Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled’
2008
color photograph
254.3  x 174.6 cm

“For her first exhibition of new work since 2004, Cindy Sherman will show a series of color photographs that continues her investigation into distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and aging. Typical of Sherman, these works are at once alarming and amusing, distasteful and poignant.

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has developed an extraordinary relationship with her camera. A remarkable performer, subtle distortions of her face and body are captured on camera and leave the artist unrecognizable to the audience. Her ability to drastically manipulate her age or weight, or coax the most delicate expressions from her face, is uncanny. Each image is overloaded with detail, every nuance caught by the artist’s eye. No prosthetic nose or breast, fake fingernail, sequin, wrinkle or bulge goes unnoticed by Sherman.

Sherman shoots alone in her studio acting as author, director, actor, make-up artist, hairstylist and wardrobe mistress. Each character is shot in front of a “green screen” then digitally inserted onto backgrounds shot separately. Adding to the complexity, Sherman leaves details slightly askew at each point in the process, undermining the narrative and forcing the viewer to confront the staged aspect of the work.”  

Press release at Metro Pictures Gallery

The artist Cindy Sherman is a multifaceted evocation of human identity standing in glorious and subversive Technicolor before the blank canvas of her imagination. Poststructuralist in her physical appearance (there being no one Cindy Sherman, perhaps no Sherman at all) and post-photographic in her placement in constructed environments, Sherman challenges the ritualized notions of the performative act – and destabilizes perceived notions of self, status, image and place.

The viewer is left with a sense of displacement when looking at these tableaux. The absence/presence of the artist leads the viewer to the binary opposite of rational/emotional – knowing these personae and places are constructions, distortions of a perceived reality yet emotionally attached to every wrinkle, every fold of the body at once repulsive yet seductive.

Rembrandt van Rijn
‘Self-portrait as the apostle Paul’ 1661 (left) and ‘Self-portrait as Zeuxis laughing’ 1662 (right)

They are masterworks in the manner of Rembrandt’s self portraits – deeply personal images that he painted over many years that examined the many identities of his psyche – yet somehow different. Sherman investigates the same territories of the mind and body but with no true author, no authoritative meaning and no one subject at their beating heart. Her goal is subversive. 

As Roy Boyne has observed, “The movement from the self as arcanum to the citational self, has, effectively, been welcomed, particularly in the work of Judith Butler, but also in the archetypal sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. There is a powerful logic behind this approbation. When self-identity is no longer seen as, even minimally, a fixed essence, this does not mean that the forces of identity formation can therefore be easily resisted, but it does mean that the necessity for incessant repetition of identity formation by the forces of a disciplinary society creates major opportunities for subversion and appropriation.
In the repeated semi-permanences of the citational self, there is more than a little scope for counter-performances marked, for example, by irony and contempt.”1

Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled’
2008
color photograph
177.8 x 161.3 cm

Counter performances are what Sherman achieves magnificently. She challenges a regularized and constrained repetition of norms and as she becomes her camera (“her extraordinary relationship with her camera”) she subverts its masculine disembodied gaze, the camera’s power to produce normative, powerful bodies.2 As the viewer slips ‘in the frame’ of the photograph they take on a mental process of elision much as Sherman has done when making the images – deviating from the moral rules that are impressed from without3 by living and breathing through every fold, every fingernail, every sequin of their constructed being.

M Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 15th November – 23rd December 2008

Metro Pictures Gallery
519 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011

Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10-6 PM

Gallery website with more Cindy Sherman images

1. Boyne, Roy. “Citation and Subjectivity: Towards a Return of the Embodied Will,” in Featherstone, Mike (ed.,). Body Modification. London: Sage, 2000, p.212.

2. “To the extent that the camera figures tacitly as an instrument of transubstantiation, it assumes the place of the phallus, as that which controls the field of signification. The camera thus trades on the masculine privilege of the disembodied gaze, the gaze that has the power to produce bodies, but which itself has no body.”

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993, p.136.

3. “Universal human nature is not a very human thing. By acquiring it, the person becomes a kind of construct, built up not from inner psychic propensities but from moral rules that are impressed upon him from without.”

Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1972, pp.44-45. 

Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled’
2008

Installation view of Cindy Sherman exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, 2008

More images are Metro Pictures Gallery website

Exhibition dates: 27th March – 14th June, 2009

I have collected a few photographs that appear in the exhibition.

“Photographs from the MoMA, which will provide an in-depth look at an essential component of the MoMA’s assets: its photography collection. Curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the museum’s department of photography, the exhibition offers an overview of the history of photography through the work of over 90 artists, with the iconic city as a backdrop. It includes some of the most prestigious names in photography, such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walter Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Cindy Sherman, Irving Penn and Alfred Stieglitz.

Paul Strand
‘Wall Street’
1915

Ted Croner
‘Central Park South’
1947-48

For Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, “Portraits of New York amply reflects the history of synergies of this medium and of the Big Apple during a period of important transformations for both. The photographs generated by the restless and constant commitment of numerous photographers to the city of New York have played a fundamental role in determining how New Yorkers perceive the city and themselves. These photographs have also defined the city’s image in the world’s imagination.

[…] The urban landscape of the city is a combination of the old and the new in constant evolution, and these physical transformations are repeated in the demographic changes that have characterised the city since the 1880s, when massive waves of immigrants began to arrive. This same diversity can be seen in the photography of New York of the past four decades. Just as its architects are inspired and limited by surrounding structures and building codes, and just as its inhabitants learn and rub up against each other and previous generations, so too the photographers of New York transport the visual memory of a an extensive and extraordinary repertoire of images of the city. They take on the challenge of creating new works that go beyond traditions and respond to what is new in New York.

Bernice Abbott
‘Nightview, New York City’
1932

The exhibition curator continues: “Throughout the 20th century, numerous artists have felt inspired by New York’s combination of glamour and rawness. The city – which acquired its modernity at the same pace as photography, and in an equally impetuous and undisciplined way – has always been a theme of particular vitality for photographers, both those who have visited the city and those who live in it. On one occasion, faced with the challenge of capturing the essence of New York with a camera, the photographer Berenice Abbott wondered, “How shall the two-dimensional print in black and white suggest the flux of activity of the metropolis, the interaction of human beings and solid architectural constructions, all impinging upon each other in time?” Each of the photographs reproduced here is a unique response to that question.

Arthur (Weegee) Fellig
‘Coney Island’
1940

Diane Arbus
‘Woman with Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C’
1968

New York may not be the capital of the United States, but it prides itself on being the capital of the world. Its inhabitants are intimate strangers, its avenues are constantly teeming and its buildings are absolutely unmistakeable, though they are packed so close together that it is impossible to see just one. The New York subway runs twenty-four hours a day, which has earned it the sobriquet of “the city that never sleeps.” It is the model for Gotham City, the disturbing metropolis that Batman calls home, and a symbol of independence and a wellspring of opportunities in a wide variety of films, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Working Girl. And this is just a sample of the captivating and abundant raw material that the city offers to artists, regardless of the medium in which they work. However, it is the convergence of photographers in this city – in this place that combines anonymity and community, with its local flavour and global ambitions – that has created the ideal setting for the development of modern photography.”

Text from the La Casa Encendida website

Bruce Davidson
‘Untitled’ from the ‘Brooklyn Band’ series
1959

Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled Film Still #21′
1978

La Casa Encendida

Ronda Valencia, 2 28012 Madrid
La Casa Encendida is open from Monday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the year except national and Community of Madrid holidays.

Exhibition dates: 25th November 2009 – 7th February 2010

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Many thankx to Monica Cullinane and the Irish Museum of Modern Art for allowing me the reproduce photographs from the exhibition below.

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Times Wide World Photos
American, active 1919 – 1941
Mr. and Mrs. Joe Louis Out for a Stroll
September 25, 1935
Gelatin silver print, 8 ¾ x 6 5/8″ (22.2 x 16.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The New York Times Collection.

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Helen Levitt
American, 1913-2009
New York
1982
Gelatin silver print, 9 9/16 x 6 7/16″ (24.3 x 16.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Marvin Hoshino in memory of Ben Maddow
© 2009 The Estate of Helen Levitt, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Louis Stettner
American, born 1922
Manhattan from the Promenade, Brooklyn, New York
1954
Gelatin silver print, 12 1/4 x 18 1/4″ (31.1 x 46.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer in memory of his brother, David Stettner
© 2009 Louis Stettner, courtesy Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York

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Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled Film Still #21′
1978

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“An exhibition of 145 masterworks from the photographic collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York , celebrating the architecture and life of that unique city from the 1880s to the present day, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday, November 25, 2009. “Picturing New York” draws on one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary photography in the world to celebrate the long tradition of photographing New York, a tradition that continues to frame and influence our perception of the city to this day. Presenting the work of some 40 photographers including such influential figures as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model, Alfred Stieglitz and Cindy Sherman, the exhibition features both the city and its inhabitants, from its vast, overwhelming architecture to the extraordinary diversity of its people.

The exhibition reflects photographers’ ongoing fascination with New York, a city whose vitality, energy, dynamism and sheer beauty have also inspired innumerable artists, writers, filmmakers and composers. New York’s unique architecture is explored, from elegant skyscrapers to small shop fronts; likewise the life of its citizens, from anonymous pedestrians to celebrities and politicians. The city’s characteristic optimism is caught time and again in these images, even in those taken in difficult times. Together, they present a fascinating history of the city over more than a century, from Jacob Riis’s 1888 view of bandits on the Lower East Side to Michael Wesely’s images taken during the recent expansion at MoMA.

The photographs reveal New York as a city of contrasts and extremes through images of towering buildings and tenements, party-goers and street-dwellers, hurried groups and solitary individuals. “Picturing New York” suggests the symbiosis between the city’s progression from past to present and the evolution of photography as a medium and as an art form. Additionally, these photographs of New York contribute significantly to the notion that the photograph, as a work of art, is capable of constructing a sense of place and a sense of self.

“I am thrilled that ‘Picturing New York ‘will be presented in Dublin  – a city whose vitality, grit, and vibrant artistic community resonates with that of New York ,” said Sarah Meister, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Photography, who organized the exhibition. “In addition, the layout and scale of the galleries at IMMA will allow this story – of New York and photography becoming modern together throughout the twentieth century – to unfold as if chapter by chapter.”

Press release from the Irish Museum of Modern Art website

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Jacob Riis
‘Bandit’s Roost at 59½ Mulberry Street’
1888

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Lewis W. Hine
American, 1874–1940
Welders on the Empire State Building
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print, 10 5/8 x 13 5/8″ (27 x 34.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund

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Dan Weiner
American, 1919–1959
New Year’s Eve, Times Square
1951
Gelatin silver print, 9 1/4 x 13 3/16″ (23.5 x 33.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Sandra Weiner
© 2009 Estate of Dan Weiner

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Unknown
‘Brooklyn Bridge’
1914

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Weegee (Arthur Fellig)
American, born Austria. 1899–1968
Coney Island
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print, 10 5/16 x 13 11/16″ (26.2 x 34.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous gift

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Irish Museum of Modern Art/Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann
Royal Hospital
Military Road
Kilmainham
Dublin 8
Ireland
Telephone : +353-1-612 9900

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm

Irish Museum of Modern Art website

Exhibition dates: 7th May, 2010 – 4th April 2011

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I wish there had been at least double the number of photographs in this posting!

Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954)
Untitled #92
1981
Chromogenic color print
24 x 47 15/16″ (61 x 121.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Fellows of Photography Fund
© 2010 Cindy Sherman

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Nan Goldin (American, born 1953)
Nan One Month After Being Battered
1984
Silver dye bleach print (printed 2008)
15 1/2 x 23 1/8″ (39.4 x 58.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© 2010 Nan Goldin

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Ilse Bing (American, born Germany. 1899-1998)
Self-Portrait in Mirrors
1931
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 12″ (26.8 x 30.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Joseph G. Mayer Fund
© 2010 The Ilse Bing Estate / Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery

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“The Museum of Modern Art draws from its rich collection of photography to present the history of the medium from the dawn of the modern period to the present with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, from May 7 to August 30, 2010. Filling the entire third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries with photographs made exclusively by women artists, this installation comprises more than 200 works by approximately 120 artists, including a selection of exceptional recent acquisitions and works on view for the first time by such artists as Anna Atkins, Claude Cahun, Rineke Dijkstra, VALIE EXPORT, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, and Judith Joy Ross. The exhibition also includes masterworks by such luminaries as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Gertrude Käsebier, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as pictures, collages, video, and photography-based installations drawn from other curatorial departments by artists such as Hannah Höch, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Yoko Ono, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; Sarah Meister, Curator; and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries comprise a circuit of six rooms devoted to a rotating selection of photographs from the Museum’s collection. The galleries featuring works from 1850 to the 1980s open on May 7, 2010, and remain on view through March 21, 2011. The most contemporary works in the exhibition are currently on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, and they remain on view through August 30, 2010.

For much of photography’s 170-year history, women have contributed to its development as both an art form and a means of communication, expanding its parameters by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Self-portraits and representations of women by a variety of women practitioners are a recurring motif, as seen in works by artists ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron to Lucia Moholy, and from Germaine Krull to Katy Grannan. Significant groups of works by individual photographers are highlighted within this chronological survey, including in-depth presentations of the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, Käsebier, Modotti, Lange, Levitt, Arbus, Goldin, and Ross.

Marking the entrance to The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries is a large-scale photographic wallpaper, Fluxus Wallpaper, realized by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas in the early 1970s. This work depicts the serial repetition of a set of buttocks, an image originating from a provocative Fluxus film made by Ono in 1966.

Pictures by Women opens with a gallery of nineteenth and early twentieth-century work, representing the variety of photography’s applications. The earliest photograph in the installation was made in the 1850s by British photographer Anna Atkins, who used the cyanotype process to record her many plant specimens. Presented side by side are in-depth groupings of work by American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier. In 1899 the Hampton Institute commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school that were featured in an exhibition about contemporary African American life at the Paris Exposition of 1900. On view is a selection of pictures taken from a larger album of 156, which exemplify Johnston’s talent for balancing pictorial delicacy and classical composition with the demands of working on assignment. Käsebier – another woman who produced photographic works of art while operating a successful commercial studio – is best known for her portraits and symbolic, soft-focus pictures of the mother-and-child theme.

The rise of photographic modernism in the 1920s and 1930s is traced in the second gallery primarily with the work of European women artists. A wall of portraits of women showing the range of artistic expression and experimentation during this period includes Claude Cahun’s radical gender-bending self-portrait in drag (1921); Lucia Moholy’s striking portrait of fellow Bauhaus student Florence Henri (1927); and Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (1930), a collage evoking the modern woman. Included here is also a photocollage by the little known Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, titled In Love (1953). Cannibalizing images from U.S. magazines such as Life and Vogue, this surreal collage represents a young Japanese woman’s perception of the Western way of life. A group of pictures taken in Mexico in the late 1920s by Italian photographer Tina Modotti possess an aesthetic clarity and beauty that reflect her increasing political involvement within her adopted country. Also included is Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1931), a picture staging a complex mise-en-scène between two reflections – one in the mirror and the other in the camera’s eye – as well as similarly powerful works by Imogen Cunningham, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, and Lee Miller, who experimented with mobile perspectives of the handheld camera and graphic compositions.

The third gallery features photographers who devoted themselves to the complex challenge of exploring the social world in the interwar and postwar periods. Largely comprising work by American women, this gallery includes comprehensive presentations of two of America’s leading photographers, Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt. The breadth of Lange’s accomplishments is represented through a selection of approximately 20 photographs, all of women, including her iconic Depression-era picture Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936); the memorable One Nation, Indivisible, San Francisco (1942); and pictures capturing the bustle of postwar life in America, such as Mother and Child, San Francisco (1952). Opposite these works is a wall of color photographs taken by Levitt in the 1970s on the streets of New York City. These lively, spontaneous pictures are full of humor and drama, and continue the rich tradition of the American documentary genre that Levitt helped establish in the 1940s with her black-and-white photographs. The rest of the gallery includes a variety of work made during the period, including Berenice Abbott’s documents of the changing architecture and character of New York City in the 1930s, and Barbara Morgan’s elegant 1940 photograph of dancer Martha Graham performing her dramatic piece “Letter to the World,” based on the love life of American poet Emily Dickinson.

Photography’s documentary tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, most notably with a selection of Diane Arbus’s portraits of women, such as A Widow in Her Bedroom, New York City (1963); Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1966); and Girl in Her Circus Costume, Maryland (1967). This gallery also includes work by artists of the 1960s and 1970s who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool for appropriating and manipulating existing photographs. Examples include Martha Rosler’s collage Cleaning the Drapes (1969 – 72), which juxtaposes images of domestic bliss taken from women’s magazines with news pictures of the war in Vietnam. The gallery also introduces several notable examples of acts performed for the camera, including Adrian Piper’s self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and VALIE EXPORT’s provocative Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Presented as a set of posters, this work memorialized a performance in which the Austrian artist marched into an experimental art-film house in Munich wearing crotchless trousers, challenging mostly male viewers to “look at the real thing” instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.

The emergence of color photography as a major force in the 1970s is seen in the fifth gallery, with large photographs, including Tina Barney’s Sunday New York Times (1982) and a picture from Cindy Sherman’s celebrated Centerfolds (1981) series. This gallery also includes the work of postmodern artists associated with The Pictures Generation, such as Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Laurie Simmons, who played with photography’s potential to comment on the increasingly image-saturated world of the late twentieth century. Representing the other end of the photographic spectrum is the diaristic aesthetic of Nan Goldin. A group of Goldin photographs dating from 1978 to 1985 capture the shared experience of an artistic downtown New York community – a generation ravaged by drug abuse and AIDS. These pictures of the artist’s friends, lovers, and Goldin herself explore the highs and the lows of amorous relationships. These are presented opposite work by Gay Block, Sally Mann, and Sheron Rupp, who use the probing vision of straightforward photography to explore the world around us.

Concluding the installation in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery are major groups of works that suggest the diversity of artistic strategies and forms in contemporary photography. A group of Judith Joy Ross portraits of very different women – a graduation guest (1993), a soldier (1990), a congresswoman (1987), and a visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1984) – invite us to reflect upon the relationship between social roles and the unique identities of the individuals who fulfill them. Presented on the same wall is Rineke Dijkstra’s ongoing series Almerisa, comprising 11 photographs made over a period of 14 years. Dijkstra first photographed Almerisa – a six-year-old Bosnian girl whose family had relocated from their war-torn native country to Amsterdam – as part of a project documenting children of refugees. Dijkstra continued to photograph her at one- or two-year intervals, chronicling not only her development from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood but also her cultural assimilation from Eastern to Western Europe. A selection from Carrie Mae Weems’s series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995) superimpose sand-blasted text over found photographs to dissect photography’s historical role in imposing stereotypes upon African Americans. Rounding out this gallery is a wall dedicated to portraits of women, including work by Valérie Belin, Tanyth Berkeley, Katy Grannan, and Cindy Sherman, suggesting the plasticity of photography and, indeed, of female identity itself.”

Press release from the MOMA website

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Tina Modotti
Workers Parade
1926
Gelatin silver print
8 7/16 x 7 5/16″ (21.5 x 18.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously

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Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Manger
1899
Platinum print
12 13/16 x 9 5/8″ (32.5 x 24.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner

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Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Untitled
c. 1867
Albumen silver print
13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Shirley C. Burden

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Lucia Moholy (British, 1894-1989)
Untitled (Florence Henri)
1927
Gelatin silver print
14 5/8 x 11″ (37.1 x 28 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2010 Lucia Moholy Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York
NY 10019
(212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
Wednesday through Monday: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Friday: 10:30 a.m.-8:00 p.m.
Closed Tuesday

MOMA website

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Exhibition dates: 16th April – 10th July 2011

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Many thankx to Tansy Curtin, Senior Curator, Programs and Access at Bendigo Art Gallery for her time and knowledge when I visited the gallery; and to Bendigo Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Gertrude Käsebier
The Sketch (Beatrice Baxter)
1903
platinum print
Gift of Hermine Turner
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

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Dorothea Lange
Kern County California
1938
gelatin silver print
Exchange with Roy Stryker
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

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Ansel Adams
Winter Storm
1942

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Diane Arbus
Untitled (6)
1971

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This is a fabulous survey exhibition of the great artists of 20th century American photography, a rare chance in Australia to see such a large selection of vintage prints from some of the masters of photography. If you have a real interest in the history of photography you must see this exhibition, showing as it is just a short hour and a half drive (or train ride) from Melbourne at Bendigo Art Gallery.

I talked with the curator, Tansy Curtin, and asked her about the exhibition’s gestation. This is the first time an exhibition from the George Eastman House has come to Australia and the exhibition was 3-4 years in the making. Tansy went to George Eastman House in March last year to select the prints; this was achieved by going through solander box after solander box of vintage prints and seeing what was there, what was available and then making work sheets for the exhibition – what a glorious experience this would have been, undoing box after box to reveal these magical prints!

The themes for the exhibition were already in the history of photography and Tansy has chosen almost exclusively vintage prints that tell a narrative story, that make that story accessible to people who know little of the history of photography. With that information in mind the exhibition is divided into the following sections:

Photography becomes art; The photograph as social document; Photographing America’s monuments; Abstraction and experimentation; Photojournalism and war photography; Fashion and celebrity portraiture; Capturing the everyday; Photography in colour; Social and environmental conscience; and The contemporary narrative.

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There are some impressive, jewel-like contact prints in the exhibition. One must remember that, for most of the photographers working after 1940, exposure, developing and printing using Ansel Adams Zone System (where the tonal range of the negative and print can be divided into 11 different ‘zones’ from 0 for absolute black and to 10 for absolute white) was the height of technical sophistication and aesthetic choice, equal to the best gaming graphics from today’s age. It was a system that I used in my black and white film development and printing. Film development using a Pyrogallol staining developer (the infamous ‘pyro’, a developer I tried to master without success in a few trial batches of film) was also technically difficult but the ability of this developer to obtain a greater dynamic range of zones in the film itself was outstanding.

“The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results… An expressive image involves the arrangement and rendering of various scene elements according to photographer’s desire. Achieving the desired image involves image management (placement of the camera, choice of lens, and possibly the use of camera movements) and control of image values. The Zone System is concerned with control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired. Anticipation of the final result before making the exposure is known as visualization.”1

Previsualisation, the ability of the photographer to see ‘in the mind’s eye’ the outcome of the photograph (the final print) before even looking through the camera lens to take the photograph, was an important skill for most of these photographers. This skill has important implications for today’s photographers, should they choose to develop this aspect of looking: not as a mechanistic system but as a meditation on the possibilities of each part of the process, the outcome being an expressive print.

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A selection of the best photographs in the exhibition could include,

1. An original 1923 Alfred Steiglitz Equivalent contact print  - small (approx 9cm x 12cm, see below), intense, the opaque brown blacks really strong, the sun shining brightly through the velvety clouds. In the Equivalents series the photograph was purely abstract, standing as a metaphor for another state of being, in this case music. A wonderful melding of the technical and the aesthetic the Equivalents’ “are generally recognized as the first photographs intended to free the subject matter from literal interpretation, and, as such, are some of the first completely abstract photographic works of art.”2

2. Paul Strand Blind (1915, printed 1945) – printed so dark that you cannot see the creases in the coat of the blind woman with a Zone 3 dark skin tone.

3. Lewis Hine [Powerhouse mechanic] see below, vintage 1920 print full of subtle tones. Usually when viewing reproductions of this image it is either cropped or the emphasis is on the body of the mechanic; in this print his skin tones are translucent, silvery and the emphasis is on the man in unison with the machine. The light is from the top right of the print and falls not on him directly, but on the machinery at upper right = this is the emotional heart of this image!

4. Three tiny vintage Tina Modotti prints from c. 1929 – so small, such intense visions. I have never seen one original Modotti before so to see three was just sensational.

5. Walker Evans View of Morgantown, West Virginia vintage 1935 print – a cubist dissection of space and the image plane with two-point perspective of telegraph pole with lines.

6. An Edward S. Curtis photogravure Washo Baskets (1924, from the portfolio The North American Indian) – such a sumptuous composition and the tones…

7. Ansel Adams 8″ x 10″ contact print of Winter Storm (1944, printed 1959, see above) where the blackness of the mountain on the left hand side of the print was almost impenetrable and, because of the large format negative, the snow on the rock in mid-distance was like a sprinkling of icing sugar on a cake it was that sharp.

8. A most splendid print of the Chrysler Building (vintage 1930 print, approx. 48 x 34  cm) by Margaret Bourke-White – tonally rich browns, smoky, hazy city at top; almost like a platinum print rather than a silver gelatin photograph. The bottom left of the print was SO dark but you could still see into the shadows just to see the buildings.

9. An original Robert Capa 1944 photograph from the Omaha Beach D Day landings !!

10. Frontline soldier with canteen, Saipan (1944, vintage print) by W Eugene Smith where the faces of the soldiers were almost Zone 2-3 and there was nothing in the print above zone 5 (mid-grey) – no physical and metaphoric light.

11. One of the absolute highlights: two vintage Edward Weston side by side, the form of one echoing the form of the other; Nude from the 50th Anniversary Portfolio 1902 – 1952 (1936, printed 1951), an 8″ x 10″ contact print side by side with an 8″ x 10″ contact print of Pepper No. 30 (vintage 1930 print). Nothing over zone 7 in the skin tones of the nude, no specular highlights; the sensuality in the pepper just stunning – one of my favourite prints of the day – look at the tones, look at the light!

12. Three vintage Aaron Siskind (one of my favourite photographers) including two early prints from 1938 – wow. Absolutely stunning.

13. Harry Callahan. That oh so famous image of Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (vintage 1953 print) that reminds me of the work of Jeffrey Smart (or is it the other way around). The wonderful space around the figures, the beautiful composition, the cobblestones and the light – just ravishing.

14. The absolute highlight: Three vintage Diane Arbus prints in a row – including a 15″ square image from the last series of work Untitled (6) (vintage 1971 print, see above) – the year in which she committed suicide. This had to be the moment of the day for me. This has always been one of my favourite photographs ever and it did not disappoint; there was a darkness to the trees behind the three figures and much darker grass (zone 3-4) than I had ever imagined with a luminous central figure. The joyousness of the figures was incredible. The present on the ground at the right hand side was a reveleation – usually lost in reproductions this stood out from the grass like you wouldn’t believe in the print. Being an emotional person I am not afraid to admit it, I burst into tears…

15. And finally another special…. Two vintage Stephen Shore chromogenic colour prints from 1976 where the colours are still true and have not faded. This was incredible – seeing vintage prints from one of the early masters of colour photography; noticing that they are not full of contrast like a lot of today’s colour photographs – more like a subtle Panavision or Technicolor film from the early 1960s. Rich, subtle, beautiful hues. For a contemporary colour photographer the trip to Bendigo just to see these two prints would be worth the time and the car trip/rail ticket alone!

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Not everything is sweetness and light. The print by Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California is a contemporary print from 2003, the vintage print having just been out on loan; the contemporary section, The contemporary narrative, is very light on, due mainly to the nature of the holdings of George Eastman House; and there are some major photographers missing from the line up including Minor White, Fredrick Sommer, Paul Caponigro, Wynn Bullock and William Clift to name just a few.

Of more concern are the reproductions in the catalogue, the images for reproduction supplied by George Eastman House and the catalogue signed off by them. The reproduction of Margaret Bourke-White’s Chrysler Building (1930, see below) bears no relationship to the print in the exhibition and really is a denigration to the work of that wonderful photographer. Other reproductions are massively oversized, including the Alfred Stieglitz Equivalent, Lewis Hine’s Powerhouse mechanic (see below) and Tina Modotti’s Woman Carrying Child (c.1929). In Walter Benjamin’s terms (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) the aura of the original has been lost and these reproductions further erode the authenticity of the original in their infinite reproducability. Conversely, it could be argued that the reproduction auraticizes the original:

“The original artwork has become a device to sell its multiply-reproduced derivatives; reroductability turned into a ploy to auraticize the original after the decay of aura…”3

In other words, after having seen so many reproductions when you actually see the original –  it is like a bolt of lightning, the aura that emanates from the original. This is so true of this exhibition but it still begs the question: why reproduce in the catalogue at a totally inappropriate size? Personally, I believe that the signification of the reproduction (in terms of size and intensity of visualisation) is so widely at variance with the original one must question the decision to reproduce at this size knowing that this variance is a misrepresentation of the artistic interpretation of the author.

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In conclusion, this is a sublime exhibition well worthy of the time and energy to journey up to Bendigo to see it. A true lover of classical American black and white and colour photography would be a fool to miss it!

Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Actual size of print: 9.2 x 11.8 cm

Size of print in catalogue: 18.5 x 13.9 cm

These two photographs represent a proportionate relation between the two sizes as they appear in print and catalogue but because of monitor resolutions are not the actual size of the two prints.

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Alfred Stieglitz
Equivalent
1923
gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film 

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Actual size of print: 16.9 x 11.8 cm

Size of print in catalogue: 23.2 x 15.8 cm

These two photographs represent a proportionate relation between the two sizes as they appear in print and catalogue but because of monitor resolutions are not the actual size of the two prints.

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Lewis Hine
[Powerhouse mechanic]
1920
gelatin silver print
Transfer from the Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee, ex-collection Corydon Hine
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

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As it approximately appears in the exhibition (above, from my notes, memory and comparing the print in the exhibition with the catalogue reproduction)

Below, as the reproduction appears in the catalogue (scanned)

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Margaret Bourke-White
Chrysler Building
New York City
1930
Silver gelatin photograph

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“An exhibition of treasures from arguably the world’s most important photographic museum, George Eastman House, has been developed by Bendigo Art Gallery. The exhibition American Dreams will bring, for the first time, eighty of some of the most iconic photographic images from the 20th Century to Australia.

The choice of works highlights the trailblazing role these American artists had on the world stage in developing and shaping the medium, and the impact these widely published images had on the greater community.

Curator Tansy Curtin, who worked closely with George Eastman House developing the exhibition commented, “Through these images we can recognise the extraordinary ability of these artists, and their pivotal role influencing the evolution of photography. Their far-reaching images helped shape American culture, and impacted on the fundamental role photography has in communications today. Even more than this we can see through these artists the burgeoning love of photography that engaged a nation.”

Through these images we can see not only the development of photography, but also as some of the most powerful social documentary photography of last century, we see extraordinary moments captured in the lives of a wide range of Americans. The works distil the dramatic transformation that affected people during the 20th century – the affluence, degradation, loss, hope and change – both personally and throughout society.

The role of photography in nation building is exemplified in Ansel Adams’ majestic portraits of Yosemite national park, Bourke-White’s Chrysler building and images of migrants and farm workers during the Depression. Tansy Curtin added, “We see the United States ‘growing up’ through photography. We see hopes raised and crushed and the inevitable striving for the American Dream.” Director of Bendigo Art Gallery Karen Quinlan said, “We are thrilled to have been given this unprecedented opportunity to work with this unrivalled photographic archive. The resulting exhibition ‘American Dreams’, represents one of the most important and comprehensive collections of American 20th Century photography to come to Australia.”

George Eastman House holds over 400,000 images from the invention of photography to the present day. George Eastman, one time owner of the home in which the archives are housed, founded Kodak and revolutionised and democratised photography around the world. Eastman is considered the grandfather of snapshot photography.

American Dreams is one of the first exhibitions from this important collection to have been curated by an outside institution. It will be the first time Australian audiences have been given the opportunity to engage with this vast archive.”

Press release from the Bendigo Art Gallery

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Alfred Steiglitz
[Georgia O'Keefe hand on back tire of Ford V8]
1933
gelatin silver print
Part purchase and part gift from Georgia O’Keefe
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

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Walker Evans
Torn Poster, Truro, Massachusetts
1930
gelatin silver contact print
Purchased with funds from National Endowment for the Arts
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

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Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
1936, printed c2003
photogravure print
Gift of Sean Corcoran
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

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1. Anon. “Zone System,” on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 13/06/2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_System

2. Anon. “Equivalents,” on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 13/06/2011. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalents

3. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 23-24.

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Bendigo Art Gallery
42 View Street Bendigo
Victoria Australia 3550
T: 03 5434 6088

General admission fees for this exhibition
Adults - $12
Concession/tertiary - $10
Primary/secondary - $4

Opening hours:
Bendigo Art Gallery is open daily 10am to 5pm

Bendigo Art Gallery website

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Exhibition dates: February 2011 – end of the year

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A bumper posting from an exhibition highlighting a collection of over 100,000 photographs – how lucky are they! Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Another Story: Possessed by the Camera

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Annika von Hausswolff
‘I Am the Runway of Your Thoughts’
2008
© Annika von Hausswolff

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Andreas Gursky
‘Bibliothek’
1999
© Andreas Gursky/BUS 2011

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Candida Höfer
‘The Louvre in Paris X 2005 – the caryatid hall’
2005
© Candida Höfer/BUS 2011

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Thomas Ruff
‘Häuser Nummer 9′
1989
© Thomas Ruff/BUS 2011

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Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled’
2008
© Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

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“In 2011, Moderna Museet’s new directors, Daniel Birnbaum and Ann-Sofi Noring, will launch a new presentation of the collection. Another Story gives a fresh angle on art history, based on works from the Moderna Museet collection. We will start by focusing on photography, which will gradually be given a more prominent position, only to fill the entire exhibition of the permanent collection this autumn.

If you want an art collection to develop and stay alive, it can’t remain static. You need to present it in new ways and look at it from new angles. That may sound obvious, but it is not that common. In 2011, Moderna Museet will take a radical step, with Another Story. Photography from the Moderna Museet Collection. This is possibly the most extreme re-hanging of the collection undertaken in the history of the museum.

There is a growing interest in photography today, as proven by the panoply of exhibitions, fairs and festivals throughout the world. And this is hardly surprising. Nowadays, practically everyone is a photographer, at the very least snapping pictures with the camera built into most mobiles.

Moderna Museet’s collection of photography, ranging from 1840 to the present day, is one of the finest in Europe, featuring many of the most prominent names in photo history and comprising more than 100,000 photographs. The collection provides a historic background to the art of photography, and now we are sharing this with all our visitors. Moreover, several magnificent private donations have recently enriched the collection with works by famous artists practising in the field of photography.

Moderna Museet has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, ranging from 1840 to the present day. Many of the most famous names in photographic history are represented, and the collection comprises more than 100,000 works. The re-hanging of the permanent collection exhibition will be done in three stages. In February, we will open the first part, Another Story: Possessed by the Camera, which presents contemporary photography-based art. Just before summer, we open Another Story: See the World!, presenting the period 1920-1980. This autumn, finally, we look at the early days of photography. Another Story: Written in Light presents the pioneers of photography from 1840 to the first three decades of the 20th century. In autumn 2011 and for the rest of the year, the entire permanent collection exhibition will consist of photography and photo-based art.”

Text from the Moderna Museet website

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Another Story: See the World!

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Aleksandr Rodtjenko
‘Sjukov-masten, radiomast i Moskva’
1929
© Aleksandr Rodtjenko

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August Sander
‘Die elegante Frau – Sekrutärin beine WDR’
1927/ca.1975
© August Sander/BUS 2011

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Christer Strömholm
‘Barcelona’
1959
© Christer Strömholm/Bildverksamheten Strömholm

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Christer Strömholm
‘Hiroshima’
1963/1981
© Christer Strömholm/Bildverksamheten Strömholm

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Irving Penn
‘Frozen Foods with String Beans, New York, 1977′
1977
© Irving Penn Foundation

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Irving Penn
‘Mouth (for L’Oréal), New York, 1986′
1986
© Irving Penn Foundation

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Another Story: Written in Light

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Julia Margaret Cameron
‘The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty’
1866
© Julia Margaret Cameron

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Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.

Opening hours:
Tuesday 10-20
Wednesday-Sunday 10-18
Monday closed

Moderna Museet website

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Exhibition dates: 18th February 2012 – 22nd April 2012

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Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

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Samuel Fosso
Sans titre. De la série Années 70
1970-1980
© Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/Paris

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Robert Mapplethorpe
Patti Smith
1979
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

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Robert Mapplethorpe
Self Portrait
1980
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

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Seydou Keïta
Untitled #419
1950-1952
© Seydou Keïta Foundation, Bamaho, Mali

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Seydou Keïta
Untitled #420
1950-1952
© Seydou Keïta Foundation, Bamaho, Mali

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“This spring we will be showing more than forty photographs from the period 1950-90 taken by leading artists such as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Fosso, Tracey Moffatt, and Elina Brotherus. The exhibition focuses on the art of portrait photography and how the artist in his or her studio creates images that depict people not just as they actually are, but also as they would like to appear.

Moderna Museet’s collection of photography is among the foremost in Europe, it includes some of the most prominent figures in the history of photography. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe are all big names in photography, artists whose work often revolves around concepts of identity, sexuality, and performativity. The photography studio is a place for masquerades and manipulations, a stage where various identities and roles can be tested. It therefore problematizes the idea that a portrait is meant to convey some truth about the subject’s inner life. How do we distinguish a staged scene from reality? Is it even possible to make such a distinction? How free are we to form our own identity? If it’s a matter of choosing a role, what roles are available to us?

Andy Warhol’s Polaroid pictures, whose title, Ladies and Gentlemen, has also provided the name for the exhibition, are examples of his interest in – or rather his obsession with – celebrities. From industrial magnates to movie stars, from rock musicians to the “superstar” friends who hung out around the Factory, his fabled studio. In the world of pop art and popular culture, surface is everything. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are instead classically composed – stylized and aesthetically formed. In the controlled environment and lighting of the photo studio, he strives not for realism but for beauty. Here role-play becomes a part of the picture’s constructed character.

In Cindy Sherman’s suite of images called Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), she plays with film clichés. The scenes and characters in her photographs seem familiar, but in fact it’s always Sherman herself we see in the leading role. Using the camera as a mirror, she takes on and explores various roles. It’s a game of trying on identities that is familiar to teenagers in particular the world over, a game we play in an attempt to find ourselves, or rather to construct an individual identity. One of the many ways in which Sherman’s pictures have been interpreted is as a feminist critique of the limited number of roles available to women.

This exhibition also presents several works by Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Samuel Fosso, studio photographers who work primarily with portrait photography. Keïta’s studio was next-door to a movie theater in Bamako, the capitol city of Mali. Sidibé takes pictures not just in his studio but also at weddings and other parties. His photographs from Bamako in the 1960s reflect the great hope that came with liberation from French colonial power. Fosso opened his studio in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, when he was still a teenager. He is best known for a series of self-portraits in which he dons a variety of outfits to assume different roles.”

Press release from the Moderna Museet website

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Elina Brotherus
Honeymoon (detail)
1997
© Elina Brotherus

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Francesco Vezzoli
Portrait of H.R.H The Princess of Hanover (Before & After Salvador Dalí)
2009
© Francesco Vezzoli/BUS 2012

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Andy Warhol
Gianni Agnelli
1972
© Andy Warhol/BUS 2012

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Andy Warhol
John Chamberlain and Lorraine
1978
© Andy Warhol/BUS2012

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Andy Warhol
Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross)
1974
© Andy Warhol/BUS 2012

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Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22 in Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday - Sunday 11-18
Wednesday 11-21
Mondays closed

Moderna Museet Malmö website

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Exhibition dates: 26th February – 11th June 2012

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Ceaselessly inventive, the bodies (literally) of work of Cindy Sherman are a wonder to behold. From film stills to head shots, from history portrait to society portraits, Sherman constantly reinvents herself, her variations of identity exploring “the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images,” her iterations into the construction of femininity and masculinity constantly “provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.”

Where to next? Her recent series of digitally altered landscapes and portraits (Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, New York, April – June 2012) seem less resolved than her earlier work, becoming almost a pastiche of themselves. Despite their massive size they seem to lack resolution, the great female impersonator of our time relying for effect on Self as feminine earth (m)Other, tricked up in dubious, quasi-ethnic regalia. Sherman is almost sacrosanct with regard to criticism but it’s about time someone said it: these images are pretty awful.

After so many simulacra, so many layerings and expositions of identity isn’t it about time Sherman got back to basics and ditched these grandiose notions of identity sublime. The sublimation (an unconscious defense mechanism by which consciously unacceptable instinctual drives are expressed in personally and socially acceptable channels) of her/Self, her actual body, the energy of her (non) presence is finally starting to wear thin. Will the real Cindy Sherman (if ever there is such a thing) please stand up and tell us: what do you really stand for, where as a human being, is your spirit really at?

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Many thankx to MOMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Cindy Sherman MOMA installation with photographs from her society portraits (2008) to left and centre

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Cindy Sherman MOMA history portraits (1988-90) installation

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Cindy Sherman MOMA headshots (2000-2002) installation

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #21 
1978
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19.1 x 24.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #6 
1977
Gelatin silver print
9 7/16 x 6 1/2″ (24 x 16.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #56 
1980
Gelatin silver print
6 3/8 x 9 7/16″ (16.2 x 24 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd

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Gallery 2

In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills. Over three years, the series (presented here in its entirety) grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the Untitled Film Stills - resembling publicity pictures made on movie sets – read like an encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s Stills are entirely fictitious; they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. While the pictures can be appreciated individually, much of their significance comes in the endless variation of identities from one photograph to the next. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.

Wall text from the exhibition

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #137 
1984
Chromogenic color print
70 1/2 x 47 3/4″ (179.1 x 121.3 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, 1985

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #458 
2007-08
Chromogenic color print
6′ 5 3/8″ x 58 1/4″ (196.5 x 148 cm)
Glenstone

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Gallery 3 

Fashion – a daily form of masquerade that communicates culture, gender, and class – has been a constant source of inspiration for Sherman and a leading ingredient in the creation of her work. Throughout her career the artist has completed a number of commissions for fashion designers and magazines, and this gallery gathers many of these works. Sherman’s fashion pictures challenge the industry’s conventions of beauty and grace. Her first such commission, made in 1983, parodies typical fashion photography. Rather than projecting glamour, sex, or wealth, the pictures feature characters that are far from desirable – whether goofy, hysterical, angry, or slightly mad. Later commissions resulted in more extreme images of characters with bloodshot eyes, bruises, and scars. These exaggerated figures reached ostentatious heights in a 2007-08 commission, in which fashion victims – including steely fashion editors, PR mavens, assistant buyers, and wannabe fashionistas – wear clothing designed by Balenciaga and ham it up for the camera. Sherman’s interest in the construction of femininity and the mass circulation of images informs much of her work; the projects that take fashion as their subject illustrate the artist’s fascination with fashion images but also her critique of what they represent.

Wall text from the exhibition

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #424 
2004
Chromogenic color print
53 3/4 x 54 3/4″ (136.5 x 139.1 cm)
Holzer Family Collection

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Gallery 5 

Sherman, who photographs alone in her studio, has used a variety of techniques to suggest different locations and imaginary (sometimes impossible) spaces, extending the narrative possibilities of her images. In her first foray into color, in 1980, the artist photographed herself in front of rear-screen projections of various cityscapes and landscapes, evoking films from the 1950s and 1960s that used similar techniques to create the illusion of a change in location. In later series, such as the head shots (2000-2002), clowns (2003-04), and society portraits (2008), the artist used digital tools to create a variety of environments. The garish fluorescent colors in a clown picture contribute to the disturbing quality of the portrait, while a fairy tale forest provides a dreamy backdrop for a well-to-do lady.

Wall text from the exhibition

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“The Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition Cindy Sherman, a retrospective tracing the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present, from February 26 to June 11, 2012. The exhibition brings together 171 key photographs from the artist’s significant series – including the complete Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), the critically acclaimed centerfolds (1981), and the celebrated history portraits (1988-90) – plus examples from all of her most important bodies of work, ranging from her fashion photography of the early 1980s to the breakthrough sex pictures of 1992 to her 2003-04 clowns and monumental society portraits from 2008. In addition, the exhibition features the American premiere of her 2010 photographic mural. An exhibition of films drawn from MoMA’s collection selected by Sherman will also be presented in the Museum’s theaters in April. Cindy Sherman is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Cindy Sherman is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential artists of our time and her work is the unchallenged cornerstone of post-modern photography. Masquerading as a myriad of characters in front of her own camera, Sherman creates invented personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. Her works speak to an increasingly image-saturated world, drawing on the unlimited supply of visual material provided by movies, television, magazines, the Internet, and art history.

Ms. Respini says, “To create her photographs, Sherman works unassisted in her studio and assumes multiple roles as photographer, model, art director, make-up artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl or a blond bombshell, a fashion victim or a clown, a French aristocrat or a society lady of a certain age, for over 35 years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply with our visual culture.” 

The American premiere of Sherman’s recent photographic mural (2010) will be installed outside the galleries on the sixth floor. The mural represents the artist’s first foray into transforming space through site-specific fictive environments. In the mural Sherman transforms her face via digital means, exaggerating her features through Photoshop by elongating her nose, narrowing her eyes, or creating smaller lips. The characters, who sport an odd mix of costumes and are taken from daily life, are elevated to larger-than-life status and tower over the viewer. Set against a decorative toile backdrop, her characters seem like protagonists from their own carnivalesque worlds, where fantasy and reality merge. The emphasis on new work presents an opportunity for reassessment in light of the latest developments in Sherman’s oeuvre.

Entering the galleries, the exhibition strays from a chronological narrative typical of retrospectives, and groups photographs thematically to create new and surprising juxtapositions and to suggest common threads across several series. A gallery devoted to her work made for the fashion industry brings together commissions from 1983 to 2011. Sherman’s interest in the construction of femininity and mass circulation of images informs much of the work that takes fashion as its subject, illustrating not only a fascination with fashion images but also a critical stance against what they represent. A gallery exploring themes of the grotesque focuses on bodies of work from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, including disasters (1986-89) and sex pictures (1992). Sherman’s investigation of macabre narratives followed a trajectory of the physical disintegration of the body, and features prosthetic parts as a stand-in for the human body. A gallery devoted to Sherman’s exploration of myth, carnival, and fairy tales pairs works from her 2003 clowns with her 1985 fairy tales series. These theatrical pictures revel in their own artificiality, with menacing characters and fantastical narratives.

Galleries devoted to single bodies of work are interspersed among the thematic rooms. Sherman’s seminal series the Untitled Film Stills, comprising 70 black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980, are presented in their entirety (the complete series is in MoMA’s collection). Made to look like publicity pictures taken on movie sets, the Untitled Film Stills read like an encyclopedic roster of female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. While the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s Stills are entirely fictitious. Her characters represent deeply embedded clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, housewife, and so on) and rely on the persistence of recognizable manufactured stereotypes that loom large in the cultural imagination.

Other series presented in depth include Sherman’s 1981 series of 12-color photographs known as the centerfolds. Originally commissioned by Artforum magazine, these send-ups of men’s erotic magazine centerfolds depict characters in a variety of emotional states, ranging from terrified to heartbroken to melancholic. With this series, Sherman plays into the male conditioning of looking at photographs of exposed women, but she turns this on its head by taking on the roles of both (assumed) male photographer and female pinup. The history portraits investigate the relationships between painter and model, and are featured in depth in the exhibition. These theatrical portraits borrow from a number of art historical periods, from Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical. This free-association sampling creates an illusion of familiarity, but not with any one specific era or style (just as the Untitled Film Stillsevoke generic types, not particular films). The subjects (for the first time, many are men) include aristocrats, Madonna and child, clergymen, women of leisure, and milkmaids, who pose with props, elaborate costumes, and obvious prostheses.

Sherman has explored the experience of aging in a youth- and status-obsessed society with several bodies of work made since 2000. For her headshots from 2000-2002 (sometimes called Hollywood/Hamptons), the artist conceived a cast of characters of would-be or has-been actors (in reality secretaries, housewives, or gardeners) posing for headshots to get an acting job. With this series, Sherman underscores the transformative qualities of makeup, hair, expression, and pose, and the recognition of certain stereotypes as powerful transmitters of cultural clichés. Her monumental 2008 society portraits feature women “of a certain age” from the top echelons of society who struggle with today’s impossible standards of beauty. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through in the unrelenting honesty of the description of aging and the small details that belie the attempt to project a certain appearance. In the infinite possibilities of the mutability of identity, these pictures stand out for their ability to be at once provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.”

Press release from the MOMA website

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #193 
1989
Chromogenic color print
48 7/8 x 41 15/16″ (124.1 x 106.5 cm)
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #213 
1989
Chromogenic color print
41 1/2 x 33″ (105.4 x 83.8 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #216 
1989
Chromogenic color print
7′ 3 1/8″ x 56 1/8″ (221.3 x 142.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser

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Gallery 7 

Sherman’s history portraits (1988-90) investigate modes of representation in art history and the relationship between painter and model. These classically composed portraits borrow from a number of art-historical periods – Renaissance, baroque, rococo, Neoclassical – and make allusions to paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Ingres (who, like all the Old Masters, were men). This free-association sampling creates a sense of familiarity, but not of any one specific era or style. The subjects (for the first time for Sherman, many are men) include aristocrats, Madonnas with child, clergymen, women of leisure, and milk-maids, who pose with props, costumes, and obvious prostheses. Theatrical and artificial – full of large noses, bulging bellies, squirting breasts, warts, and unibrows – the history portraits are poised between humorous parody and grotesque caricature.

A handful of Sherman’s portraits were inspired by actual paintings. Untitled #224 was made after Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (c. 1593), which is commonly believed to be a self-portrait of the artist as the Roman god of wine. In Sherman’s reinterpretation, the numerous layers of representation – a female artist impersonating a male artist impersonating a pagan divinity – create a sense of remove, pastiche, and criticality. Even where Sherman’s pictures offer a gleam of art-historical recognition, she has inserted her own interpretation of the canonized paintings, creating contemporary artifacts of a bygone era.

Wall text from the exhibition

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #359 
2000
Chromogenic color print
30 x 20″ (76.2 x 50.8 cm)
Collection Metro Pictures, New York

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Gallery 8 

After almost a decade of staging still lifes with dolls and props, in her 2000-2002 head-shots series Sherman returned to a more intimate scale and to using herself as a model. The format recalls ID pictures, head shots, or vanity portraits made in garden-variety portrait studios by professional photographers. First exhibited in Beverly Hills, the series explores the cycle of desire and failed ambition that permeates Hollywood. Sherman conceived a cast of would-be or has-been female actors posing for head shots in order to get acting jobs; later, for an exhibition in New York, she added East Coast types. Whichever part of the country they’re from, we’ve seen these women before – on reality television, in soap operas, or at a PTA meeting. With these pictures, Sherman underscores the transformative qualities of makeup, hair, express-ion, and pose, and the power of stereotypes as transmitters of cultural clichés. She projects well-drawn personas: the enormous pouting lips of the woman in Untitled #360 suggest a yearning for youth, while the glittery makeup and purple iridescent dress worn by the character in Untitled #400 indicate an aspiration to reach a certain social status. In her role as both sitter and photographer, Sherman has disrupted the usual power dynamic between model and photographer and created new avenues through which to explore the very apparatus of portrait photography itself.

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #465 
2008
Chromogenic color print
63 3/4 x 57 1/4″ (161.9 x 145.4 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Photography Committee, 2009

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #466
2008
Chromogenic color print

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #474 
2008
Chromogenic color print
7′ 7″ x 60 1/4″ (231.1 x 153 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor, Michael Lynne, Charles Heilbronn, and the Carol and David Appel Family Fund

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Gallery 10 

Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters in Sherman’s 2008 society portraits seem at once tragic and vulgar. The figures are not based on specific women, but the artist has made them look entirely familiar in their struggle with the impossible standards of beauty that prevail in a youth – and status – obsessed culture. At this large scale, it is easy to decipher the characters’ vulnerability behind the makeup, clothes, and jewelry. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through the unrelenting honesty of their description of aging, the tell-tale signs of cosmetic alteration, and the small details that belie the characters’ attempts to project a polished and elegant appearance. Upon careful viewing, they reveal a dark reality lurking beneath the glossy surface of perfection. As with much of her work, in her society portraits Sherman has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to channel the zeitgeist. These well-heeled divas presaged the financial collapse of 2008, the end of an era of opulence – the size of the photographs alone seems a commentary on an age of excess. Among the numerous iterations of contemporary identity, these pictures stand out as at once provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.

Wall text from the exhibition

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #475 
2008
Chromogenic color print
7′ 2 3/8″ x 71 1/2″ (219.4 x 181.6 cm)
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

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Gallery 11 

Because the majority of Sherman’s pictures feature the artist as model, they showcase a single character. In the 1970s Sherman experimented with cutouts of multiple figures, in her whimsical 1975 stop-motion animated short film Doll Clothes and her rarely seen 1976 collages, which were achieved through a labor-intensive process of cutting and pasting multiple photographs. When Sherman began working digitally in the early 2000s, she was able to more easily incorporate multiple figures in one frame, allowing for a variety of new narrative possibilities. Where the early works chart the movements and gestures of a single character through space, the multiple figures in recent works interact with one another to create tableaus.

Wall text from the exhibition

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The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
T: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Monday, 10:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Friday, 10:30 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Closed Tuesday

My Favourite Cindy Sherman at MOMA

MOMA website

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Exhibition dates: 4th May – 22nd September 2013

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Like a mouthful of cinders.

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Many thankx to the Astrup Fearnley Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #92
1981
Chromogenic colour print
61 x 121.9 cm
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #167
1985
Chromogenic colour print
150 x 225 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #32
1979
Gelatin silver print
69.5 x 87.2 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #150
1985
Chromogenic colour print
121 x 163.8 cm
Collection of Cynthia and Abe Steinberger

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Cindy Sherman 
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
Gelatin silver print
15.5 x 22.8 cm
Moderna Museet
Donation from The American Friends of the Moderna Museet, Inc., 2010

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“Cindy Sherman (born 1954) is one of the leading and most influential artists of our time. She belongs to a generation of postmodern artists who redefined the photograph and its place in an ever more visually oriented culture. Taking female roles in photographic representations as her starting point, Sherman creates recognizable pictures that mirror the human condition in its many nuances. Sherman’s pictures became key works in a time of turbulence for the very concept of art, and continue to challenge concepts of representation, identity and portrait.

Cindy Sherman’s allegorical pictures reflect our own conception of the world and open up for new interpretations of familiar phenomena. She uses herself as a model and eqally portrays film stars and pin-up girls, as well as abnormal monsters from fantasy worlds. Sherman’s assertive use of masks, wigs and prosthetics has a disturbing effect, which is further reinforced in pictures where the human presence is gradually reduced in favour of posed dolls or traces of waste and decay.

The exhibition Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors has been composed to emphasise the disturbing, grotesque and disquieting sides of Sherman’s pictures. These are aspects that are visible in her exploration of well-established photographic genres such as film stills, fashion photography or classic portraits, as well as in series with titles such as Fairy Tales, Disasters, Sex Pictures, Civil War and Horror & Surrealist. This exhibition seeks to highlight these key aspects in her artistry and to examine their relevance through a dedicated selection of works from the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s up to the present day.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a richly illustrated catalogue is being published in cooperation with art publishers Hatje Cantz Verlag. The idea behind the catalogue is to explore and examine the more disquieting sides of Sherman’s art by inviting contributions from authors who have touched on similar themes in their own works. Contributors are well-known artists, dramatists and authors including Lars Norén, Miranda July, Sibylle Berg, Sjón, Sara Stridsberg, Karl Ove Knausgård and Kathy Acker.”

Press release from the Astrup Fearnley Museet website

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #402
2000
Chromogenic colour print
88 x 60 cm
Astrup Fearnley Samlingen / Collection

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #132
1984
Chromogenic colour print
176.3 x 119.2 cm
Kunsthaus Zürich

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #199-A
1989
Chromogenic colour print
63.3 x 45.7 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #152
1985
Chromogenic colour print
184.2 x 125.4 cm
Astrup Fearnley Samlingen/ Collection

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Cindy Sherman
Untitled #470
2008
Chromogenic colour print
216.5 x 147.5 cm
Acquired with founding from The American Friends of the Moderna Museet Inc.,

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Astrup Fearnley Museet
Strandpromenaden 2
0252 Oslo
T: +47 22 93 60 60

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 12-17
Thursday 12-19
Saturday, Sunday 11-17
Mondays closed

Astrup Fearnley Museet website

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Exhibition dates: 6th October 2013 – 12th January 2014

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Cindy Sherman, eat your actress out…

A fascinating, erudite analysis of the difference between Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago can be found on the seemingly anonymous Hoegen: Thoughts About Gender, Sex And Sexuality web page (excerpt below). If you can find an author’s name it would be appreciated!

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Many thankx to The Andy Warhol Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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“In Anne D’Alleva’s article concerning reception theory, she draws upon several scholars of art and literature to discuss the importance of not only the artist, but also of the viewer. She discusses the symbiotic relationship that must exist and the merits of the ideal viewer. The two artworks that she mentions to support her arguments are Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Ysumasa Morimura’s Futago. These two artworks are prime examples of works that establish an ideal viewer, or viewers, as well as a mirror stage. These two theories assist the art historian to go beyond the biography of the artist and question the relationship of the image and it’s audience.

Just as Wolfgang Iser believes there is an implied reader for literature, one must believe that there is an implied viewer of Edouard Manet’s Olympia and a different implied viewer for Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago (114). In the case of Manet’s Olympia, one might believe the ideal implied viewer is a white and wealthy man of the upper class. This ideal viewer would appreciate, or maybe question, the bold gaze of Olympia, and possibly even recognize her as the popular courtesan (116)…

The ideal viewer for Morimura’s photograph is not as easy to define.  One might make the presumption that Morimura desires the same ideal viewer of Manet, so that they can simply see the work differently. Also, one could assume that he intended his painting to be viewed by Asian, upper class homosexuals who have seen Manet’s Olymia and want to connect on a more personal level. Either of these audiences may be ideal.

According to Ernest Kris, art “requires the participation of both artist and spectator.” (110) Therefore, there must be something that establishes a relationship of the ideal viewer and the photograph of Yasumasa Morimura. Since it is a photograph, and not a painting, there is a humanistic connection that is not present in Manet’s Olympia that ultimately assists the creation of an image-audience relationship. The gaze is not a representation of a gaze but the actual gaze of Morimura establishing a deeper relationship with the ideal viewer of the artist and subject. Since the ideal audience is harder to define for Morimura’s photograph, the establishing element of the relationship between the ideal viewer and the artwork are also hard to define. If the ideal viewer is exactly that of Manet’s: a white, wealthy, upper-class man, then the “shock factor” of the image is multiplied. The ideal viewer has just begun to accept this shocking image of a nude female daring to look at her viewer when Morimura decided to change the race, gender, and possibly the sexual orientation of the subject of the artwork. This assumption, however, provides that the viewer come with “pre-understanding” as described by Roman Ingarden (113); in this case, a memory of Manet’s Olympia. If one assumes that this image is meant for the common man, this relationship is established through the use of photography, the universal and common way to capture images. If one assumes the connection between the inclusive group of Asian, male, homosexuals, then the establishment of the relationship is directly associated with the subject and artist…

The reception theory of Ernest Gombrich states the importance of perception is clearly prevalent within these works (113). The artists have taken their own interpretations of these works, but one must value the fact that their ideal viewers can be similar and have similar perceptions. The differences of their individual perceptions provide for the differences between their viewers. However, the perception of the viewer, whether ideal or not, is the ultimate reflection of the artwork in the culture.

Clearly, the mirror stage is present in these two images. The viewer does not seem to view their self in the artwork directly, but they do feel a connection to the work.  Morimura most definitely used Manet’s Olympia as a basis image for his Futago. Although some details are incongruous, the overall effect of Futago is a mirrored image of the whole self of Olympia. There are several differences in these paintings that one may attribute to race and gender that affect the dynamics of the mirror effect. Most obviously, Morimura, who was his own subject in his photographic rendition of Manet’s Olympia, is a man. This affects the mirror image of the body. He is leaner, has no curves and is more muscular. Also, his race affects skin color as well as the some of the details of the picture. He has clearly chosen a kimono to replace the intricate shawl, and a seated, waving cat to replace standing one – both of these depictions have significance in Asian culture (116). Cultural implications are evident.

Overall, these two images reflect Anne D’Avelia’s idea that that two similar artworks can have two different implied viewers. Also, they can mirror each other in certain respects, but diverge in others. These help reinforce D’Avelia notes that gender, expression, details, and race, all play roles in developing the image-audience relationship. They also reflect our class work exploring the troubling of gender norms and the gaze.”

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Yasumasa Morimura
Portrait (Futago)
1988
Color photograph
82 ¾ x 118 inches
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund, 92.108

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Yasumasa Morimura
To My Little Sister: for Cindy Sherman
1998
Ilfochrome print mounted on aluminum
55 x 31 inches
Private Collection, New York

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Yasumasa Morimura
Doublonnage (Marcel)
1988
Color photograph
59 x 47 ¼ inches
Private Collection, New York

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Art History

Yasumasa Morimura’s reprisals of European masterpieces are, at once, acts of homage and parody. Painstakingly realized, his photographic reconstructions of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn and Edouard Manet, among others, bring compositional questions together with those pertaining to race, gender and sexuality. In doing so, they reveal both the aesthetics and the politics embedded in the art historical canon.

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Actresses

This section of the exhibition focuses on Morimura’s restaging of scenes from award winning films featuring Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, Liza Minnelli, Jodie Foster and many others. It is notable that the artist’s impersonations are not anonymous but well-known stars, archetypes of Hollywood’s leading ladies. As stated in their titles, each work is a self-portrait and together they propose a range of possibilities for the artist’s own identity. Morimura has stated, “My own self-definition includes this entire zone of possibilities. When I apply this way of thinking to making a self-portrait, it becomes what I call an ‘open self-portrait.’”

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Yasumasa Morimura
M’s Self-portrait No.15
1995
Gelatin silver print
18 ½ x 21 ¼ inches (framed)
Collection of the artist, on deposit at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

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Yasumasa Morimura
Self-portrait (Actress)/after Elizabeth Taylor 1
1996
Ilfochrome print mounted to plexiglass
47 ¼ x 37 ¼ inches
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Yasumasa Morimura
M’s self-portrait No. 56/B 9 (or “as Marilyn Monroe”)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Edition 6 of 10
11 ¾ x 14 inches

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“For more than three decades Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura has forged an extraordinary body of work that reimagines the visual culture of the West, as well as that of his native Japan. Whether portraying Elizabeth Taylor, Mao Zedong or Andy Warhol, Morimura’s iconic images examine the practice of photography while also claiming a space for the self in historical narratives. The artist inserts himself as the subject(s) in all of his works. The exhibition, Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self, is a retrospective of Morimura’s 30 year career covering his fascination with the self-portrait, celebrity, gay and transgendered life, art history, and popular culture align him closely with the work of Andy Warhol. Morimura has described himself as Warhol’s “conceptual son.”

Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition focuses on three important bodies of work: his celebrated “Art History” photographs in which he painstakingly restages European masterpieces; “Requiem” in which Morimura recreates iconic photographs relating to political and cultural life; and the “Actors” series in which he assumes the personae of Hollywood luminaries such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn.

Milton Fine Curator of Art, Nicholas Chambers states, “Including almost 100 images, many of which have never before been seen in the United States, Theater of the Self offers audiences an in-depth view of Morimura’s work. His pictures reveal a sophisticated form of engagement with the worlds of celebrity, art and the mass media that is at once celebration and critique, homage and parody, and has the effect of questioning the nature of the individual’s relationship to culture-at-large.”"

Press release from The Warhol website

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Requiem

The artworks comprising the Requiem Series are derived from photographic sources and depict prominent masculine figures in moments of triumph or transition. Substituting himself for ideologues, dictators and creative thinkers, Morimura reflects on what these figures represent for the broader culture and on the role of photography in celebrating, demonizing or memorializing them.

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Yasumasa Morimura
A Requiem: Vietnam War 1968 – 1991
1991/2006
Gelatin silver print

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Yasumasa Morimura
A Requiem: Theater of Creativity / Andy Warhol in Motion
2010
Digital video, black and white, silent, 3:58 minutes
Collection of the artist

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Yasumasa Morimura
A Requiem: Mishima 1970
2006
Digital video, color, sound, 7:42 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Yasumasa Morimura
A Requiem: Red Dream / Mao
2007
C- print mounted on alpolic
59 x 47 ¼ inches
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Yasumasa Morimura
A Requiem: Oswald, 1963
2006
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

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The Andy Warhol Museum
117 Sandusky Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15212-5890
T: 412.237.8300

Opening hours:
Monday closed
Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Wednesday 10am – 5pm
Thursday 10am – 5pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 10am – 5pm

The Andy Warhol Museum website

Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self exhibition microsite

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Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 24th August 2014

What a fascinating exhibition this looks to be… I wish I could see it!
Quite a few Sander photographs I have never seen before in the posting.
Sander is another photographer that would be near the top of my list.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

August Sander
Stadtwald [Urban Forest]
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
23 x 29 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Children in the city
1930
Gelatin silver print
21.3 x 26 cm (sheet)
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Alter Posthof in Bacharach
1926
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 21.4 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Die Familie in der Generation
1912
Gelatin silver print
21.5 x 28.6 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Deutz Bridge, Rhine in winter
1937
Gelatin silver print
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
The Rhine near Boppard, Osterspey
1938
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 29.3 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Andreas Gursky
The Rhine II
1999
Chromogenic print
1564 x 3083 mm

August Sander
View from the Mülheim Bridge, Sunrise
1938
Gelatin silver print
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander’s epochal cycle People of the 20th Century is considered one of the most important works in the history of art and photography of the last century.

Sander’s photographic typology of German society did not only fascinate artists, writers and philosophers of that period but, at the same time, formed an important point of reference for the artistic concept contemporary photographers had of themselves. This is also reflected in the Munich publisher Lothar Schirmer’s photographic collection, the starting point of which was a group of some 80 works by Sander comprising not only portraits, but also landscapes and urban pictures, acquired in the early 1970s.

This batch of works, acquired from the artist’s estate back in the 1970s, comprises not only more than 40 originals of Sander’s famous portraits, including masterpieces such as the Stammmappe focussing on farmers in Westerwald, the portrait of the artist Heinrich Hoerle in the austere style of New Objectivity and Handlanger, with its impressive visual directness, but also a rare group of lesser known Rhineland landscapes and vedute of Cologne from the 1930s. Precisely the last two groups of works mentioned are enduring proof that Sander’s vision of an equally authentic and veritable document of the times was not only to be limited to people within their social and societal structure but should also include their immediate surroundings, the landscape and the urban environment – an aspect that, for a long time, was given little attention in analyses of the photographer’s work since his death in April, fifty years ago.

In view of the undisputed importance of Sander’s portraits, it is surpising that a more extensive selection of the photographer’s work is only now to be seen in the exhibition People in a River Landscape – and that in Munich too, although there were in fact a number of links between the artist and the city. Sander’s pioneering photography book, Antlitz der Zeit, was published in 1929 by the Munich-based Kurt Wolff Verlag; one year later, his works were to be seen in the exhibition Das Lichtbild – one of the rare presentations of Sander’s works anywhere before 1933; and in the 1960s and ’70s his extensive estate was stored not far from Munich.

Sander’s photographs from this collection will be exhibited for the first time in their entirety and be displayed in dialogue with works by contemporary artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall. The selection will be extended by a rare group of extraordinary photographs taken in Berlin by Heinrich Zille in the late 19th /early 20th century and enlarged by Thomas Struth almost 100 years later.

The exhibition presents a both representative and focussed cross section of Sander’s photographic oeuvre. At the same time it shows the medium of photography in a wider perspective by placing individual groups of works by Sander in dialogue with those of contemporary artists. Starting with a typology by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose encyclopaedically structured work can be regarded as an immediate successor to Sander’s photographic credo, the selection – supplemented by works from the holdings of the Sammlung Moderne Kunst – includes Andreas Gursky’s Rhine picture, urban views by Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall and portraits by Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman, among others. The interplay between the past and the present, between small-format, black-and-white prints and colour images the size of large canvases, between austere documentary works and staged and digitally processed pictures, not only illustrates the immediate relevance of Sander’s concept, far beyond any temporal or formal distinctions, but also how photography has become established as an artistic form of expression in its own right within the context of contemporary art. This topic will be explored in greater depth in the accompanying series of lectures Why Photography Matters, at which the artists Hilla Becher and Thomas Struth, as well as the art historians Wolfgang Kemp and Michael Fried will be speaking. As a modest homage to another historical precursor, the exhibition finishes with a rare group of photographs of Berlin by Heinrich Zille taken at the turn of the century, which Thomas Struth enlarged and reinterpreted in 1985 using the original negatives.”

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Jeff Wall
The Thinker
1986
Large-format slides in lightbox
216 x 229 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
Courtesy of the artist
© Jeff Wall

August Sander
Handlanger [Odd-job man]
1928
Gelatin silver print
43.0 x 28.5 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #127
1983
© Cindy Sherman / Courtesy Schirmer/Mosel München

August Sander
The Architect [Hans Poelzig]
1929
Gelatin silver print
40 x 29.8 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Ruff
Portrait (T. Ruff) [Selfportrait]
1987
C-Print/Diasec
210 x 165 cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Der erdgebundene Mensch [The Earthbound Human]
1910
Gelatin silver print
29.2 x 23.1 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Bauernpaar – Zucht und Harmonie [Peasant Couple - Breeding and Harmony]
1912
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 23.1 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Struth
Alte Pinakothek, Self-portrait, Munich
2000
© Thomas Struth / Courtesy Schirmer/Mosel München

August Sander
Painter [Heinrich Hoerle]
1928
Gelatin silver print
59.3 x 47.7 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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Exhibition dates: 6th June – 4th September 2014

I remember some time in the dim distant past when Cindy Sherman’s photographs actually had relevance and were important in and of themselves… but perhaps my memory is playing tricks with me. Memory is a strange thing for we remember only fragments of fragments, like an echo chamber, a distant echo of something (the construction of identity and gender) that was once cutting edge, now overtaken by reality itself – on the red carpet, in the cosmetic surgery offices, in the media mags. Once there may have been an original, an original Cindy Sherman, an original idea, but now there just seems to be pastiche after pastiche of a Sherman nobody is sure ever really existed.

There are certainly some horrors among this posting, images that I wish I had never seen, and never really wish to see again. As the amount of ‘Untitled’ works rises (untitled is such a cop out!) the numbers, and the body count, become irrelevant. The early work, through the 80s to the early 90s, had important things to say but now the artist formally know as Sherman is earth mother goddess to all, and ancestral trickster to many. Enough please!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Kunsthaus Zürich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors at Kunsthaus Zürich
Photo: Lena Huber

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #93
1981
Chromogenic color print
61 × 121.9 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #122
1983
Chromogenic color print
89.5 × 54 cm
Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #129
1983
Chromogenic color print
89.7 × 59.3 cm
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, Donation: The New Carlsberg Foundation
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New Yor

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #146
1985
Chromogenic color print
184.2 × 125.4 cm
Skarstedt Gallery, New York
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #153
1985
Chromogenic color print
170.8 × 125.7 cm
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #170
1987
Chromogenic color print
179.1 x 120.7 cm
Collection Metro Pictures, New York
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #216
1989
Chromogenic color print
221.3 × 142.5 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

“From 6 June to 14 September 2014, the Kunsthaus Zürich plays host to a major retrospective featuring American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954). Sherman is one of the leading exponents of staged photography. In her work she deals with issues of identity, (gender) roles and physicality, almost always using herself as the model. Cindy Sherman’s earliest works were created in 1975. Preceding the celebrated ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977-1980), these photographs were produced at home using an external shutter release, yet they were already concerned with the issues of identity and role play that are central to her oeuvre. The exhibition Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors includes a selection of these early and rarely shown works as well as her latest pieces, some of them monumental and covering entire walls. Sherman references the techniques and forms of advertising, cinema and classical painting.

THE THREATENING HEART OF UNTITLED HORRORS

The principal focus of the overview, which has been compiled by the Kunsthaus together with the artist, is the threatening and grotesque. The retrospective’s subtitle, ‘Untitled Horrors’, is partly a reference to the exhibition’s content, but also a play on the fact that Cindy Sherman invariably labels her photos ‘Untitled’. She leaves it to the viewer to read the pictures in their own way, inviting them to develop the stories behind them as they see fit, and come up with their own titles.

110 WORKS IN TOTAL

The presentation includes all the key works from the various phases of Cindy Sherman’s artistic career. Iconic pieces from the early period, such as the famous ‘Untitled Film Stills’ series, reminiscent of Italian Neo-Realism and American film noir, appear alongside the later photographs of ‘Hollywood/Hampton Types’ (2000-2002), while the ‘Clowns’ (2003-2004) encounter the ‘Sex Pictures’ series from 1992. These juxtapositions reveal the remarkable consistency with which, throughout her long career, the artist has engaged with fundamental issues of human existence and repeatedly explored new avenues of formal expression. Curated by Mirjam Varadinis and created in association with the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the 110-work presentation dispenses with a linear or chronological approach, choosing instead to create unexpected combinations that shed new light on the oeuvre of this important artist and her exploration of the self through film and photography.”

Text from the Kunsthaus Zürich website

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #235
1987-1991
Chromogenic color print
228.6 × 152.4 cm
Private collection, courtesy Segalot LP, New York
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #304
1994
Chromogenic color print
154.9 × 104.1 cm
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #324
1996
Chromogenic color print
146.7 × 99.1 cm
Collection Metro Pictures & Skarstedt Gallery
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #348
1999
Gelatin silver print
97,8 × 66 cm
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #352
2000
Chromogenic color print
68.6 × 45.7 cm
Collection Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #363 (Bus Riders I)
1976/2000
Gelatin silver print
18.9 x 12.7 cm
Tate; purchased with funds provided by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, 2001
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #420
2004
Chromogenic color print (2-teilig)
Each: 182.4 × 115.8 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #458
2007-2008
Chromogenic color print
195 × 147 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #544
2010 / 2012
Chromogenic color print
172.7 × 254 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #549-C
2010
Pigment / print on PhotoTex, adhesive fabric,
Dimensions variable
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Kunsthaus Zürich
Heimplatz 1
CH–8001 Zurich

Opening hours:
Tue/Fri–Sun 10 am – 6 pm
Wed/Thu 10 am – 8 pm

Kunsthaus Zürich website

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Exhibition dates: 8th February – 2nd November 2014

The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor

Curators: Organized by Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography

A bumper two part posting on this fascinating, multi-dimensional subject: photographic practices in the studio, which may be a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. The exhibition occupies all MoMA’s six photography galleries, each gallery with its own sub theme, namely, Surveying the Studio, The Studio as Stage, The Studio as Set, A Neutral Space, Virtual Spaces and The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground.

The review of this exhibition “When a Form Is Given Its Room to Play” by Roberta Smith on the New York Times website (6th February 2014) damns with faint praise. The show is a “fabulous yet irritating survey” which “dazzles but often seems slow and repetitive.” Smith then goes on to list the usual suspects: “And so we get professional portraitists, commercial photographers, lovers of still life, darkroom experimenters, artists documenting performances and a few generations of postmodernists, dead and alive, known and not so, exploring the ways and means of the medium. This adds up to plenty to see: around 180 images from the 1850s to the present by some 90 photographers and artists. The usual suspects here range from Julia Margaret Cameron to Thomas Ruff, with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lucas Samaras, John Divola and Barbara Kasten in between.” There are a few less familiar and postmodern artists thrown in for good measure, but all is “dominated by black-and-white images in an age when colour reigns.” The reviewer then rightly notes the paucity of “postmodern photography of the 1980s, much of it made by women, that did a lot to reorient contemporary photo artists to the studio. It is a little startling for an exhibition that includes so many younger artists dealing with the artifice of the photograph (Ms. Belin, for example) to represent the Pictures Generation artists with only Cindy Sherman, James Casebere and (in collaboration with Allan McCollum) Laurie Simmons” before finishing on a positive note (I think!), noting that the curators “had aimed for a satisfying viewing experience, which, these days, is something to be grateful for.”

SOMETHING TO BE GRATEFUL FOR… OH, TO BE SO LUCKY IN AUSTRALIA!

Just to have the opportunity to view an exhibition of this quality, depth and breadth of concept would be an amazing thing. Even a third of the number of photographs (say 60 works) that address this subject at any one of the major institutions around Australia would be fantastic but, of that, there is not a hope in hell.

Think Marcus, think… when was the last major exhibition, I mean LARGE exhibition, at a public institution in Australia that actually addressed specific ISSUES and CONCEPTS in photography (such as this), not just putting on monocular exhibitions about an artists work or exhibitions about a regions photographs? Ah, well… you know, I can’t really remember. Perhaps the American Dreams exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery, but that was a GENERAL exhibition about 20th century photography with no strong investigative conceptual theme and its was imported from George Eastman House.

Here in Australia, all we can do is look from afar, purchase the catalogue and wonder wistfully what the exhibition actually looks like and what we are missing out on. MoMA sent me just 10 images media images. I have spent hours scouring the Internet for other images to fill the void of knowledge and vision (and then cleaning those sometimes degraded images), so that those of us not privileged enough to be able to visit New York may gain a more comprehensive understanding of what this exhibition, and this multi-faceted dimension of photography, is all about. It’s a pity that our venerable institutions and the photography curators in them seem to have had a paucity of ideas when it comes to expounding interesting critiques of the medium over the last twenty years or so. What a missed opportunity.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish six of the photographs in the posting. The rest of the images were sourced from the Internet. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Surveying the Studio

Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941)
Composite Photo of Two Messes on the Studio Floor 
1967
Gelatin silver print
40 1/2″ x 10′ 3″ (102.9 x 312.4 cm)
Gift of Philip Johnson

Uta Barth (American, born 1958)
Sundial (07.13)
2007
Chromogenic color prints
each 30 x 28 1/4″ (76.2 x 71.8 cm)
The Photography Council Fund

Geta Brâtescu (Romanian, born 1926)
The Studio. Invocation of the Drawing (L’Atelier. Invocarea desenului)
1979
Gelatin silver prints with tempera on paper
33 1/16 x 27 9/16″ (84 x 70 cm)
Modern Women’s Fund

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Laboratory of the Future
1935
Gelatin silver print
9 1/16 x 7″ (23.1 x 17.8 cm)
Gift of James Johnson Sweeney

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Cactus and Photographer’s Lamp, New York
1931
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 6 5/8″ (23.5 x 16.6 cm)
Gift of Samuel M. Kootz

“Bringing together photographs, films, videos, and works in other mediums, A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and artists using photography have worked and experimented within the four walls of the studio space, from photography’s inception to today. Featuring both new acquisitions and works from the Museum’s collection that have not been on view in recent years, A World of Its Own includes approximately 180 works, by approximately 90 artists, such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brătescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.

The exhibition considers the various roles played by the photographer’s studio as an autonomous space; depending on the time period, context, and the individual motivations (commercial, artistic, scientific) and sensibilities of the photographer, the studio may be a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. Organized thematically, the display unfolds in multiple chapters. Throughout the 20th century, artists have explored their studio spaces using photography, from the use of composed theatrical tableaux (in photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron or Cindy Sherman) to neutral, blank backdrops (Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe); from the construction of architectural sets within the studio space (Francis Bruguière, Thomas Demand) to chemical procedures conducted within the darkroom (Walead Beshty, Christian Marclay); and from precise recordings of time and motion (Eadweard Muybridge, Dr. Harold E. Edgerton) to amateurish or playful experimentation (Roman Signer, Peter Fischli/David Weiss). A World of Its Own offers another history of photography, a photography created within the walls of the studio, and yet as groundbreaking and inventive as its seemingly more extroverted counterpart, street photography.”

Text from the MoMA website

The exhibition is divided into 6 themes each with its own gallery space:

1. Surveying the Studio

2. The Studio as Stage

3. The Studio as Set

4. A Neutral Space

5. Virtual Spaces

6. The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground

The Studio as Stage

George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
Untitled
1941
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.2 x 24.4 cm)
Anonymous gift

Lucas Samaras (American, born Greece 1936)
Auto Polaroid
1969-71
Eighteen black-and-white instant prints (Polapan), with hand-applied ink
each 3 3/4 x 2 15/16″ (9.5 x 7.4 cm)
overall 14 5/8 x 24″ (37.2 x 61 cm)
Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill

Lucas Samaras (American, born Greece 1936)
Auto Polaroid (details)
1969-71
Eighteen black-and-white instant prints (Polapan), with hand-applied ink
each 3 3/4 x 2 15/16″ (9.5 x 7.4 cm)
overall 14 5/8 x 24″ (37.2 x 61 cm)
Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Madonna with Children
1864
Albumen silver print
10 1/2 x 8 5/8″ (26.7 x 21.9 cm)
Gift of Shirley C. Burden

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Untitled (Mary Ryan?)
c. 1867
Albumen silver print
13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9 cm)
Gift of Shirley C. Burden

Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910)
Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825-1903)
Pierrot Surprised
1854-55
Albumen silver print
11 1/4 x 8 3/16″ (28.6 x 20.8 cm)
Suzanne Winsberg Collection. Gift of Suzanne Winsberg

Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984)
Untitled
1929
Gelatin silver print
6 9/16 x 6 1/2″ (16.7 x 16.5 cm)
Gift of Robert Shapazian

Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg. 1879-1973)
Anna May Wong
1930
Gelatin silver print
16 9/16 x 13 7/16″ (42.1 x 34.1 cm)
Gift of the artist

Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954)
Untitled #131
1983
Chromogenic color print
35 x 16 1/2″ (89 x 41.9 cm)
Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Fund

The Studio as Set

Barbara Kasten (American, born 1936)
Construct I-F
1979
Color instant print (Polaroid Polacolor)
9 1/2 x 7 1/2″ (24.0 x 19.0 cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Wendy Larsen

Barbara Kasten (American, born 1936)
Construct NYC 17
1984
Silver dye bleach print
29 3/8 x 37 1/16″ (74.7 x 94.1 cm)
Gift of Foster Goldstrom

James Casebere (American, born 1953)
Subdivision with Spotlight
1982
Gelatin silver print
14 13/16 x 18 15/16″ (37.6 x 48.1 cm)
Purchase

Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945)
Light Abstraction
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
9 15/16 x 7 15/16″ (25.2 x 20.2 cm)
Gift of Arnold Newman

Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958)
Images de Deauville
1936
Tri-color carbro print
15 3/4 x 12 1/4″ (40 x 31.1 cm)
Gift of Mrs. Ralph Seward Allen

Elad Lassry (Israeli, born 1977)
Nailpolish
2009
Chromogenic color print
14 1/2 x 11 1/2″ (36.8 x 29.2 cm)
Fund for the Twenty-First Century

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
T: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Monday, 10.30 am – 5.30 pm
Friday, 10.30 am – 8.00 pm
Closed Tuesday

MOMA website

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Exhibition dates: 9th March – 29th May 2017

This is the last posting for a while as my hand operation is tomorrow… so let’s make the most of the occasion!

“…the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.”

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George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel 1807 ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, Preface (trans. A. V. Miller 1977), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10

This is an interesting pairing for an exhibition but the connection between the artists is unconvincing. This is because Wearing and Cahun are talking to different aspects of the self.

Wearing’s self-portraits, her mask-querades, her shielded multiple personalities, talk to a “postmodern meditation on the slipperiness of the self” in which there is little evidence of the existence of any “real” person. Wearing wears her identities in a series of dress-ups, performances where only the eyes of the original protagonist are visible. These identities evidence Jung’s shadow aspect, “an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself.” Rather than an assimilation of the shadow aspect into the self followed by an ascent (enantiodromia), Wearing’s images seem to be mired in a state of melancholia, a “confrontation with the shadow which produces at first a dead balance, a stand-still that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective…tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia.” This is not a confrontation that leads anywhere interesting, by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. These split personalities rise little above caricature, an imitation of a person in which certain striking characteristics are over emphasised, such as in Wearing’s portraits of her as Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe. To me, the photograph of Wearing as Mapplethorpe is a travesty of the pain that artist was feeling as he neared the end of his life, dying from HIV/AIDS.

Cahun’s self-portraits contain all the depth of feeling and emotion that Wearing’s can never contain. Here, identity and gender is played out through performance and masquerade in a constructive way, a deep, probing interrogation of the self in front of the camera. While Cahun engages with Surrealist ideas – wearing masks and costumes and changing her appearance, often challenging traditional notions of gender representation – she does so in a direct and powerful way. As Cumming observes, “She is not trying to become someone else, not trying to escape [as Wearing is]. Cahun is always and emphatically herself. Dressed as a man, she never appears masculine, nor like a woman in drag. Dressed as a woman, she never looks feminine. She is what we refer to as non-binary* these days, though Cahun called it something else: “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.””

*Those with non–binary genders can feel that they: Have an androgynous (both masculine and feminine) gender identity, such as androgyne. Have an identity between male and female, such as intergender. Have a neutral or unrecognized gender identity, such as agender, neutrois, or most xenogenders.*

Cahun had a gift for the indelible image but more than that, she possesses the propensity for humility and openness in these portraits, as though she is opening her soul for interrogation, even as she explores what it is to be Cahun, what it is to be human. This is a human being in full control of the balance between the ego and the self, of dream-state and reality. The photographs, little shown in Cahun’s lifetime, are her process of coming to terms with the external world, on the one hand, and with one’s own unique psychological characteristics on the other. They are her adaption** to the world.

**“The constant flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.” (Carl Jung. “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8, par. 143.)**

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Claude Cahun is person I would have really liked to have met. Affiliated with the French Surrealist movement, living with her partner the artist and stage designer Marcel Moore, the two women left Paris for the Isles of Scilly and were then imprisoned in Nazi-occupied Jersey during the Second World War as a result of their roles in the French Resistance.

“Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey, strategically placing them in soldier’s pockets, on their chairs, etc. Also, they inconspicuously crumpled up and threw their fliers into cars and windows. In many ways, Cahun and Malherbe’s [Marcel Moore] resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised. In many ways, Cahun’s life’s work was focused on undermining a certain authority, however her specific resistance fighting targeted a physically dangerous threat. In 1944 she was arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out. However, Cahun’s health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954.” (Wikipedia)

Undermining a certain authority … while ennobling her own identity and being. Love and respect.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. For more information please see the blog entry Claude Cahun: Freedom Fighter.

This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of French artist Claude Cahun and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing. Although they were born almost seventy years apart and came from different backgrounds, remarkable parallels can be drawn between the two artists. Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”

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Claude Cahun, 1930

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (reflected image in mirror with chequered jacket)
1927
Silver gelatin print

Claude Cahun
Autoportrait
1928
Gelatin silver print
13.9 x 9 cm
Jersey Heritage Collection
© Jersey Heritage

“Once seen, never forgotten: Cahun had a gift for the indelible image. Even when the signals are jammed, and the meaning deliberately baffled, her vision always holds strong. This is partly convenienced by the artist’s exceptional looks. Her long, thin face, with its shaved eyebrows, large eyes and linear nose, takes paint like a canvas. She converts herself into a harpy, a lunatic or a doll with equal ease. In one self-portrait, she even holds her own bare face like a mask…

Peering into these monochrome images, so delicate and small, the viewer might inevitably wonder which is the real Cahun: the woman in the aviator goggles, the pensive Buddhist, the young man in a white silk scarf? But this is not the right question. She is not trying to become someone else, not trying to escape. Cahun is always and emphatically herself.

Dressed as a man, she never appears masculine, nor like a woman in drag. Dressed as a woman, she never looks feminine. She is what we refer to as non-binary these days, though Cahun called it something else: “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” …

There is little evidence that she ever displayed these photographs, which were forgotten for decades after her death. It seems that her partner was generally behind the lens, but we know almost nothing about how they were made. Of her lifelong project, Cahun wrote: “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”

Commentators have taken this to mean that she thought of herself as a series of multiple personalities, and the double exposures, shadows and reflections in her work all seem to undermine the idea of a singular self. Yet Cahun is formidably and unmistakably Cahun, her force of personality registering every time in that utterly penetrating look. Far from some postmodern meditation on the slipperiness of the self, her images are completely direct. They acknowledge the sufferings of a double life and are deepened by them every time; and yet they rejoice in that life too.”

Laura Cumming. “Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask – review,” on The Observer website

Claude Cahun in collaboration with Marcel Moore
Aveux non avenus frontispiece
1929-30
Photomontage
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

“Cahun appears in enigmatic guises, playing out different personas using masks and mirrors, and featuring androgynous shaven or close-cropped hair – as can be seen in the multiple views of her in the lower left-hand side of this collage. The image also includes symbols made up by the women to represent themselves – the eye for Moore, the artist, and the mouth for Cahun, the writer and actor. Whereas the majority of Surrealists were men, in whose images women appear as eroticised objects, Cahun’s androgynous self-portraits explore female identity as constructed, multifaceted, and ultimately as having a nihilistic absence at the core.”

Ron Radford (ed), Collection highlights: National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2008

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (as a dandy, head and shoulders)
1921-22
Silver gelatin print
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Thomas Walther Collection
Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

Claude Cahun
Studies for a keepsake
c. 1925
Silver gelatin prints
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
© Musée d’Art moderne / Roger-Viollet

Claude Cahun
Study for a keepsake
c. 1925
Silver gelatin print
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
© Musée d’Art moderne / Roger-Viollet

Claude Cahun
I am in training don’t kiss me
c. 1927
Silver gelatin print
117mm x 89mm (whole)
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Totor (progenitor of Tintin) and Popol are two comic characters by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Castor and Pollux are the twin stars; Pollux and Helen were the children of Zeus and Leda, while Castor and Clytemnestra were the children of Leda and Tyndareus.

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (kneeling, naked, with mask)
c. 1928
Silver gelatin print
116mm x  83mm
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (full length masked figure in cloak with masks)
1928
Silver gelatin print
109mm x 82mm
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait
1929
Silver gelatin print

Claude Cahun
Je tends les bras (I extend my arms)
c. 1932
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (in cupboard)
c. 1932
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask (9 March – 29 May 2017) draws together over 100 works by French artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing (b.1963). While they were born 70 years apart, they share similar themes of gender, identity, masquerade and performance.

Cahun, along with her contemporaries André Breton and Man Ray, was affiliated with the French Surrealist movement although her work was rarely exhibited during her lifetime. Together with her partner, the artist and stage designer Marcel Moore, the two women left Paris and were then imprisoned in Nazi-occupied Jersey during the Second World War as a result of their roles in the French Resistance. In her photographs she is depicted wearing masks and costumes and engaging with Surrealist ideas. She also changes her appearance by shaving her hair and wearing wigs, often challenging traditional notions of gender representation.

Gillian Wearing studied at Goldsmiths University, winning the Turner Prize in 1997. She has exhibited extensively in the United Kingdom and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, whilst overseas, recent retrospectives include IVAM Valencia and K20 Dusseldorf. Wearing’s photographic self-portraits incorporate painstaking recreations of her as others in an intriguing and sometimes unsettling range of guises such as where she becomes her immediate family members using prosthetic masks.

Despite their different backgrounds, obvious and remarkable parallels can be drawn between the artists whose fascination with identity and gender is played out through performance and masquerade. Wearing has referenced Cahun overtly in the past: Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face is a reconstruction of Cahun’s self-portrait Don’t kiss me I’m in training of 1927, and forms the starting point of this exhibition, the title of which (Behind the mask, another mask) adapts a quotation from Claude Cahun’s Surrealist writings.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘This inspired, timely and poignant exhibition pairs the works of Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun. These pioneering artists, although separated by several decades, address similarly compelling themes around gender, identity, masquerade, performance and the idea of the self, issues that are ever more relevant to the present day.’

Sarah Howgate, Curator, Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask, says: ‘It seems particularly fitting that at the National Portrait Gallery on International Women’s Day we are bringing together for the first time Claude Cahun’s intriguing and complex explorations of identity with the equally challenging and provocative self-images of Gillian Wearing.’

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask is curated by Sarah Howgate, Senior Curator of Contemporary Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait as a young girl
1914
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait as a young girl
1914
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (shaved head, material draped across body)
1920
Silver gelatin print
115mm x 89mm

Claude Cahun
Autoportrait
1927
Silver gelatin print

Claude Cahun
Self-Portrait
1927
Silver gelatin print

Claude Cahun
Que me veux tu? (What do you want from me?)
1929
Gelatin silver print
18 x 23 cm (7 1/16 x 9 1/16 ins)
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait
1929
Gelatin silver print

Claude Cahun
Autoportrait
1939
Gelatin silver print
10 x 8 cm
Jersey Heritage Collection
© Jersey Heritage

Claude Cahun
Self-portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth)
1945
Photograph – Courtesy of the artist

Ten things you need to know about this extraordinary artist

1. Her real name was Lucy Schwob.
She was born 25 October 1894 in Nantes, daughter of newspaper owner Maurice Schwob and Victorine Marie Courbebaisse; her uncle was the Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob. Subjected to anti-Semitic acts following the Dreyfus Affair, she was removed to a boarding school in Surrey, where she studied for two years.

2. Cahun’s lover was also her stepsister.
In 1909, she met her lifelong partner and collaborator Suzanne Malherbe while studying in Nantes, in what she described as a ‘thunderbolt encounter’. Eight years later, Cahun’s father married Suzanne’s widowed mother.

3. The couple adopted gender-neutral names.
Schwob first used the name Claude Cahun in the semi-biographical text ‘Les Jeux uraniens’, Cahun being a surname from her father’s side. Malherbe changed her name to Marcel Moore and the pair moved to Paris in 1914, where they began their artistic collaborations and Cahun studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne.

4. Cahun was one of the few female Surrealists.
In 1932 she was introduced to André Breton, who called her ‘one of the most curious spirits of our time’. Four years later, Cahun participated in the Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, and visited the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London. Whereas in the works of male Surrealists women often appear as eroticised objects, Cahun’s self-portraits explore female identity as constructed and multifaceted.

5. She was first and foremost a writer.
Now best known for her striking self-portraits, Cahun saw herself primarily as a writer. In 1930 she published Aveux non avenus (translated into English as Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions), an ‘anti-memoir’ including ten photomontages created in collaboration with Moore.

6. In 1937 the couple swapped Paris for Jersey.
Cahun and Moore moved to La Rocquaise, a house in St Brelade’s Bay, Jersey, where they led a secluded life. The couple reverted to their given names, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, and were known by the islanders as ‘les mesdames’.

7. They were actively involved in the resistance against Nazi Occupation.
When the Germans invaded Jersey in 1940 they decided to stay and produced counter-propaganda tracts. In July 1944 they were found out, arrested, stood trial, and were, briefly, sentenced to death (though these sentences were commuted). The couple were imprisoned in separate cells for almost a year before Liberation in May 1945.

8. In 1951 Cahun received the Medal of French Gratitude for her acts of resistance during the Second World War. Suffering increasingly from ill health, she died in 1954 at the age of sixty. Moore died eighteen years later, in 1972.

9. She remained forgotten for half a century
Following her move to Jersey, Cahun slipped from critical attention. After the death of Marcel Moore, much of Cahun’s work was put up for auction and acquired by collector John Wakeham, who then sold it to the Jersey Heritage Trust in 1995. The publication in 1992 of the definitive biography by Francois Leperlier, Claude Cahun: l’ecart et la metamorphose, and subsequent exhibition, Claude Cahun: Photographe, at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1995 encouraged a growing interest in the artist’s work. It was during this time that Gillian Wearing discovered Claude Cahun.

10. She was an artist ahead of her time
Wearing speaks of a ‘camaraderie’ between her and Cahun but she is not the only contemporary artist to have been influenced by her work. Cahun has a dedicated following among artists and art historians working from postmodern, feminist and queer theoretical perspectives; the American art critic Hal Foster described Cahun as ‘a Cindy Sherman avant la lettre’.

Gillian Wearing
Self-portrait as my brother Richard Wearing
2003
Heather Podesta Collection
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
Me as Mapplethorpe
2009
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar
2010
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
Me as Diane Arbus
2008-2010
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face
2012
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
Self-portrait of me now in a mask
2011
Collection of Mario Testino
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
Me as mask
2013
Private collection, courtesy Cecilia Dan Fine Art
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Gillian Wearing
At Claude Cahun’s grave
2015
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

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St Martin’s Place
London, WC2H 0HE

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