Cindy Sherman, National Portrait Gallery, review: a glossy retrospective for the original Selfie Queen

When Cindy Sherman’s fictionalised photographic ­self-portraits started appearing in late-Seventies New York, few can have imagined she’d sustain a whole career from this apparently niche activity, never mind make herself one of the most influential, not to say prophetic, artists of the past half century.

Her impersonations of characters from imaginary films felt of a piece with the alienated mood of the time, when the Western world was beset by cynical disillusionment, and New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. Even so, making herself the raw material of her art appeared a gimmick, whose impact was hardly likely to last.

Since then, though, the rest of the world has caught up: isn’t exploring your identity through a succession of assumed personae just what everybody does now, as a matter of course?

Yet looking at this major exhibition of 150 works from the mid-Seventies to the present day, in which Sherman’s plastic features transform themselves from film noir starlet to old master muse to New York society hostess, you wonder if these are self-portraits at all. Is the Queen of Selfie-Culture exploring her “identity”, in the social media sense, or is she hiding it in plain sight?

Born in New Jersey in 1954, Sherman was already making quite sophisticated self-portraits as a student at Buffalo, New York, in her 20s. In Untitled A-E, 1975, she shows a chilling ability to change personality from wacky to aloof with a twist of the head, becoming in rapid succession a kooky middle-aged woman, a goofy dad and a vulnerable teenager. Everything she’s done since has been essentially an elaboration and variation on these technically modest, yet remarkably knowing, images.

In her breakthrough series Untitled Film Stills, begun on her move to New York in 1977 – seen together here for the first time in Britain – she takes on a range of archetypal cinematic personae, from French New Wave to classic Hollywood. In #13 swept-back blonde hair and coquettish expression suggest Brigitte Bardot, while in #21 – one of her best – she looks uncertainly around a New York streetscape in early Fifties fashions that scream Hitchcock. Yet where a classic film-still gives a sense of a story, Sherman’s scenarios are left deliberately unresolved, so you’re left puzzling at what you’re seeing. If #08 brings to mind some Antonioniesque road movie, the more you look, the more it seems an almost abstract image of a woman in a desert.

Fame brought major assignments, and a hike in production values. In Centerfolds, 1981, commissioned by Artforum magazine, she experiments with the double-page format of the men’s-mag centrefold and the kind of prone poses used by glamour models, in sumptuous large-format colour images, in which she remains fully clothed with facial expressions that are near impossible to read. Despite allusions to Hollywood films, fashion photography and soft porn, the purpose of these images remains compellingly enigmatic: finally they’re just, well, art, but of a kind that had never quite been seen before.

In the standout, and the most straightforward, Untitled #92, Sherman crouches. sweaty and dishevelled, clad in a tartan skirt, looking up in wide-eyed alarm. It’s a brilliant parody of – again – Hitchcock and a critique of the way some male directors get their kicks putting actresses in positions of threat. Yet if it’s feminist, Sherman is too sophisticated to make it too obvious.

In the Pink Robe series, 1982, she presents herself apparently au naturel, without make-up, swathed in an old dressing gown and looking at the camera for the first time. While some have assumed these show the “real” Cindy Sherman, you get a sense that she’s double-bluffing, that it’s just more role-play, and while she looks towards us, she carefully – and significantly – never quite meets our gaze.

From here on, Sherman’s career progresses in a succession of themed projects that become glossier and more richly detailed. In a range of old master pastiches, from 1988, she’s seen in roles from a Holbeinesque bearded merchant to Raphael beauty with prosthetic breasts, while her Fairy Tales, 1985, in which she appears variously with bleeding mouth and with a prosthetic pig’s features are actually pretty silly.

In her later works, she addresses the ever more contested and adaptable nature of the female physiognomy. A cruel series purporting to be publicity shots for fading actresses, in 2000, employs so much make-up you start to wonder what’s flesh and what’s a mask, while in her spectacular Society Portraits, 2008, we’re offered the odd spectacle of an impersonation of the sort of women who have cosmetic surgery as a matter of course, by a woman who hasn’t – or so we, perhaps naively, assume. Technically extraordinary though these later works are, they have an almost caricatured theatricality. They tell us a little too much what to think.

Perhaps the most telling of her works were produced in the mid-Eighties, as adverts for garments by high fashion brands. While Sherman sought to subvert traditional notions of glamour by wearing couture in contradictory roles – as a wasted outsider, a deformed woman and a dominatrix – the fashion houses eagerly embraced her perverse vision. Indeed, since she started out, the worlds of fashion, style and pop have plundered contemporary art so relentlessly – and Sherman’s work perhaps most of all – that it can be difficult, at this distance, to discern how original her best works are.

Still, it’s hardly Sherman’s fault if the rest of the world has endlessly copied and co-opted her style. It’s a testament to her brilliance that you leave this highly entertaining exhibition still guessing about whether you’ve learnt everything or nothing about this remarkable artist.

Opens Thursday until Sept 15; 020 7306 0055; npg.org.uk