Post War and Contemporary Art

Published by the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York; printed by Ken Lieberman Laboratories, Inc., New York.

Provenance:

Metro Pictures, New York.

Lot Note:

Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits: The Renaissance Profile Portrait

Cindy Sherman’s use of self portraits to engage with contemporary society as well as the Western art historical tradition is particularly interesting in her History Portrait series, where she, donning elaborate costumes, imitates well-known paintings from such artists as Raphael and François Boucher through staged photographs. Freeman’s | Hindman is pleased to offer Untitled #212 of this series. With impressions currently also held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Untitled #212 offers an opportunity to engage with Sherman’s work as she adopts the format of a Renaissance profile portrait while also subtly subverting its original meaning.

In this scene, Sherman faces left, staring regally ahead while dressed in sumptuous purples and greens, wearing pearls and with her hair elaborately coiffed. However, the longer the image is examined, the more it appears out of order. As Dr. Beth Hinderliter notes “Sherman revels in showing us rascals in costumes with improvised grimaces. Rather than hiding the seams of artifice, she exposes them all the more.”[i]

On its face, the photograph appears to adopt the appropriate gravity of its original format: a Quattrocento profile portrait. Usually made to celebrate the marriage of a young woman of the social elite, these paintings emphasized both the family’s wealth and status as well as reflecting the chastity and purity of the sitter. These works were less about the individual woman depicted and more about broadcasting the suitable message of power and prestige to a very hierarchical, male-centric, and image-obsessed culture. As described by Dr. Patricia Simon, “the profile, presenting an averted eye and face available to scrutiny, was suited to the representation of an ordered, chaste and decorous piece of property”.[ii]

However, the longer the viewer examines Sherman’s photograph, the more this represented pose begins to fall apart. The seriousness of her expression is undermined by the unblended application of her applied prosthetic nose. The edge of her garment appears to unravel at the back, along with her trailing green hair ribbon. As opposed to a traditional devotional scene where a young woman may be contemplating the Virgin Mary or a female saint, here, a small devotional statuette is instead facing back-to-back with the artist: a studious rejection of these original idealized virtues. Instead of hands likewise clasped in devotion and facing to the side, Sherman’s hands are splayed out towards the viewer, as though coming out of the photograph. As Hinderliter explains:

"Sherman stages the disagreement of colliding worlds on several different levels. First, by juxtaposing the supposed realism of photography – its documentary aspects – with the glaring falsity of the staged scene with its rigged props, Sherman insists that identity in portraiture is always constructed.[iii]"

In Untitled #212, Sherman reclaims the agency denied by those subjects of Renaissance profile portraits, spinning the original voyeurism of the pose through the lens of her own agency. Humorously distorting its conventions that historically limited the sitter’s individuality to the benefit of making claims about her family, wealth, and social status, Sherman instead reasserts the artist’s identity and questions the societal role of women both now and then.

Bibliography

Hinderliter, Beth. “The Multiple Worlds of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits.” National Gallery of Victoria Art Journal 44 (2014). https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-multiple-worlds-of-cindy-shermans-history-portraits-2/.

Simon, Patricia. “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture.” History Workshop No. 25 (Spring 1988): 4-30.

[i] Beth Hinderliter, “The Multiple Worlds of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits,” National Gallery of Victoria Art Journal 44 (2014), https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-multiple-worlds-of-cindy-shermans-history-portraits-2/.

[ii] Patricia Simon, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop No. 25 (Spring 1988): 7.

[iii] Hinderliter, “Multiple Worlds.”