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Lot Essay
Cindy Sherman was commissioned by Artforum in 1981 to make a project, a series of double-page spreads. She conceived of them as equivalent to those found in men's magazines and developed the persona of a pensive or distracted young girl as protagonist.
The images generated an intense debate about the scenes depicted and Artforum's editors eventually rejected the project. Suggestions that this image shows a scene after a rape has taken place were countered by Sherman's disingenuous description in a Japanese catalogue (Shiga, Museum of Modern Art, 1995) as imagining someone who had just come home in the early morning from being out partying all night, and the sun wakes her shortly after she has gone to bed.
Sherman's notes from the series (Cindy Sherman Retrospective, New York and London, 1997, p. 101) define the sensibility of the image. "If these (centerfolds) are going to be big they'd better be cluttered with images, information. That means no solid fields of space, or color with nothing in it or going on... This could be in 2 parts--close-up and full view or close-up and view of room/location." The works were produced in Sherman's apartment in lower Manhattan, using the furniture and props in the house.
Much has been written about the horizontality of the format of these works, placing them within a modernist avant-garde history as well as the feminist reworking of picture-making of the early 1970s.
Peter Schjeldhal (in Cindy Sherman, exh. cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984, p. 9) describes them as Sherman's first fully mature work--"Pictorial, semiotic, and psychological dynamics are seamless, and as taut as a snare drum. Though still involved with movies, the "horizontals" meet it on the highest plane... These are static or, if you will think of time as moisture, freeze-dried movies... The hypnotic women of the "horizontals" strike beneath humanity. Their reveries are like so many viewpoints on the darkest sensations, and the terror of existing."
The images generated an intense debate about the scenes depicted and Artforum's editors eventually rejected the project. Suggestions that this image shows a scene after a rape has taken place were countered by Sherman's disingenuous description in a Japanese catalogue (Shiga, Museum of Modern Art, 1995) as imagining someone who had just come home in the early morning from being out partying all night, and the sun wakes her shortly after she has gone to bed.
Sherman's notes from the series (Cindy Sherman Retrospective, New York and London, 1997, p. 101) define the sensibility of the image. "If these (centerfolds) are going to be big they'd better be cluttered with images, information. That means no solid fields of space, or color with nothing in it or going on... This could be in 2 parts--close-up and full view or close-up and view of room/location." The works were produced in Sherman's apartment in lower Manhattan, using the furniture and props in the house.
Much has been written about the horizontality of the format of these works, placing them within a modernist avant-garde history as well as the feminist reworking of picture-making of the early 1970s.
Peter Schjeldhal (in Cindy Sherman, exh. cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984, p. 9) describes them as Sherman's first fully mature work--"Pictorial, semiotic, and psychological dynamics are seamless, and as taut as a snare drum. Though still involved with movies, the "horizontals" meet it on the highest plane... These are static or, if you will think of time as moisture, freeze-dried movies... The hypnotic women of the "horizontals" strike beneath humanity. Their reveries are like so many viewpoints on the darkest sensations, and the terror of existing."