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Lot Essay
In the early 1980s, Cindy Sherman was approached by the magazine Artforum to create a series of work to feature in an upcoming issue. Sherman’s friend, the artist David Salle, worked in the art department of a cheap ‘gentleman’s magazine’ and Sherman had seen some of the images of nude women they produced lying around Salle’s studio. Inspired by the format of Artforum, and unsettled by the retrograde nudes, Sherman produced a series of images that challenged notions of female iconography, and although Artforum ultimately decided against publishing the images, they now stand as being amongst Sherman’s great and most important works, and a mainstay of many museum collections of contemporary art.
The Centerfolds marked a turning-point, essentially propelling Sherman’s work to world-wide fame following their exhibition at New York’s Metro Pictures in November of 1981. The following year, she was invited to show her work at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, and at the 40th Venice Biennale. “Commercially and critically, this provocative body of work ushered in a new era in Sherman’s career,” the curator of Sherman’s 2012 retrospective, Eva Respini, has written, “catapulting her to art stardom and engendering a new round of vigorous critical debate” (E. Respini, Cindy Sherman, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 30).
Untitled is among the most chilling and evocative of all the Centerfolds. Executed in 1981, it features the image of a young schoolgirl who crouches upon a scratched and dirty wood floor. Wearing a white blouse and tartan skirt, she is the embodiment of the stereotypical male “schoolgirl fantasy,” but one which has gone horribly wrong. Supporting the weight of her body with splayed fingers, she cowers in a position of fear. Who is this young girl, with wet hair and piercing blue eyes? She is bathed in a penetrating cool white light, almost as if she’s performing on a stage, but Sherman has cropped and fitted the frame to include only her face and contorted body. The image glows with a bright light that heightens the drama of the scene.
“I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at it in expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be, looking at this woman who’s perhaps a victim...[although] I didn’t think of them as victims at the time.”Cindy Sherman
The image is permeated with uncomfortable beauty, a symphony of blue tones that accentuate the artist’s wide blue eyes, with the lines upon the wood floor mirroring that of her plaid skirt. It is an image both beautiful and disturbing, and perhaps for this very reason, has featured on the cover of several exhibition catalogues and books about the artist’s work. When the Centerfolds were first exhibited at Metro Pictures in New York on November 7, 1981, they sparked considerable discussion and debate. The artist would later explain: “I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at it in expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be, looking at this woman who’s perhaps a victim...[although] I didn’t think of them as victims at the time” (C. Sherman, quoted in G. Allen, Cindy Sherman Centerfold (Untitled #96), New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2021, p. 6).
By subverting the traditional “male gaze” of the nude centerfold, these images instead granted its female heroines more agency and a mind of their own. Acting as both creator and subject, Sherman was able to take control of the narrative and re-fashion it according to her own viewpoint. In doing so, she draws upon the rich, yet complicated, history of women and the construction of gender throughout art history, and in film, TV, magazines, newspapers and literature. Sherman was one of the first artists to tackle this weighty and problematic issue, and her work continues to resonate today despite the forty years since its original creation. She credits the pioneering feminist work of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antoni and Janine Anton as an early influence.
By engaging with these pre-existing tropes, Sherman wrestles with the important strategies of visual appropriation that developed in New York in the 1970s and ‘80s. This paralleled the work of her peers, including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler, who later became known as the Pictures Generation. Perhaps because of this, the Centerfolds often contain subtle clues as to their own inherent artificiality as a work of fiction. For example, the theatrical lighting and wide-scale cinematic format of Untitled mimics the look of a vintage Hollywood film. This is an important aspect of the Centerfolds that the art critic Roberta Smith lit upon when reviewing the series in 1981: "Sherman makes you understand the components of photography with a particular bluntness which is one of her trademarks. The roles of color, light, cropping, space, eye contact (or lack of it) are continually stated and restated and we read them just as we do details of clothing, hairdo, posture, flooring. Despite all this the effect is not simply didactic; everything is both laid out and convincingly, ingenuously synthesized” (R. Smith, "Review: Cindy Sherman," Village Voice, New York, November 18, 1981).
As a child growing up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Sherman always enjoyed dressing up and makeup and inventing different characters. When she moved to New York after graduating from college in Buffalo in 1977, she famously dressed up to attend art openings and at her part-time job at Artist’s Space. And although her critique of the mass media dovetails neatly with the prevailing postmodern philosophy of the era, notably put forth by Michel Foucault and Guy Debord, her characters can also be seen as a way to circumvent what was expected of her. They are also, at times, zany, irreverent and even fun. “When I was in school I was getting disgusted with the attitude of art being so religious or sacred,” Sherman explained. “So I wanted to make something that people could relate to without having to read a book about it beforehand. ... That’s the reason why I wanted to imitate something out of the culture, and also make fun of the culture as I was doing it” (C. Sherman, quoted in E. Respini, op. cit., 2012, pp. 17-18).
The Centerfolds ultimately brought Sherman much success and fame. In particular, Untitled has become iconic. Of the small edition of 10, at least five belong to major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago (a gift of the Edlis Neeson Collection); the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
The Centerfolds marked a turning-point, essentially propelling Sherman’s work to world-wide fame following their exhibition at New York’s Metro Pictures in November of 1981. The following year, she was invited to show her work at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, and at the 40th Venice Biennale. “Commercially and critically, this provocative body of work ushered in a new era in Sherman’s career,” the curator of Sherman’s 2012 retrospective, Eva Respini, has written, “catapulting her to art stardom and engendering a new round of vigorous critical debate” (E. Respini, Cindy Sherman, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 30).
Untitled is among the most chilling and evocative of all the Centerfolds. Executed in 1981, it features the image of a young schoolgirl who crouches upon a scratched and dirty wood floor. Wearing a white blouse and tartan skirt, she is the embodiment of the stereotypical male “schoolgirl fantasy,” but one which has gone horribly wrong. Supporting the weight of her body with splayed fingers, she cowers in a position of fear. Who is this young girl, with wet hair and piercing blue eyes? She is bathed in a penetrating cool white light, almost as if she’s performing on a stage, but Sherman has cropped and fitted the frame to include only her face and contorted body. The image glows with a bright light that heightens the drama of the scene.
“I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at it in expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be, looking at this woman who’s perhaps a victim...[although] I didn’t think of them as victims at the time.”Cindy Sherman
The image is permeated with uncomfortable beauty, a symphony of blue tones that accentuate the artist’s wide blue eyes, with the lines upon the wood floor mirroring that of her plaid skirt. It is an image both beautiful and disturbing, and perhaps for this very reason, has featured on the cover of several exhibition catalogues and books about the artist’s work. When the Centerfolds were first exhibited at Metro Pictures in New York on November 7, 1981, they sparked considerable discussion and debate. The artist would later explain: “I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at it in expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be, looking at this woman who’s perhaps a victim...[although] I didn’t think of them as victims at the time” (C. Sherman, quoted in G. Allen, Cindy Sherman Centerfold (Untitled #96), New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2021, p. 6).
By subverting the traditional “male gaze” of the nude centerfold, these images instead granted its female heroines more agency and a mind of their own. Acting as both creator and subject, Sherman was able to take control of the narrative and re-fashion it according to her own viewpoint. In doing so, she draws upon the rich, yet complicated, history of women and the construction of gender throughout art history, and in film, TV, magazines, newspapers and literature. Sherman was one of the first artists to tackle this weighty and problematic issue, and her work continues to resonate today despite the forty years since its original creation. She credits the pioneering feminist work of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antoni and Janine Anton as an early influence.
By engaging with these pre-existing tropes, Sherman wrestles with the important strategies of visual appropriation that developed in New York in the 1970s and ‘80s. This paralleled the work of her peers, including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler, who later became known as the Pictures Generation. Perhaps because of this, the Centerfolds often contain subtle clues as to their own inherent artificiality as a work of fiction. For example, the theatrical lighting and wide-scale cinematic format of Untitled mimics the look of a vintage Hollywood film. This is an important aspect of the Centerfolds that the art critic Roberta Smith lit upon when reviewing the series in 1981: "Sherman makes you understand the components of photography with a particular bluntness which is one of her trademarks. The roles of color, light, cropping, space, eye contact (or lack of it) are continually stated and restated and we read them just as we do details of clothing, hairdo, posture, flooring. Despite all this the effect is not simply didactic; everything is both laid out and convincingly, ingenuously synthesized” (R. Smith, "Review: Cindy Sherman," Village Voice, New York, November 18, 1981).
As a child growing up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Sherman always enjoyed dressing up and makeup and inventing different characters. When she moved to New York after graduating from college in Buffalo in 1977, she famously dressed up to attend art openings and at her part-time job at Artist’s Space. And although her critique of the mass media dovetails neatly with the prevailing postmodern philosophy of the era, notably put forth by Michel Foucault and Guy Debord, her characters can also be seen as a way to circumvent what was expected of her. They are also, at times, zany, irreverent and even fun. “When I was in school I was getting disgusted with the attitude of art being so religious or sacred,” Sherman explained. “So I wanted to make something that people could relate to without having to read a book about it beforehand. ... That’s the reason why I wanted to imitate something out of the culture, and also make fun of the culture as I was doing it” (C. Sherman, quoted in E. Respini, op. cit., 2012, pp. 17-18).
The Centerfolds ultimately brought Sherman much success and fame. In particular, Untitled has become iconic. Of the small edition of 10, at least five belong to major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago (a gift of the Edlis Neeson Collection); the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.