It’s well-known; Cindy Sherman constructed her photographic rhetoric with an ability to reproduce and distort stereotypes of women. When someone ordered a personalized porcelain piece from her in 1989, she had to reproduce Jean Fouquet’s 1452-1458 work Le Diptyque de Melun. That’s when she got the idea to play with classical painting – with a stoic stance and strained eyes, her blue coat and lace background imitate all the conventions of Renaissance painting of Northern Europe; but the awkwardly positioned plastic chest and the pleats of the dress betray the photograph’s artifice.
“I was disgusted with an attitude that aimed to see art as something religious or so sacred,” she would later explain. It’s true that Cindy Sherman has always striven for art that’s accessible to everyone, and especially art that speaks to everyone. Untitled #216 is part of a series of 35 photographs that have a common theme of distorting legendary art. Raphael, Caravaggio, Ingres, and Rubens… Sherman used them all to rewrite her own history of art. By exploiting costumes and decor elements that provide the backdrop for her classical compositions, the artist seeks to woo in order to bring a twist to art and portraits.
Once more, the artist herself incarnates these different models taken out of the collective imagination. Comprised of figurative paintings reworked in a deliberately artificial and caricatural new way, Sherman’s series can be understood as a rebuke to the worship of works of art that are themselves representative of dated beliefs. Sherman’s new version of Le Diptyque de Melun, or Untitled #216, offers an ironic vision of what art is in the post-modern era. By plunging into humanity’s shared heritage, she makes photography a useful tool for a continuing diffusion of icons.
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