Untitled #201

In this series, Cindy Sherman confronts the Western tradition of portrait painting, appropriating the themes, and the language of old masters, in a deliberately artificial manner. Dressed in costumes put together from clothes bought in flea markets, prosthetics, wigs, and various accessories, the artist embodies in turn Madonnas, nobles, aristocrats, and the bourgeois of the Renaissance to the 19th century. These men and women are posed in rudimentary settings, with curtains or hangings, with a few significant objects. Sherman humorously parodies the traditional style and codes of representation—pose, gaze, hairstyle, clothing, etc.—to invent her own portraits. Only four refer to specific works: Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (Untitled #224), Jean Fouquet’s Virgin from the Melun Diptych (Untitled #216), Ingre’s Madame Moitessier (Untitled #204), and Raphael’s La Fornarina (Untitled #205).