ART REVIEWS : Cindy Sherman: A Painted Lady : Photography: A new collection of dazzling self-portraits features the artist in an elevated guise: Old Master paintings are her models.

Season after season, Cindy Sherman just doesn’t quit.

Occupying a prominent place among the most significant artists to have emerged in the 1980s, she’s deftly walked the tightrope in an arena known for the volatility of its fashions. Yet, not only is the assessment of Sherman’s stature in no danger of downward revision today, it simply becomes more secure, more deeply resonant, with each new body of work she produces.

Since 1979, Sherman has been jamming a monkey wrench into our complacent notions of the natural uniqueness of individual identity. In a vast array of self-portraits, Sherman’s “self” typically has been jerry-built with images scavenged from vernacular culture. She’s portrayed herself in a wide variety of imaginative roles, ranging from glamorous movie star to hideous fairy tale ghoul.

At the Linda Cathcart Gallery, the New York-based artist has upped the dazzling ante yet again. A dozen color photographs--all dated 1990, but continuing a project begun last year--extrapolate from her previous work. Movies, television, magazines and the high school yearbook have been among the sources of her evanescent personae in the past. Now, the self-portraits feature the artist in a rather more elevated guise: Old Master paintings are her models.

Sometimes, Sherman’s photographs refer to specific paintings by specific artists--Caravaggio’s “Self-Portrait as Bacchus” in the Villa Borghese, for example, or Botticelli’s “Judith and Holofernes.” Other times, the picture seems more generic, recalling Rubens and Rembrandt or Northern Baroque and Italian Renaissance styles, without an obvious tie to a particular picture.

You may not be able to place the image, but in your bones you know you’ve encountered it (or something like it) before. These new pictures deftly recast “High Art” as part and parcel of a vernacular tradition. Your place in relation to art itself becomes part of the subject. So, of course, does Sherman’s.

Like the artist Sherrie Levine, she specifically uses the medium of photography to grapple with painting as an artistic tradition most closely associated with men, not women. (After all, the models she reproduces aren’t “Old Mistress” paintings.) By photographing existing images plucked from the history of Western portrait painting since the Renaissance, she starts with an important cultural frame of reference: In the modern world, a principal role of men has been to originate the master images, while a principal role of women has been to reproduce. It’s a constricting frame she proceeds to undo.

The most disconcerting features of this work are the tensions it establishes between photography and painting, and between the artist and the viewer. Sherman’s lush and gorgeously staged photographs are large--the biggest is seven feet by four feet--which implies a scale more common to painting than to photography. Yet, because they are photographs, and because their sitter is clearly a flesh-and-blood person in elaborate makeup and costume, they establish a direct, physical, bodily relationship with the viewer in ways that photographs rarely do.

Sherman’s transformation of herself into a sagging old woman, a radiant Madonna, an androgynous boy and so on is not accomplished with seamless special effects. The makeup and costuming certainly do their jobs, but the artist makes no effort to hide the artifice of the nose-putty and prosthetic breasts, the wigs and complicated lighting she employs. The result is an acute self-consciousness about your own habitual “costuming,” from the clothes you happen to be wearing to your social demeanor in a public place.

This emphasis on artifice also transfers the sensuous appeal of a painting’s surface, which is largely absent from a mechanical photograph, to the surface of the artist herself. The “paint” isn’t on the picture, it’s on Sherman’s body. Whatever Old Master guise the artist might choose to adopt, she is nonetheless bound by a single master image: No less than the prostitutes of Manet’s “Olympia” or Picasso’s “Demoiselles,” she displays herself as a painted lady, alluring and available for your delectable consumption. The thrilling difference here is that, in this visual transaction, she has adroitly defined her own terms.

At Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Blvd., Santa Monica, to June 23.

Picture Perfect: On the heels of its exquisite show of photographs by the great Carleton Watkins, drawn entirely from its own collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum has mounted “Persistent Themes: Notable Photography Acquisitions, 1985-1990.” With 40 vintage prints, three albums and a stereograph, the selection is relatively small (some 7,500 photographs have been acquired since 1985). But the quality is so consistent, the range so broad, that there is much to satisfy the eye.

The photographs range in date from the 1850s to the 1930s. Nearly one-third are portraits, and more than half are by Americans. Two were gifts, and none has been shown before at the museum. What these “factoids” might say about the Getty--how gaps in the collection are being filled, or how strengths are being built--is anybody’s guess. Because the museum’s holdings are so immense (more than 40,000 images) and its exhibition space so small, and because light-sensitive photographs cannot be displayed for long periods, visitors can only regard the Getty photo collection as a gigantic, mysterious iceberg whose enticing tip says little about what looms beneath the surface.

The show claims “Persistent Themes” in still life, landscape, portraiture and such, and works are grouped to make the point. There are classic images by Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, surprising and unfamiliar photographs by painters Edgar Degas and Rene Magritte, and even a commercial picture or two (one a marvelous Paul Outerbridge cover for Mademoiselle). And Nadar’s photographs of actress Sarah Bernhardt, who is decked out in the costumes of her most famous roles, reverberate against the memory of Cindy Sherman’s art.

Still, the best way to approach this show of individually compelling photographs is to forget everything but the pleasure of the pictures. Surrender to sheer indulgence.

This may be why Alma Lavenson’s 1932 “Self-Portrait,” given pride of place at the entrance to the show, is so beguiling in an assembly dominated by photographers far more famous than she. Lavenson’s image of herself is in fact an intimate portrait of her view-camera, its Cyclopean lens and boxy body lovingly caressed by gentle hands. Lavenson was without formal training in photography, but her “I am a camera” self-portrait speaks eloquently of the inventive marriage of mind and machine that launched and sustained modern photography.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, through Sept. 2.