Sherrie Levine

The 1970s: Distrust of the Avant-Garde Demand for Original Style

Levine studied painting and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After moving to New York, she made collages from magazine advertisements and found images. In 1977 she took part in Pictures, organized by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space^*1. During the same period, Conceptual art challenged assumptions about the artist’s hand and the unique art object, while artists began using existing images from film, television, advertising, and magazines as material^*26. The avant-garde ideal of continually renewing an original personal style also came under criticism. Levine’s subject became the authority and desire carried by images already in circulation.

“Where Could a Woman Artist Position Herself?”: Why Levine Used Images by Male Masters

Levine’s doubt about originality grew from her experience that anything she made in art school seemed derivative, and from her recognition that the center of modern art was occupied by male artists and male desire. She later recalled that copying released her from the frustration of trying to demonstrate originality^*5. In 1986 she also said that, while the art system as a whole celebrated work expressing male desire, she could not see where a woman artist could position herself^*25. Levine therefore did not add a new iconography intended to represent a woman’s point of view. She took up images by male masters whose work she herself valued and remade them under her own name. The same print could retain respect for its precedent and resistance to the history that had transmitted those works under the category of the “master.”

Why Rephotography? Removing Visible Difference and Changing Attribution

A negative can yield multiple prints, and a photograph can spread through printed reproduction, yet the art system treats an individual print with a signature, provenance, and edition as a unique work. The Hammer Museum describes the After series as questioning the contradiction between reproducible photography and a culture that privileges the singular art object^*12. Rephotography allowed Levine to produce another negative and print from a nearly identical image without redrawing its forms as she would in a painted copy. She did not return to Evans’s locations or subjects; she pointed her camera at printed reproductions in an exhibition catalog. The result was a different object with a new negative, paper, dimensions, frame, title, signature, seller, and owner. Photography’s reproducibility was essential because it allowed her to demonstrate materially how the same image becomes a work by another author^*25.

After Walker Evans: How a Catalog Reproduction Became a Levine

In After Walker Evans (1981), Levine did not use Walker Evans’s negatives or his own prints. She photographed reproductions printed in an exhibition catalog. The catalog had already translated the original size, paper, and tonal range into a different printed object. Levine rephotographed those reproductions, made new negatives, and installed twenty-two small gelatin silver prints in a solo exhibition^*8. The Whitney Museum’s collection record registers After Walker Evans: 4 as a 1981 work by Levine^*10. The image remains nearly identical to Evans’s photograph, while the title, author, and collection record are distinct. The series also shows that Evans’s photographs were never neutral windows. He photographed tenant farmers during the Great Depression, turning their lives into canonical works of modern photography. Craig Owens argued that by taking again photographs of “the dispossessed,” Levine made visible how the first act of photography had already appropriated the subject’s life as art^*25.

“After”: A Title of Regard, Inheritance, and Belatedness

After can indicate temporal succession, imitation, or work made in the wake of a predecessor. The Centre Pompidou explains that the term acknowledges a debt to a predecessor while also marking the position of an artist working after the major inventions of modern art have already been made^*7. Levine keeps the reputations of Evans and Weston inside her titles. The citation does not erase the original, and it does not follow the conventional model of influence that produces a visibly different work. Placing After before the same image holds together attachment to the predecessor, unavoidable belatedness, and the act of taking that authority under her own name.

Respect for and Critique of Male Masters: Levine’s Feminism

Evans, Edward Weston, Edgar Degas, and Marcel Duchamp—the artists Levine rephotographed—have occupied central positions in modern art and photographic history. Once a woman’s name is attached to their work, questions arise about how the same image is read as a woman’s production and how women can enter an existing art history. The Centre Pompidou identifies After Walker Evans as a work that addresses the underrepresentation of women in art history alongside authorship and authenticity^*7. This is not a simple substitution of a woman artist for a male master. Levine’s work depends on the fame of those masters, and her own authorial name becomes a new authority that guarantees the copy as an artwork. As AWARE’s account of the contemporary debate explains, the method was praised as a sophisticated critique of male-centered modern art and criticized for repeating the forms and authority it targeted^*25. Because that dependence remains inside the work, the critique does not resolve into a clean transfer of authority.

Existing Photographs as Subjects: A Double Distance from People and Bodies

Levine did not point her camera directly at tenant farmers, nudes, women, or nature. She photographed images in which Evans, Weston, advertising, and art-historical reproductions had already rendered them as “poverty,” the “ideal body,” or “nature.” Discussing the later After Edward Curtis, the Hammer Museum describes a project that revisits the aims and biases of photographers and recorders, and asks whether a photograph can convey the complete truth about its subject^*12. The photograph appears here as the result of selecting a subject, taking and printing an image, then assigning it a title and an author’s name. It cannot function as a direct window onto the world. Rephotography made the photographer’s viewpoint before the subject, and the circulation history of the reproduction, into the work’s subject.

After Edward Weston: Reusing a Photograph That Turned the Artist’s Son into Abstract Form

In After Edward Weston, Levine rephotographed a reproduction of Weston’s Six Nudes of Neil, 1925^*27. Fotomuseum Winterthur holds Levine’s work as a 1981 gelatin silver print^*11. In the original, the nude body of Weston’s son Neil occupies the frame as a form whose contours and sheen recall shells or plants. Leaving the image nearly unchanged, Levine re-presented under her own name both Weston’s transformation of a family member’s body into abstract form and the history through which the photograph became a canonical modernist work. The work asks about ownership of the body and about how a photograph of an intimate nude came to be sanctioned as a master’s universal “form.”

After Edgar Degas: Adding Generations of Reproduction Between Photograph and Print

The 1987 work Untitled, from After Edgar Degas is a set of five photolithographs based on a reproduction of a work by Degas^*15. The original first becomes a printed reproduction; that reproduction is photographed and then printed again as a lithograph. Each passage changes the paper, density, dimensions, and owner, while the form recognized as a “Degas image” persists. By adding stages of reproduction, Levine separates the possible bases of originality: material identity, repeated contour, and the artist’s name.

From Photography to Bronze and Glass: Testing the Value of the Original Through Material

From the late 1980s onward, Levine expanded into painting, wood, glass, and bronze. In Melt Down, she extracted average colors from paintings by Kirchner, Mondrian, Monet, and others, transforming them into fields of color in which the original compositions could no longer be identified^*14. Fountain (Madonna) remade Duchamp’s industrial urinal as a polished bronze sculpture^*8. In Newborn, she remade a Brancusi sculpture in clear crystal^*16. The photographs examine how an existing image becomes another author’s work; the sculptures examine how an existing form is treated as a new original through material, fabrication, and the display plinth. Across media, the work addresses a system in which value is determined by who fabricates, signs, and exhibits a form, and in what material. Chronological priority is only one part of that system.

Mayhem: Photography, Sculpture, and Painting Across Periods

The Whitney Museum’s 2011–12 exhibition Sherrie Levine: Mayhem brought After Walker Evans, bronze and glass sculptures, and abstract paintings from different periods and media into the same exhibition^*17. The accompanying guide explained the sources and production methods of works across photography, sculpture, and painting^*8. Placing the early rephotographs beside later sculptures reveals the consistency of Levine’s operations: the form of an existing work is retained while the author’s name, material, fabrication process, and method of display change. The Whitney’s audio introduction likewise explains that Levine takes forms from art history and brings back into the work information usually treated as external to the image, including the artist’s gender and the material^*18.

How After Walker Evans Separated the “Photographer” from the “Author”

Before After Walker Evans, Duchamp’s readymades, Pop art, and Conceptual art had already made existing objects and images into art. Levine’s distinct intervention was to reproduce canonical photographs with almost no change to their content or photographic technique, materializing under another author’s name the process by which a reproducible image becomes institutionalized as the rare “original” of a male master. The Met situates Levine within the Pictures Generation’s reuse of found imagery to analyze desires and social roles produced by mass media, describing her as photographing from behind the “fathers” of photographic history^*26. Her work brought to the center of 1980s photography and contemporary art the possibility that photographic authorship could consist of selecting, remaking, titling, and exhibiting existing images, as well as choosing a subject and operating a camera.

The Paradox of the Copy as a Rare Art Object

Whether Levine’s rephotography dismantled the authority of the original became a subject of debate early on. After Walker Evans and After Edward Weston were made as gelatin silver prints and treated by museums and the market as works by Levine^*10. A review in Frieze noted that the copy might create a new aura and price for Levine’s own work instead of erasing aura^*20. The contradiction belongs to the work itself. Levine’s photographs reenact the mechanisms—signature, edition, provenance, and museum collection—that make a reproducible image singular. Her work cannot stand outside the art system; critique and commodification proceed together.

The Limits of Critique That Depends on Art-Historical Knowledge

Without knowledge of Evans or Weston, the images in the After series may appear to be straightforward reproductions of classic photographs. AWARE notes that understanding Levine’s feminism and critical argument requires knowledge of early twentieth-century photographic history, the source images, and the method of rephotography, and that the work has been criticized as not universally legible and as dependent on specialized codes^*25. Martha Rosler warned that repeating an oppressive form could also repeat its oppression, while Abigail Solomon-Godeau argued that the reach of the critique was limited to the art world^*25. The knowledge demanded by the work shows how the history of male masters is shared through education and museums, while potentially excluding viewers without access to that education.

Levine’s Place: Defining the Photographic Original as a History, Not an Image

In Levine’s photographs, the same image accumulates multiple material and institutional histories. Evans’s negative, the prints made from it, a printed reproduction in an exhibition catalog, Levine’s rephotography negative, her gelatin silver print, its gallery sale, and its museum accession are not the same work despite their visual similarity. The Whitney Museum connects this project to a present in which the copying and circulation of digital images have become ordinary^*6. Levine showed that the status of a photograph as an original includes more than the chronological order of images; it includes the history of who made, signed, owned, and exhibited the negative and print. Placing a nearly identical image under two artists’ names offers a concrete point of comparison for authorship and ownership in reenactment, citation, and digital reproduction.