After Soutine (The Musician)

Through her use and re-use of celebrated works of modern art as source material, Sherrie Levine dismisses the fraught notion of artistic originality outright. For Levine, images are ownerless and authorless: an idea standing in direct opposition to the highly individualistic modernism from which Soutine, Modigliani and Beckmann emerged in the first half of the 20th century. Levine reduces and essentializes those three artists’ paintings, substituting Soutine’s fleshy impasto brushwork for a lighter watercolor wash while softening Beckmann and Modigliani’s machismo, leaving their respective hands recognizable but largely declawed.

Here, Levine avoids, or perhaps moves beyond, the direct appropriation of her acclaimed After Walker Evans series in favor of a deceptively personal mode of artist-to-artist interfacing: In rejecting the source artists’ authorship and waiving the rights to her own, Levine makes a case for authorship’s outright dismissal. Levine’s watercolors ask whether image or author stands as the arbiter of quality, inviting the viewer to act as lawyer and jury.

Levine’s watercolors represent an important and atypical moment for the typically polished, exacting artist; rarely does she show her hand as freely and successfully as in this series. While Levine’s After Walker Evans series is often mistaken for their source imagery, the watercolors invite no such ambiguity. Coming on the heels of that iconic series, Levine’s watercolors find the artist reconsidering the very notion of reconsideration.