The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Bulletin

PHOTOGRAPHS
Cindy Sherman
American, born 1954
Untitled
1989
Chromogenic print
65/z x 499/, in. (I66.4x 125.7 cm)
Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel, Mr. and Mrs.
Eugene M. Schwartz, and The Horace W. Goldsmith
Foundation Gifts, i 99
1991.1137
Cindy Sherman's rise to prominence as a major artist in the
i98os began with her fascination with the cliched depictions
of women in Grade B movies and film noir. Imitating the
technique and content of eight-by-ten-inch glossy black-andwhite
film stills, Sherman dressed, posed, and photographed
herself as a not-wholly-persuasive actress trapped in an ambivalent
role-usually caught between sex and violence.
Sherman's recent series of sham historical portraits, like the
film stills, also draws on propositions common to Pop, Conceptual,
and performance art. Sherman again used herself as
the subject, adopting costumes and poses that recall specific
or generic Old Master portraits. Lending herself to multiple
roles and rehashing famous representations of historic individuals
into troubling pastiches of obvious artificiality, Sherman
calls into question the mystique conferred by tradition.
If the vaguely Holbeinesque monk in this picture is epicurean,
androgynous, and of questionable celibacy, he/she is also
playing a role that does not entirely mask the poignant equivocation
and vulnerability of her psyche. This larger-than-life
self-portrait is thus both mocking and dead earnest. By equating
the sensuous surface realism of photography with the
beguiling styles of the Old Masters, Sherman asks the viewer
to reconsider the ways both conventional and modern media
simultaneously cloak and reveal the particular contexts and
agendas that condition the art of every epoch, including
our own.
MMH
Related references: Arthur C. Danto, Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film
Stills, New York, i990; Cindy Sherman (exhib. cat.), New York,
Whitney Museum of Art, 1987.
49