After Edgar Degas, 1987

About the Work

Borrowed authorship! The photographs by this American artist confirm her admission that she would have preferred to process all the exposed originals herself. That is how she proceeds in 'After Edgar Degas' with the painter's subjects, which were created during the first golden age of photography. Back then, between 1860 and 1880, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who would achieve world fame with his camera under his pseudonym, Nadar, wandered through Paris. In nightclubs and cafés, at the washstand, at the riding ground and at the ballet school, he watched people who were absorbed in themselves, singing, drinking, dancing, yawning - like his friend Degas, who was recording them in drawings and paintings around that time. Legitimated by Appropriation Art, Sherrie Levine now steals from these references the aura of the original, always using the same format of 69 x 56 centimetres. She does the same not only with Degas (à la Nadar), but also with such masters of Classic Modernism as Kasimir Malevich and Yves Klein or the plant photographer Karl Blossfeldt, as if wishing to lay claim to their copyright for herself. In reality, however, she delivers a sympathetic declaration of relationship through the formally and materially changed reproduction.