Untitled #209, “History Portrait” Series by Cindy Sherman

~ JezzieG

Untitled #209, “History Portrait” Series
1989
Feminist Art
Colour Photograph
The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Sherman assumes the persona of the Mona Lisa in this three-quarter length, Italian Renaissance-style portrait. Not a true replica, the photo is intended to call the original painting to mind without copying it, somehow haunting the imitation with the original. Possibly it is suggesting that we rethink the familiarity of the original and examine and question how its conventions of depiction continue to influence the representation of the ‘Female’ today, hundreds of years after the original was created.

Cindy Sherman
The Pictures Generation, Conceptual Art, Feminist Art, Post Modernism
Born: 19 January 1954, New Jersey, USA
Nationality: American

A contemporary master of socially critical photography, Sherman is a key figure of the Pictures Generation, a circle of American artist who came into artistic maturity during the early 1980s, an era of rapid and widespread proliferation of mass media imagery. In art school painting in a super-realist style during the aftermath of American Feminism Sherman took up photography at the end of the 1970s to explore common female social roles and personas. She sought to question the seductive and oppressive influence of mass media on individual and collective identities.

Published by JezzieG

I am a freelance writer and poet and started writing after raising my two boys as a way of discovering just who Jez is. That is still very much an ongoing project but the journey so far has introduced me to many wonderful friends and fellow writers through an ever-growing love of poetry.