Untitled #490
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.While in art school in the 1970s, Cindy Sherman recognized that photography was a ready and effective means with which to challenge archetypes and roles projected onto women by society. Then, as now, she uses photography to record a reality of sorts, but one she wholly manufactures. In her photographs, she plays the role of producer, director, and photographer, and often is the sole performer. Here, in a radical nine-part self-portrait, Sherman pleasures herself for the camera (or suggests as much). She has an orgasm, then relaxes and smokes a cigarette, a wink to the formidable heroine Mrs. Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft, of The Graduate (1967). Made when she was just twenty-two years old, the individual prints are intentionally, seductively, modest in size, but enormous in ambition.
Artwork Details
- Title: Untitled #490
- Artist: Cindy Sherman (American, born Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 1954)
- Date: 1976
- Medium: Nine gelatin silver prints with applied color
- Dimensions: Image: 4 1/4 × 3 1/8 in. (10.8 × 7.9 cm), each
Framed: 11 × 38 in. (27.9 × 96.5 cm) - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
- Curatorial Department: Photographs