After Rodchenko: 1-12, 1987/1998. Twelve gelatin silver prints, A.P. 1/1, edition of 5, sheet: 8 x 6 inches (20.3 x 15.2 cm) each; frame: 20 9/16 x 16 9/16 inches (52.2 x 42.1 cm) each. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee; the Estate of Ruth Zierler, in memory of her dear departed son, William S. Zierler; and Pamela and Arthur Sanders  2006.76. © Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine emerged in the late 1970s as a member of a group of Conceptual artists known as the “Pictures” generation, a name derived from the seminal exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp for Artist’s Space in 1977. Immersed in the prevailing currents of critical theory, these artists used appropriation-based techniques to interrogate the assumptions surrounding visual representation. Whereas many of her contemporaries drew from the image bank of everyday life and the mass media, Levine’s best-known work finds a more rarified source in the annals of 20th-century art, appropriating from such modernist luminaries as Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, and Man Ray. After Rodchenko: 1-12 comprises twelve facsimiles of the work of the Russian Constructivist, whose celebrated photographs dating from the 1920s and ’30s reflect both his interest in graphic abstraction and a fiercely communist ideology. The performative nature of Levine’s practice, in which she assumes, or impersonates, the identity of an artistic predecessor, has been interpreted by feminist critics as a subversive intervention in the rigid (and overwhelmingly male) construction of the art-historical canon. Levine, however, prefers to view her work as a regenerative act of collaboration, transforming the singular masterpiece into something fluid and perpetually renewable.

Katherine Brinson