Cindy Sherman: Work From Early Years
Blake Gopnik comments: ‘When Cindy Sherman began to take her famous pictures of herself, she changed the history of art—and of photography. The Museum of Modern Art has recognized that fact with the full-scale Sherman retrospective that will close in New York in two weeks. (I discussed it when it opened.) What that great MoMA show doesn’t quite make clear is how very early Sherman hit her stride. Sherman came up with her world-famous Untitled Film Stills in 1977, after she’d moved to New York from Buffalo, where she’d been studying. But from early in her student years at Buffalo State she’d already figured out the direction her artmaking would take. (A show now at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery looks at Sherman and the rest of the local art scene.) On June 1, the Austrian Verbund collection will be releasing a complete catalog of the artist’s very earliest—and amazingly mature—self-portrayals, and we’ve gathered a few of them in this Web gallery. Most have never been seen before.’
