Cindy Sherman "Untitled #96" Sells For $3.9 Million At Auction, The Highest Ever For A Photograph

Christie's had a bumper night, tallying more than $300 million in sales. While not the priciest item up for auction that day, Cindy Sherman's "Untitled #96" from 1981 passed all records for photography, and was sold for $3.89 million. According to ArtInfo.com, the buyer was New York dealer Philippe Segalot, and the underbidder was Per Skarstedt, also a New York dealer. Christie's confirmed that this was a record for a photograph at auction, previously held by Andreas Gursky's "99 Cent II Diptychon," which fetched $3.35 million in 2006. Sherman recently had another high profile sale, with her work "Untitled #153," from 1985 reaching $2.7 million in late 2010.


Other big sellers on the night include Andy Warhol’s 1963-64 “Self- Portrait” which went for $38.4 million, an undocumented Rothko for $33.7 million, and "Untitled (Lamp/Bear)" by Urs Fisher, an enormous, 35,000-pound bright-yellow teddy bear which had been in front of the Seagram building in New York for the last month sold for $6.8 million.


In 1981 the Centerfold or Horizontals series began when the publication ArtForum commisioned Cindy Sherman to create a portfolio of images for display in the magazine. Inspired by the magazines horizontal format and the fact that the publication wanted Sherman to make 2 page spreads, she decided to create pictures that would mimick centerfolds from pornographic magazines. Close-cropped and close up, they portray this multi-self-portraitist in various roles, from a sultry seductress to a frightened, vulnerable victim who might have just been raped.


In the series, Sherman again is the subject in the images and portrays diffrent women in each photo. The mood of each of these life-size storytelling pictures is charged, not only by Ms. Sherman's poses, expressions, clothes and wigs but also by the use of gels that cast the images in colors appropriate to their narratives.


In Untitled #96 (shown above), Sherman portrays what seems to be a young teenager. A sort of kitschy orange suffuses the photograph in which Ms. Sherman lies dreamily on a linoleum floor in a sweater and skirt, a thirty-something single clutching a ''Personals'' ad torn from a newspaper.  This image portrays the character as being innocent yet seductive because at closer inspection, you will notice that her finger points to a small "singles" ad in the newspaper. This is to show how the character wants to leave her young single life and is ready to find her man, showing how she's progressed from a young teenager to a woman. Criticts panned the series, claiming that Sherman was reaffirming sexist stereotypes. Eventually, ArtForum rejected the series and the images were never published in the magazine.

When talking about one of her centerfold pictures Cindy stated, "In content I wanted a man opening up the magazine suddenly look at it with an expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that they would be. Looking at this woman who is perhaps a victim. I didn't think of them as victims at the time... But I suppose... Obviously I'm trying to make someone feel bad for having a certain expectation."

In her work, Sherman is both revealed and hidden, named and nameless. She explained to the New York Times in 1990, "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear."

More than simple spoofs of the sterotypes promulgated by various magazines, these photographs manage to convey the ambiguities of women playing gender cliché roles and even Ms. Sherman's own unease at casting herself in them. Preceding a long era of repulsive imagery when she took herself out of the picture, using instead body parts, mutilated dolls, rotting foods and such, they re-emerge as positively refreshing.