Avedon at the Met

A 55-year retrospective of photographer Richard Avedon's portraits will be on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art through Jan. 5, 2003. It is just one of the city's attractions during Visual New York's winter Store Concepts market, Dec. 5-7, 2002.

“Richard Avedon: Portraits” follows the photographer's career in portraiture beginning in the mid-1940s, just after World War Two ended. The 180 portraits, organized chronologically and by theme, include physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, writers W. H. Auden and Ezra Pound, singer Marian Anderson, actress Marilyn Monroe, President Eisenhower, writer Truman Capote, painters Willem deKooning and Andy Warhol and the Chicago Seven political activists arrested during the 1968 Democratic convention. The first photo in the series is a 1947 image of a Sicilian street child.

It's one of the few times the Met has given a major-gallery showing of the works of a living artist.

Avedon was known for intense, unadorned, mostly unposed portraits shot mostly against a white background. Though he achieved renown as one of the most celebrated portrait photographers of his time, he did not work on commission, choosing only those subjects who interested him.

Store Concepts will again be VNY's annual December tour of the industry's permanent showrooms in New York. For more information, visit www.storeconceptsinfo.com.