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.
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