An Irving Penn portrait, from 1947, of the hulking Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and his chic wife, Dagmar, seems made for the coldest days of winter.
Every year around this time, when the air in New York City gets so cold that the tip of my nose starts to burn and my socks are always just a little bit damp, my fingers lead me to type “Freuchen and Dagmar” into a Google Images search bar. I cannot remember when I first encountered the photograph that pops up, an Irving Penn portrait, from 1947, of the six-foot-seven-inch Danish explorer Peter Freuchen and his diminutive third wife, afashion illustrator named Dagmar Cohn .
Recently, I spoke with Alexandra Dennett, the legacy-program manager for the Irving Penn Foundation, who serves as a kind of in-house researcher for the foundation. She told me that “Peter and Dagmar Freuchen” was part of a portrait series that Penn shot between 1947 and 1948, in concert with the art director of. Penn was asked to capture cultural luminaries of the time.
It makes sense that Peter Freuchen would agree to sign up for such a process: he was nothing if not tough. Freuchen, who was born in 1886, in Denmark, quit school, at the age of twenty, to sail to Greenland, as a stoker on a steamship, after seeing a student play about polar exploration and realizing that it was his life’s calling. He spent the next three decades living in and exploring some of the coldest parts of the world.
Dagmar was Freuchen’s third wife. Previously, he had married an Inuit woman, who died young, and, after her, an actress and Danish publishing heiress who, along with Freuchen, founded a women’s magazine in the nineteen-twenties. During the war, Freuchen, who had Jewish heritage, was involved in the anti-Nazi resistance . According to his memoirs, he was captured by Germans but escaped and fled, with Dagmar, to the United States.
is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered Hollywood, style, and other cultural subjects since 2012.
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