In the History Portraits, Cindy Sherman, with the help of costumes, make-up, wigs, props and fake body parts, transformed herself into various religious, mythological and aristocratic figures evoking Western paintings ranging from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. Like the Untitled Film Stills, which do not refer to any specific movie, the History Portraits, for the most part, do not quote any particular painting. Yet, when the viewer encounters this series, presented in a separate room at the Pulitzer Foundation, it is as though a condensed, ironic panorama of Western masterpieces was displayed before him/her. This creates a paradox (perhaps particularly striking for art historians), for on the one hand, Sherman’s project seems to be historically grounded, insofar as it consists of a self-conscious outlook on past artistic traditions, while on the other hand, the artist denies the historical specificity of the artworks she parodies, in the sense that her artistic appropriation reveals a consistent conceptual and pictorial treatment. Turning the characters she portrays into burlesque images, Sherman, both artist and sitter, creates fake masterpieces coming down to a set of pictorial conventions, at once canceling out the relevance of the notion of authorship, central to art history. As Matthias Waschek pointed out, the viewer is instead tempted to identify Cindy Sherman in the History Portraits – a series resembling a big art historical “soup” (we used this term in response to Sherman’s Soup Tureen, presented also in the exhibition).

One of the most conspicuous and recurrent features of the History Portraits is the emphasis Sherman put on gender difference. While the breast of the female characters is often incongruously exposed, the male characters are endowed with excessive wigs, eyebrows, beards and muscles. In this respect, the History Portraits are reminiscent (again, ironically), of the Untitled Film Stills, generally understood as the artist’s feminist negotiation of the concept of the male gaze on the female body. However, in the History Portraits, both women and men are literally turned into objects – what art historians deal with – through their fake and grotesque breasts, beards, etc., thus questioning the way in which Sherman’s work has been received. In this context, the History Portraits seem to ask whether art history is itself a masquerade.