Irving Penn: Centennial, the first big retrospective of the photographer’s work since his death in 2009, opens April 24 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Career-spanning exhibitions of any artist’s work are always illuminating—years ago, one such show taught me that Mondrian had grids on the brain even when he was a young man ostensibly painting landscapes. But this is especially so in Penn’s case. For one thing, he worked across so many genres: fashion, advertising, portraiture, ethnographic studies, nudes, still lifes, street scenes, even signage.

Penn, who cut his teeth doing fashion and editorial work, never developed an immediately recognizable signature style akin to those of contemporaries with similar backgrounds, such as Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon (a colleague of Penn’s at both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue). But as the show makes clear, Penn had a singular eye, a distinctive visual intelligence apparent from the first glance in nearly every picture on display—bold, graphic, sensuous, witty, refined. He had a signature aesthetic, for sure. But more than that, his best pictures betray a struggle between cool abstraction and messy humanity. Herewith, a few examples from this gorgeous exhibition that was thoughtfully co-curated by independent curator Maria Morris Hambourg, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, chief curator of the Met’s photography department.