Lifting images of urns, willows and winged death heads from gravestones when the alternative was preening on a beach?
So she began exploring pornography as another form of cross-cultural woman's work, lifting images directly from pornographic magazines and stitching them across her canvases.
For more than 30 years Ms. Levine has been slyly lifting images and forms from works by well-known Modernist artists and photographers, using them, her admirers maintain, in ways that undermine conventional notions of originality, artistic mastery and authorship.
In the past, Beyoncé has sparked controversy by lifting images and ideas from other pieces of art; when the Internet takes its collective close read in the coming days, "Lemonade" will certainly generate more.
A portrait of Lichtenstein depicts him behind a screen of Benday dots, for instance, and another shows him in the studio surrounded by a mountain of comic books from which he is shamelessly lifting images for paintings.
A representative of the AOL Time Warner Inc.-owned studio warned that anyone lifting images would be "prosecuted to the full extent of the law," according to one person who attended.
Steven Cairns makes full use of digital collage's ability to lift images from a wide diversity of cultural sources, to superimpose previously disconnected images just for the experimental hell of it.
Levine lifts images and forms from works by well-known Modernist artists and photographers, using them, her admirers maintain, in ways that undermine conventional notions of originality, artistic mastery and authorship, Roberta Smith writes.
Her extended preparation can involve dozens of studies, for which she freely lifts images from magazines, crafts, folk art and other so-called minor sources as well as major sources like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Florine Stettheimer and Kenneth Noland.
Now just shy of 60, she had her first gallery solo in 1974, and came into her own in the 1980's with the wave of East Village "appropriation art," work that lifted images from art history and popular culture to comment on history and culture themselves.
