''The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984'' was an exhibition at

The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 F ...

(The Met) in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from ''Pictures'', a 1977 group show organized by art historian and critic

Douglas Crimp John Douglas Crimp (August 19, 1944 July 5, 2019) was an American art historian, critic, curator, and AIDS activist. He was known for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theories and art, institutional critique, dance, film ...

(1944–2019) at New York City's

Artists Space Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in Soho, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Artist ...

gallery. Artists in the Met exhibition included art stars of the 1980s such as

Cindy Sherman Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often co ...

Barbara Kruger Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captio ...

Louise Lawler Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.Louise Lawler ...

Robert Longo Robert Longo (born 1953) is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician. Longo became first well known in the 1980s for his ''Men in the Cities'' drawing and print series, which depict sharply dressed men and women writhing in cont ...

David Salle David Salle (born September 28, 1952; last name pronounced "Sally") is a Pictures Generation American painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. He earn ...

Richard Prince Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, ''Untitled (Cowboy)'', a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell and ...

Jack Goldstein Jack Goldstein (September 27, 1945 – March 14, 2003) was a Canadian born, California-based performance and conceptual artist turned painter in the 1980s art boom. Early life and education Goldstein was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Q ...

and

Sherrie Levine Sherrie Levine (born 1947) is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston. Early ...

, together with lesser-known contemporaries such as

Troy Brauntuch Troy Brauntuch (born 1954 in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American artist. He lives in Austin, Texas. He graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1975. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia University ...

and

Michael Zwack Michael Zwack (1949 – May 5, 2017) was an American artist most often associated with The Pictures Generation. He studied sculpture at Buffalo State College and later, with artists such as Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, he co-founded the Hal ...

. It also featured some of the group's artistic predecessors including

John Baldessari John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, ...

and

Allan McCollum Allan McCollum (born 1944) is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City the same year. In the late 1970s he became especially well kn ...

.Eklund, ''The Pictures Generation'', pp. 320-329.

Precursors

In his catalogue essay for the 1977 show and a 1979 expansion of the essay published in the journal ''

October October is the tenth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the sixth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. The eighth month in the old calendar of Romulus , October retained its name (from Latin and Greek ''ôct ...

'', Crimp outlined a framework to describe shared themes in the work of the five artists he presented. In general, these were an interest in representational imagery, and references to mass media that the artists explored through "processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging." ''The Pictures Generation'' was not the first major exhibition to examine these artists as a distinct group, but it was the first to focus only on this cohort from a scholarly perspective. ''A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation'', a 1989 exhibition at the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

examined the work of American artists born between 1944 and 1956 who used mass media imagery. Also in 1989, ''Image World: Art and Media Culture'', an exhibition at the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, examined the role of mass media imagery in contemporary art from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the ''Pictures Generation'' artists playing a prominent role.

Details

The Met's show, curated by Douglas Eklund, argued that, from the perspective of three decades later, it is evident that Crimp's observations described a widely shared sensibility among artists of the 1970s and 80s. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue sought to tell the story of this "Pictures Generation" and explore the ways that these artists developed their approach to art-making. In the main catalogue essay, Elkund focused on three communities where artists shared and refined the concepts that unify the ''Pictures Generation'': The

California Institute of the Arts The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art university in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of both ...

(CalArts) in Los Angeles,

Hallwalls Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (aka Hallwalls) is a non-profit art organization located in Buffalo, New York. Since 1974, Hallwalls has shown and shows the work of contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds who work in film, video, literature ...

in Buffalo and

. Artists in the Met exhibition included art stars of the 1980s such as

Louise Lawler Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.Louise Lawler ...

and

, together with lesser-known contemporaries such as

and

. It also featured some of the group's artistic predecessors including

and

. The artists in Crimp's 1977 show were Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith. For the 1979 expansion of his catalogue essay, Crimp deleted Philip Smith and added Cindy Sherman. As time has gone on, other writers have argued that artists not included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art show, such as

Eric Fischl Eric Fischl (born March 9, 1948) is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and educator. He is known for his paintings depicting American suburbia from the 1970s and 1980s. Life Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on su ...

and

Julian Schnabel Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been ...

, were a part of this group.

Norman Rosenthal Sir Norman Rosenthal (born 8 November 1944) is a British independent curator and art historian. From 1970 to 1974 he was Exhibitions Officer at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. In 1974 he became a curator at the ...

, the curator of Schnabel's 2011 retrospective at the

Museo Correr The Museo Correr () is a museum in Venice, northern Italy. Located in St. Mark's Square, Venice, it is one of the 11 civic museums run by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. The museum extends along the southside of the square on the upper ...

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

, in that show's catalogue calls the artist "a leader and an outsider of the so-called Pictures Generation".

Gary Indiana Gary Indiana (b. 1950 as Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire) is an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the ''Village Voice'' weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his ...

has proposed further artists as having been part of this group despite the exclusion of their work from the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition, including Walter Robinson. A few artists grouped under the "Pictures Generation" category, such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, have been involved in legal disputes concerning their appropriation of content protected by intellectual property laws, particularly

copyright law A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

Artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition

Legacy

During the fall of 2020 into the winter of 2021 the Metropolitan Museum has produced a follow up exhibition on the occasion of the ten year anniversary of ''The Pictures Generation'', titled ''Pictures Revisited''. This second show focuses on "appropriation" and features the work of five artists from the original exhibition as well of that of other artists whose careers began both before and after the ''Pictures Generation'' practitioners' did.

References

External links

Douglas Eklund essay on the exhibition

in ''

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''
The exhibition catalogue
from

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale Universi ...