After Egon Schiele

For over forty years, Sherrie Levine has addressed issues of authorship and originality. Appropriating images from art history—often citations of works by male artists—Levine considers the relationships between authenticity and subjectivity and desire and power. For After Egon Schiele, the artist photographed reproductions of eighteen self-portraits by the early 20th-century Austrian painter Egon Schiele.
She did not alter the original images but recontextualized them through the act of appropriation. The finished
work is at once a copy and an original, authored anew by Levine. Commenting on the choice for these particular selfportraits by Schiele, she explained, “There is something in his eroticism that strikes a chord. Partly it’s the selfconscious representation of his own narcissism.”