The Best of Both Worlds: Sherrie Levine Now

Abstract “The Best of Both Worlds: Sherrie Levine Now” revisits Sherrie Levine's formative work in order to rethink the period's entrenched opposition between photographic appropriation and neo-expressionist painting. Taking as its point of departure Sherrie Levine: 1977–1988, curated by Scott Portnoy at the Aspen Art Museum in 2025, the essay situates Levine's emergence within a discursive field defined by the sharp binaries of photography versus painting, critique versus complicity, and women artists versus male artists. Long framed by critics (most influentially, Douglas Crimp) as a deconstructive repudiation of authorship, expressive immediacy, and painterly gesture, Levine's early appropriations were positioned as the antithesis of the market-driven resurgence of painting in the 1980s. However, such readings ultimately flattened the central contradictions, both affective and conceptual, that animated Levine's work from the beginning. Against this backdrop, her unexpected turn to painting in 1985 appears not as a betrayal of her earlier project but as a strategic reconfiguration of it—one that reintroduced contradiction at the level of medium, context, and identity. By interrogating the interpretive frameworks surrounding Levine's work and insisting on a closer engagement with its material and content, the essay reveals the antagonism between appropriation and expression to be a historically contingent fiction.