After Egon Schiele

Sherrie Levines After Egon Schiele from 1982 is a set of seven gelatin silver and eleven chromogenic prints that exemplify the American appropriation artists practice of rephotographing existing works of art and presenting them as her own, a strategy that raises fundamental questions about authorship, originality, and the nature of artistic value in an age of mechanical reproduction. Levine, who emerged in the early 1980s as one of the leading figures of the Pictures Generation and the appropriation art movement, developed a practice of photographing canonical works of art by male artists, including Walker Evans, Constantin Brancusi, and Egon Schiele, and exhibiting the resulting photographs as her own work, a strategy that was both a critique of the patriarchal structures of the art world and an investigation of the relationship between original and copy in the age of mechanical reproduction. Schiele, the Austrian Expressionist painter whose drawings of nude figures are among the most sexually frank and psychologically intense works in the history of Western art, provided Levine with a subject that combines the issues of authorship and appropriation with the issues of gender, sexuality, and the male gaze that are central to her practice. The combination of gelatin silver prints and chromogenic prints, which reproduce the tonal range of Schieles drawings in black and white and color respectively, demonstrates Levines ability to use the technical resources of photography to create works that are simultaneously copies and originals, reproductions and new works.

Levines After Egon Schiele is a significant work in the history of appropriation art, and its influence on the discourse of authorship, originality, and gender extends from the art world to the legal system. The work influenced the development of feminist art criticism and the broader tradition of art that critiques the patriarchal structures of the art world.

A 1982 set of seven gelatin silver and eleven chromogenic prints by Levine rephotographing Egon Schieles drawings, raising fundamental questions about authorship, originality, and the patriarchal structures of the art world through appropriation of one of the most sexually frank male artists in Western art history.