Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Untitled #490
Cindy Sherman American
Not on view
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.
Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
