Untitled

Artist Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954)

Date1990

CultureAmerican

MediumCibachrome print

ClassificationPhotographs

Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds from The Ringling Museum of Art Investment Trust Fund and The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Foundation, Inc., 1991

Object numberSN11011

Cindy Sherman is probably the most iconic of a group of artists who emerged in the seventies and eighties and have come to be known as the “Pictures Generation.” “Pictures” artists critically examined the idea of visual representation, questioning how it works and what politics might lurk behind it. From the seventies on, critics have celebrated Sherman’s conceptual photographic self-portraiture. Her work has taken many forms, from images imitating film stills to ambitious works like this in which she poses in the costume of a dour European scholar of the seventeenth century. This is one of a series of “History Portraits” in which Sherman mimics the look and scale of an Old Master painting rich with symbolism. We know from the sitter’s book, and the ones next to him, that he is a literate intellectual. He has probably dedicated a great deal of his life to his attainment of knowledge, at least his beard suggests as much. But that this is a photograph implies that it is really only someone in an historical costume. The picture reveals that while a portrait may claim to reveal the sitter’s personality, it is shaped instead by conventions of self-presentation according to gender, status, and the conventions of art.

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