"Colette, Paris, 1951"

Last spring, in its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired 67 of Penn’s portraits of artists, writers and musicians. (Thirty-five were donated by Mr. Penn.) The entire group is temporarily on view in “Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers,” which complements the library’s collection of 20th-century drawings, manuscripts, books and musical scores. (Photo: Irving Penn/Conde Nast Publications)

"S.J. Perelman, New York,1962"

Organized by a guest curator, Peter Barberie, “Close Encounters” encompasses work from the 1940s, when Mr. Penn first started to work for Vogue, through portraits published in The New Yorker in 2006. (Photo: Irving Penn/Conde Nast Publications)

"Igor Stravinsky, New York , 1948"

Many of the pictures at the Morgan were included in “Irving Penn: Platinum Prints” at the National Gallery in 2005, which focused on his darkroom artistry. The Morgan’s exhibition has more to do with relationships: between creative circles (Europeans and Americans); individuals (H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan; Josef Albers and Jasper Johns); and, most of all, between Mr. Penn and his exalted subjects. (Photo: Irving Penn/Conde Nast Publications)

"Francis Bacon, London, 1962" (Photo: Irving Penn/ Conde Nast Publications)

"Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1948"

Mr. Penn has been compared to Nadar, the 19th-century French photographer who made studio portraits of the Impressionists, although the comparison is superficial. He shares Nadar’s scope but not his sympathetic relationship to the sitter. Working primarily for Vogue, where he collaborated with the art director Alexander Liberman and competed with the photographer Richard Avedon, Mr. Penn developed a signature, confrontational style. (Photo: Irving Penn/ Conde Nast Publications)

"Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1948"

During the late ’40s Mr. Penn posed his subjects in austere, enclosed spaces created by movable walls and undulating sections of carpet. These backgrounds allowed him to create drama without resorting to easels, books and other props of the sort he had relied on earlier in the decade (Saul Steinberg with his sketchbook, John Cage leaning over a piano). Photo: Irving Penn/Morgan Library & Museum

"Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1957" (Photo: Iriving Penn/Morgan Library & Museum)

"Truman Capote, New York, 1948"

More important, the sense of physical confinement coaxed telling reactions from his subjects. Mr. Penn recalled in his 1991 book “Passage”: “This confinement, surprisingly, seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against.” Truman Capote slouches solicitously in his corner; Duchamp strikes a suave, Cary Grant-like pose. Georgia O’Keeffe turns her face directly at the camera but leans ever so slightly to one side, a small gesture that destabilizes the whole picture. (Photo: Irving Penn/ Morgan Library & Museum)

"Pablo Picasso, Cannes, France, 1957"

In the ’50s Mr. Penn adopted a new close-up style that remains his preferred way of working. The earliest example, a portrait of Carson McCullers (taken in 1950, but printed, like many of Mr. Penn’s works, decades later), has a haunted, confessional quality. Among the other standouts of this period is a 1957 portrait of Picasso in which his wide-open left eye appears to float between his upturned collar and the brim of his hat. (Photo: Irving Penn/Morgan Library & Museum)

“Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers” is at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, through April 13; (212) 685-0008.