By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
New York
Has any American artist ever enjoyed a career as streamlined as Cindy Sherman's? Since taking off in this city at the Times Square show in 1980, the photographer-cum-performer from Long Island via Buffalo has ascended on a steady ride to the top of the art world, seemingly without effort.
Cindy Sherman
The Museum of Modern Art
Through June 11
Museum of Modern Art'Untitled Film Still #21' (1978).
So esteemed by institutions that the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is her third (the Whitney Museum honored her first, in 1987, when she was only 33), she long ago achieved pop status with baby boomers. Name-dropped in lyrics by Chicks on Speed and on HBO's "Six Feet Under," she is overdue for a guest spot on "The Simpsons."
To be acclaimed without inspiring resentment from the art press or her fellow artists is little short of miraculous. No one minds that for 35 years she has been making the same kind of photograph: self-portraits that depend on a Lon Chaney-like repertoire of disguises to address questions about social reality and the vulnerabilities of the female body. The spectrum of characters she has created with this simple formula, everyone seems to agree, is dazzling.
Her popularity isn't hard to explain. Most of her pictures aren't brain-teasers and can be read at a glance. Too much has been written about Ms. Sherman's art reflecting the ocean of images from movies and television that surround us. (The MoMA catalog essay by the show's organizer, associate curator of photography Eva Respini, continues this tired and wrong-headed line of thought.)
It's true that Ms. Sherman's pictures often refer to other pictures. The justly celebrated "Untitled Film Stills" series from 1977-80, seen here in its entirety, relies on her audience's knowing the sources for her characters in Hollywood and European cinema. But to interpret these female types through the lens of Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist who proclaimed that the "simulacrum" of media had replaced lived experience, is to miss the empathy and self-amusement behind her role-playing. Critics love to bedizen her photographs in fancy theories, but Ms. Sherman seldom overthinks. The most impressive aspect of her work may be how economically she orchestrates her three-ring circus of effects.
Ms. Sherman is a superb caricaturist and comedienne who with body language, props, hair, make-up, facial expressions, backgrounds and camera angles can signal exactly how she wants her audience to feel about her subjects. Unlike, say, Matthew Barney's rococo mythologies, the sets never engulf the point of her photographic cartoons.
The artists who came to mind as I walked through the MoMA show were not those her own age, but Honoré Daumier and Thomas Rowlandson, and the actresses Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep. Ms. Sherman's stage-directed tableaus also come out of the history of American illustration and advertising as well as postmodernism, rootstock that MoMA could have exposed had it shown her 1987 travesty of Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving meal.
Ms. Respini's essay cites the feminist artists Hanne Wilke and Lynda Benglis as forerunners. But there is nothing truly confessional or shocking about Ms. Sherman's self-portraits. She does not bare her own breasts or buttocks, only prosthetic ones. Her wigs and masks don't conceal so much as they expose the visible flaws and grotesque insecurities of the characters she plays.
In public, she is similarly recessive and shy. Her art may be overexposed, but she is not. Even when she became the unwanted subject of a 2008 documentary, "Guest of Cindy Sherman," co-directed by ex-boyfriend Paul H-O, she emerged as unblemished and guileless in contrast to the venal poseurs who rule the international art world in the film.
Despite offers from megagalleries, Ms. Sherman has remained for more than 30 years with Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, founders of Metro Pictures, the New York space that launched her. Her one professional misstep may be the Hollywood movie she directed in 1997, "Office Killer." (It goes unlisted in the catalog chronology.)
If fame seems not to have afflicted her with a monstrous ego, Ms. Sherman is stoked by healthy fires of ambition. She has spoken of being irritated that her male counterparts from the early 1980s—Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel—were more quickly rewarded by the market.
Her 1989 series based on Old Master paintings exhibits her sweet revenge. These pictures, gorgeously installed here against burgundy walls, reflect the diminished status of women and of photography in art history. Playing figures of both sexes in portraits by Raphael, Caravaggio and others, she is climbing into the ring with a stable of canonical male artists while also cheekily humanizing the men and women in the gilded frames. Instead of sabotaging the originals, the act of photographing herself in these guises restores the overvarnished past to the momentary hazards of actual life. Her version of a Holbein ambassador imagines him as a bushy-eyed nerd. An Ingres aristocrat with an appraising gaze is a floozie gone to seed.
With the leveling laughter of comedy, Ms. Sherman has cut women as well as men down to size since the "Untitled Film Stills." That top prices for her prints have surpassed those for all but a few of her contemporaries can be a point of pride for women everywhere. Whether casting herself as abused or haughty, she speaks for those who refuse to be patronized or ignored.
Why is MoMA devoting another retrospective to someone who has already exceeded her share of attention? Wouldn't it be more timely for a curator to elevate some of the younger artists (Nikki S. Lee, Laural Nakadate, Yasumasa Morimura, to name three) who have followed Ms. Sherman's example in first-person photography? Her influence has extended backward as well, bringing renewed notice to Victorians (Lady Clementina Hawarden) and gender-bending surrealists (Claude Cahun) who took on various costumed personae.
But if Ms. Sherman was not the first woman to dress up and act out for the camera, her single-minded exploration of this method may be unique. The MoMA survey justifies its existence by tracking a deepening of sympathies since the Whitney retrospective. There are no indications that constantly photographing herself has left her feeling sick of her own image.
Ms. Respini strengthens Ms. Sherman's weakest series, the clowns from 2004, by dispersing them throughout the rooms and making these sexually and emotionally ambivalent figures a key to her work. Suspicions about the manipulative powers of her face and body, and of photography and art, have been central concerns of hers. With a few easy and readable cues, she can appear as distant as a movie star or as vulnerable as the cursed Ovidian gods and goddesses in her so-called Fairy Tales series from the mid-1980s.
The so-called Society Portraits, in the last rooms at MoMA, are her latest pictures (2000-2008) and my favorites. Here, she manipulates her own face and body with frightening precision, cutting ever close to the bone. Digital tools have allowed her to be multiple people in party scenes and to improve the often muddy color seen in her earlier work.
Ms. Respini is too polite to discuss what is obvious about these middle-age women clutching at remnants of their youthful selves. Ms. Sherman is at a stage in life (58 years old) when everyone stares in the mirror and considers what plastic surgeons might do to allay time's ravages. These doyennes are not unlike the collectors whose support makes possible extravagant shows like this one at MoMA. The artist is not so gently biting the jeweled, liver-spotted hands that have fed her career so richly. At the same time, she is facing down the inevitable atrophy of her own mortal flesh. Any laughter these frail creatures give rise to gets caught in the throat.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 7, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Roles of a Lifetime.
via online.wsj.com