Sherrie Levine
La Fortune (After Man Ray): 4
1990
Not on view
Date
1990
Classification
Sculpture
Medium
Mahogany, felt, and billiard balls
Dimensions
Overall: 33 × 110 × 60in. (83.8 × 279.4 × 152.4 cm)
Accession number
92.1a-h
Edition
Ed. 6
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Eugene Schwartz and Robert Sosnick
Rights and reproductions
© 1990 Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine’s “La Fortune” (After Man Ray) challenges the perception of the artist as a creative genius and the art work as a unique, handcrafted object. Levine’s sculpture refers to a late Surrealist painting by Man Ray, entitled La Fortune (1938), which includes a dreamlike juxtaposition of a billiard table, a mountain range, and brightly colored clouds. Levine transforms the two-dimensional images into six billiard tables that give physical form to the one depicted in Man Ray’s La Fortune. The pocketless tables are identical to Man Ray’s, even with regard to the unusual hourglass shaped legs and the placement of the balls. Through extracting and repetitiously duplicating Man Ray’s imagery, Levine questions the nature of originality in art, both in terms of the creative idea and in the production of the art object.
