Sherrie Levine

The painting Check #5 by Sherrie Levine is an important recent addition to the Museum’s growing department of contemporary art. Sherrie Levine emerged in the 1980s as perhaps the most radical in a group of artists who became known for “appropriation”-the idea of borrowing form and content directly from the works of other artists or from consumer culture.

Almost from the start of the twentieth century, artists, including such seminal figures as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, borrowed images, styles, and even actual scraps of other artwork in creating their own work. In the 1980s, this tradition of borrowing took a dramatic turn. Drawing from the earlier traditions of the avant-garde, and simultaneously reacting against Western art’s penchant for originality, these late 20th-century artists (including Richard Prince, John Baldessari, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Koons) were drawn to reproducing and adapting forms and images that others had crafted.

Sherrie Levine took the idea of appropriation to its extreme. In her early work, Levine re-photographed the classic photographs of Edward Weston and Walker Evans. A few years later, she meticulously copied the drawings of Egon Schiele and Joan Miró. These were not meant to be forgeries, though they looked remarkably like the originals. By deliberately choosing these earlier artists’ best-known work and then signing her own name, Levine did not intend to fool anyone. Instead, she aimed to provoke extreme responses from viewers while playfully defying the value systems of the art market, a system that had long under-appreciated works by women artists.

In the mid-80s, Levine’s work took a turn away from direct appropriations. She highlighted the knots found in a wooden board by covering them in gold leaf and then made a series of stripe paintings in various colors that incorporated the natural imperfections of the wood upon which they were painted. She then created a group of checkerboard paintings, of which Check #5 is an example.

By mixing wax into a milk-based paint called casein and by deliberately leaving her preparatory pencil sketches visible, Levine draws attention to her own hand at work, something absent in her earlier appropriations. These features give the painting a more handcrafted, personal look, as does the emphasis on the paints’ support: a piece of wood. The painting has no frame, and it hangs flush on the wall. By accentuating the materiality of the painting, Levine encourages us to view this work not as a depiction of some other item in another place but rather as a physical object in its own right.

In fact, Check #5 could be mistaken for a brightly-colored, hand-painted checkerboard in the 19th-century American folk art tradition, although there are eighty squares rather than the sixty-four that characterize most game boards. This painting does not directly copy or quote the work of another artist. Instead, Check #5 is more of a conceptual appropriation that refers to the systematic patterning of geometric abstraction, the formal sparseness of Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the enthusiasm for game playing Levine shares with the earlier 20th century Dada artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. In the 1920s, Duchamp went so far as to pretend to give up art making and instead said he was devoting his life to playing chess.