The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures, via Sotheby's

 

ARTIST Cindy Sherman

TITLE 'Untitled #91'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $800,000 to $1.2 million

Although Ms. Sherman already has a considerable fan base, her blockbuster retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art through June 11 has enhanced her popularity.

This season works by Ms. Sherman from various years and series are for sale at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury. This 1981 image is from her famous “Centerfold Series,” a group of portraits inspired by photographs in Playboy but with the women in clothes and conveying a complicated mix of emotions.

The estimate may seem steep considering that the Museum of Modern Art purchased her entire “Untitled Film Series” — a group of 69 prints — for a reported $1 million in 1995. But another image from the “Centerfold Series,” “Untitled #96,” brought nearly $4 million a year ago, a record for her work at auction.

“Good lord,” said Pat, a New York friend, eyeing the eager faces, the stilettos, the sheer force field of energy. “Is anybody here over the age of 18?”

“I got a very good price on it,” I said.

We walked to a nearby bar in another hotel. There, the median age doubled, the lights didn’t throb, and screaming to be heard was optional, not mandatory. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel like my own mother.

Well, maybe you get a little self-conscious and defensive about aging when you’re in a hotel lobby crowd younger than your own children (who are grown, but still). Or maybe I was just in a chronological-spiral frame of mind after seeing the new play “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From a Midlife Crisis,” at Cap 21 Theater Company in Chelsea.

Based on the memoir of the same title by Amy Ferris, the play features three menopausal women with insomnia. They’re scouring the Internet for news of old boyfriends, researching dire diseases they’re sure they’re dying of, sweating out their latest hormonal surges, cleaning their closets. You know, what you usually do at 3 a.m. when you’re middle-aged, haggard and homebound in your torn bathrobe — and not young, fresh-faced, dressed to dazzle and in search of a New York party. The play’s three unnamed women speak of their demons and fears. They swap stories of recent weight gains and parents’ deaths, the disappearance of a waistline and the lingering of a mother who’s losing her mind to dementia. They drink wine, they loudly regret quitting cigarettes, and they dance and they sing.

All the above happened to her during her plunge into menopause, Ms. Ferris, a first-time playwright (who adapted the memoir with her husband, Ken Ferris, and Krista Lyons), said when we met at the nearby Tipsy Parson restaurant. (She is, I should add, happily married and does not personally know George Clooney, at least not yet.)

Ms. Ferris’s memoir, which is freewheeling, poignant, funny and cranky, ends in an epilogue recounting her last hours with her dying mother. As she tries to comfort her mother, her own mind is overwhelmed with images and memories from both their lives. In many ways, these final scenes in the book are more powerful than the staged versions. Or maybe, when you’re a reader, your mind is freed to imagine, and the dying mother — with her lifetime of rage and unhappiness — becomes your own.

“When I do book readings,” Ms. Ferris said, “it almost always ends up like a therapy group, with all the women in the audience talking about their mothers.”

Well, of course they do. Sure, middle-aged women talk about aging and wrinkles and menopause and how we’re not young any longer. But sometimes I think that’s only a passing phase, as we plummet into a new time in our lives and learn to adjust.

But our mothers! Do we ever outgrow talking about our mothers — apologizing to them, confronting them, reproaching them, grieving for their lives — no matter how long they have been dead?

Ms. Ferris’s mother wanted to be an artist. Instead she had children she loved but deeply resented. Ms. Ferris, with her own career as a screenwriter, author and now playwright, often feels she is leading the life her mother wanted for herself.

I was still thinking about mothers and their middle-aged daughters when I met my friend Nancy at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s photographs. We wandered through the rooms marveling at the artist’s diversity, her intensity, the detail in her work, both subtle and lavish.

“Do you think,” I asked Nancy, “when Cindy was just beginning in the ’70s and ’80s, that her mother started saying, ‘Enough with photographing yourself, Cindy! What’s wrong with a nice landscape now and then?’ ”

Before I left town, I went shopping at Vince in Chelsea. Like the women at the Downtown Dream, every other woman I’d seen in New York, it seemed, had been wedged into skinny jeans and boots. The boots I could skip, but the jeans were a definite possibility.

I squeezed myself into a pair and went to peer into a store mirror. Both the young man and the young woman who worked there told me the jeans looked great. I said that, unfortunately, I couldn’t breathe or sit down. In fact, I felt I lacked the commitment to wear skinny jeans and, presumably, expire while looking great.

The experience made me sympathetic to all the young women I saw wearing skinny jeans after that. It isn’t only middle-aged women who suffer in this life, I told myself.

Maybe you had to get to middle age to realize your mother was right: you should never buy clothes you aren’t comfortable in.

Ruth Pennebaker’s latest novel is “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough.” She blogs at geezersisters.com.

 

Of all the important private art collections in Miami -- and there are many -- the Rubell Family Collection has long been one of the biggest and the best known. Founded by Don and Mera Rubell and today including son Jason in the collecting activities, the sprawling, 45,000-square-foot exhibition space was a Wynwood pioneer when it opened in 1993.

Thanks to the Rubells, Miamians have been exposed to some spectacular, world-class art that we otherwise might have missed. One of the best examples of this was the superb 30 Americans show that opened for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009, which highlighted the works of 30 African-American artists, both emerging and established, in a unique, cohesive, informative survey. Those 30 moved on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where the president visited it, and opened on March 16 at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va.

This year’s exhibit, American Exuberance, is much larger, and maybe as a consequence not as tight in its delivery and thematic thread, intended to convey the changing American condition over several decades. Many of the 190 artworks from 64 artists — both Americans and foreigners who live here — are recent acquisitions to the collection, with 40 of them made in 2011 alone. Rather than trying to follow the rather broad concept, it may be most worthwhile to concentrate on these new works, as where the Rubells go in collecting, others soon follow.

Another way to divvy up this large show would be to tour it under the theme “The Exuberance of Los Angeles Art,” as almost every other work seems to have been made by an artist who calls that West Coast hotspot home. (In fact, another great show of the Rubells from several years ago, called Red Eye, was all about L.A. artists.)

One of those is Richard Jackson, who has created the wild and colorful introductory installations to the exhibit. He has splashed the walls, floor — and in a great touch, even the drinking fountain — in the first room with bright yellow paint, while covering other surfaces with canvases in similarly vibrant primary colors. In the middle is a stainless steel sculpture, called “Upside Down Duck General,” which is, indeed, an upside-down duck.

In a second room, the color and light are outrageously intense; orange light floods in from windows and a door to a deep blue room, in which a mannequin woman, also drenched and dripping in blue, sits at a desk. Jackson made both these rooms for the show, and they make an immediate, sensational impression.

One room is dedicated to popular L.A. artist Sterling Ruby, who has four, gigantic spray-painted canvases, abstractions that nonetheless evoke layers of sediment, or horizons, in their horizontal composition. Gigantic is not an exaggeration; standing in front of one of these is simply engulfing.

It is nice to stumble (although hopefully not literally) across the work from Mike Kelley, a member of the influential Cal Arts group that includes another major player in this exhibit, John Baldessari. Kelley’s piece consists of some colorful throw rugs and found stuffed animals. In a death that shocked the arts world, Kelley took his life this past Feb. 1. Nearby is sculptural installation from one of L.A.’s most controversial inhabitants, a familiar piece from Paul McCarthy. It’s of a father, a boy and a goat, and the disquieting proximity of the boy behind the goat gives it a McCarthy signature.

March 14, 2012

By Adam Lindemann

I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things, as they did with Maurizio Cattelan’s recent Guggenheim retrospective.

 

The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue. What’s the point of everyone saying the same thing? Do they really all like the same things or are they afraid to step out and say something different, even provocative? If I were an artist, I think I’d get suspicious if everyone in town chimed in about how wonderful I was...

Read more at: adamlindemann.com

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

Spies in the House of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 26

Playing House

Brooklyn Museum, through August 26

***

New York

'Artists are the secret constituency of museums." That's the opening textual salvo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's incoherent photography exhibition "Spies in the House of Art." It also has little to do with the show's other claim—that the exhibition demonstrates how "artists explore the secret life of museums and their collections." Museums are filled with secrets, among them attribution disputes, art deaccessions and exchanges, unsavory provenance issues, and power struggles within and between trustees and staffs.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

'Untitled #207' (1989) by Cindy Sherman.

At best, the argument that this show "surveys various ways museums inspire the making of works of art" is evident in a few of the photographs on view—most notably the large Cindy Sherman portrait that conjures up an Old Master painting (and wonderfully confuses you as to precisely which one it might be). But, by their very celebrity, Ms. Sherman and other oft-seen artists in this show have long disposed of the notion that they constitute a secret museum constituency....

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

New York

Has any American artist ever enjoyed a career as streamlined as Cindy Sherman's? Since taking off in this city at the Times Square show in 1980, the photographer-cum-performer from Long Island via Buffalo has ascended on a steady ride to the top of the art world, seemingly without effort.

Cindy Sherman

The Museum of Modern Art

Through June 11

Enlarge Image

Close

Museum of Modern Art

'Untitled Film Still #21' (1978).

So esteemed by institutions that the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is her third (the Whitney Museum honored her first, in 1987, when she was only 33), she long ago achieved pop status with baby boomers. Name-dropped in lyrics by Chicks on Speed and on HBO's "Six Feet Under," she is overdue for a guest spot on "The Simpsons."

To be acclaimed without inspiring resentment from the art press or her fellow artists is little short of miraculous. No one minds that for 35 years she has been making the same kind of photograph: self-portraits that depend on a Lon Chaney-like repertoire of disguises to address questions about social reality and the vulnerabilities of the female body. The spectrum of characters she has created with this simple formula, everyone seems to agree, is dazzling.

Her popularity isn't hard to explain. Most of her pictures aren't brain-teasers and can be read at a glance. Too much has been written about Ms. Sherman's art reflecting the ocean of images from movies and television that surround us. (The MoMA catalog essay by the show's organizer, associate curator of photography Eva Respini, continues this tired and wrong-headed line of thought.)

It's true that Ms. Sherman's pictures often refer to other pictures. The justly celebrated "Untitled Film Stills" series from 1977-80, seen here in its entirety, relies on her audience's knowing the sources for her characters in Hollywood and European cinema. But to interpret these female types through the lens of Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist who proclaimed that the "simulacrum" of media had replaced lived experience, is to miss the empathy and self-amusement behind her role-playing. Critics love to bedizen her photographs in fancy theories, but Ms. Sherman seldom overthinks. The most impressive aspect of her work may be how economically she orchestrates her three-ring circus of effects.

Ms. Sherman is a superb caricaturist and comedienne who with body language, props, hair, make-up, facial expressions, backgrounds and camera angles can signal exactly how she wants her audience to feel about her subjects. Unlike, say, Matthew Barney's rococo mythologies, the sets never engulf the point of her photographic cartoons.

The artists who came to mind as I walked through the MoMA show were not those her own age, but Honoré Daumier and Thomas Rowlandson, and the actresses Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep. Ms. Sherman's stage-directed tableaus also come out of the history of American illustration and advertising as well as postmodernism, rootstock that MoMA could have exposed had it shown her 1987 travesty of Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving meal.

Ms. Respini's essay cites the feminist artists Hanne Wilke and Lynda Benglis as forerunners. But there is nothing truly confessional or shocking about Ms. Sherman's self-portraits. She does not bare her own breasts or buttocks, only prosthetic ones. Her wigs and masks don't conceal so much as they expose the visible flaws and grotesque insecurities of the characters she plays.

In public, she is similarly recessive and shy. Her art may be overexposed, but she is not. Even when she became the unwanted subject of a 2008 documentary, "Guest of Cindy Sherman," co-directed by ex-boyfriend Paul H-O, she emerged as unblemished and guileless in contrast to the venal poseurs who rule the international art world in the film.

Despite offers from megagalleries, Ms. Sherman has remained for more than 30 years with Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, founders of Metro Pictures, the New York space that launched her. Her one professional misstep may be the Hollywood movie she directed in 1997, "Office Killer." (It goes unlisted in the catalog chronology.)

If fame seems not to have afflicted her with a monstrous ego, Ms. Sherman is stoked by healthy fires of ambition. She has spoken of being irritated that her male counterparts from the early 1980s—Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel—were more quickly rewarded by the market.

Her 1989 series based on Old Master paintings exhibits her sweet revenge. These pictures, gorgeously installed here against burgundy walls, reflect the diminished status of women and of photography in art history. Playing figures of both sexes in portraits by Raphael, Caravaggio and others, she is climbing into the ring with a stable of canonical male artists while also cheekily humanizing the men and women in the gilded frames. Instead of sabotaging the originals, the act of photographing herself in these guises restores the overvarnished past to the momentary hazards of actual life. Her version of a Holbein ambassador imagines him as a bushy-eyed nerd. An Ingres aristocrat with an appraising gaze is a floozie gone to seed.

With the leveling laughter of comedy, Ms. Sherman has cut women as well as men down to size since the "Untitled Film Stills." That top prices for her prints have surpassed those for all but a few of her contemporaries can be a point of pride for women everywhere. Whether casting herself as abused or haughty, she speaks for those who refuse to be patronized or ignored.

Why is MoMA devoting another retrospective to someone who has already exceeded her share of attention? Wouldn't it be more timely for a curator to elevate some of the younger artists (Nikki S. Lee, Laural Nakadate, Yasumasa Morimura, to name three) who have followed Ms. Sherman's example in first-person photography? Her influence has extended backward as well, bringing renewed notice to Victorians (Lady Clementina Hawarden) and gender-bending surrealists (Claude Cahun) who took on various costumed personae.

But if Ms. Sherman was not the first woman to dress up and act out for the camera, her single-minded exploration of this method may be unique. The MoMA survey justifies its existence by tracking a deepening of sympathies since the Whitney retrospective. There are no indications that constantly photographing herself has left her feeling sick of her own image.

Ms. Respini strengthens Ms. Sherman's weakest series, the clowns from 2004, by dispersing them throughout the rooms and making these sexually and emotionally ambivalent figures a key to her work. Suspicions about the manipulative powers of her face and body, and of photography and art, have been central concerns of hers. With a few easy and readable cues, she can appear as distant as a movie star or as vulnerable as the cursed Ovidian gods and goddesses in her so-called Fairy Tales series from the mid-1980s.

The so-called Society Portraits, in the last rooms at MoMA, are her latest pictures (2000-2008) and my favorites. Here, she manipulates her own face and body with frightening precision, cutting ever close to the bone. Digital tools have allowed her to be multiple people in party scenes and to improve the often muddy color seen in her earlier work.

Ms. Respini is too polite to discuss what is obvious about these middle-age women clutching at remnants of their youthful selves. Ms. Sherman is at a stage in life (58 years old) when everyone stares in the mirror and considers what plastic surgeons might do to allay time's ravages. These doyennes are not unlike the collectors whose support makes possible extravagant shows like this one at MoMA. The artist is not so gently biting the jeweled, liver-spotted hands that have fed her career so richly. At the same time, she is facing down the inevitable atrophy of her own mortal flesh. Any laughter these frail creatures give rise to gets caught in the throat.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 7, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Roles of a Lifetime.

“Since 1977, when Cindy Sherman first exhibited her “untitled film Stills” of fictional B-movie starlets, she has surrendered herself to photographic portraits of nearly every female archetype imaginable. So completely does the artist disappear into her subjects—disheveled fashion victims, art-historical icons, tragic dowagers, manic clowns, Beverly Hills housewives—that it’s hard to believe they are all the same woman.” by Linda Yablonsky for the Wall Street Journal (2/26.2012)

PHOTOGRAPHY'S ANGEL PROVOCATEUR

"At many points throughout this dense, often exciting show, which opens on Sunday, we are confronted by an artist with an urgent, singularly personal vision, who for the past 35 years has consistently and provocatively turned photography against itself." By Roberta Smith for the New York Times