Fashion classicists and Irvin Penn fans will have to wait until 2017 for the Metropolitan’s major survey of the master photographer. In April, the museum will open an extraordinary Irving Penn retrospective to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the artist’s birth. The Met, which began acquiring Irving Penn in 1959, has presented two prior shows on the artist — 1977 and 2002 — but nothing on the scale of the centennial exhibition.

To mark the occasion, the Irving Penn Foundation has promised a landmark gift of more than 150 photographs, representing every period of Penn’s 70-year career, forming the core of the exhibition. In all, more than 200 photos will go on view, including fashion studies of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the artist’s wife; Quechua children in Cuzco, Peru; New Guinea tribesmen; color flower studies; nudes; and still lifes, as well as his studio portraits of cultural figures. It’s thought to be the largest collection of Penn’s work in the world.

Irving Penn: Centennial, April 20 – July 30, 2017, Metropolitan Museum, NYC

Ballet Society (1948), Irving Penn

Evelyn Tripp in dress by Anna Miller (1950), Irving Penn

Audrey Hepburn (1951), Irving Penn

Cigarettes (early 1960s), Irving Penn

Cuzco Children of Peru (1948), Irving Penn

Marlene Dietrich (1947), Irving Penn

Dorian Leigh in Balenciaga (1950), Irving Penn

Pablo Picasso (1957), Irving Penn

The Tarot Reader, Jean Patchett & Bridget Tichenor (1949), Irving Penn

Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea (1970), Irving Penn

Yves Saint Laurent, Irving Penn