrangements so rigorously right they have the seeming naturalness of glorious happenstance, except that they’re as natural (and stunning) as cut crystal. “Two Glasses of Water,’’ from 1970, displays a simplicity verging on disappearance — odorless and colorless. yes, and anything but tasteless.

Walter Pater said that all art aspires to the condition of music. Penn photographs, no matter how mundane the subject, even debased, aspire to the condition of fashion. That is, they aim to reveal a parallel world similar to the one the rest of us live in, only more elegant, more stylish, and with far less body mass. (That last condition makes one appreciate all the more the wit of his famously voluptuous nudes.)

As a design principle, less may or may not be more. As employed by Penn, less is indefinably luscious. It’s evident in fashion, with “Balenciaga Sleeve (Regine),’’ from 1950, or the pared-down pairing of appendages in “Glove and Shoe,’’ from 1947. Notice how neatly the footwear chimes a year later with that in “Sore Foot (Jean Patchett).’’

The principle is no less evident in still life, from the fabulous visual restraint of “Fish Bones on a Plate’’ (1993) to the Morandi-like purity of “Coffee Pot’’ (2007). Even the gleam of the surface seems disciplined.

Originating in a large donation from the Irving Penn Foundation, “Beyond Beauty’’ was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Lesley’s exhibiting it is a big step up for the university. Good for them. Good for us, too.

IRVING PENN: Beyond Beauty

At Lunder Arts Center, Lesley University, 1801 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, through Nov. 19. 617-349-8002, www.irvingpenn.gotolesley.org

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.