The Pictures Generation: Making Meaning of Modern Media

Among the many impressive exhibitions held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 2009 showcase, entitled The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, stood out as a landmark. Its success lay in its insightful observations on a group of artists, known as “The Pictures Generation”, which launched in the 1970 and had since created some of the most innovative contemporary art of the later 20th century. 

What was it, though, that made this Generation so influential to merit such acclaim more than thirty years later?  In this article, we sneak a peek at The Pictures Generation to frame how they carried the conversation of art and contemporary cultural critique forward. 

Making Sense of the Art World in the 1970s

Part of the impetus for this landmark exhibition was to help explain the incredible diversity of artistic expression that dominated the art world by the final quarter of the 20th century. Since the end of World War II, the United States had become a global epicenter of artistic innovation. From Jackson Pollock and the rise of Abstract Expressionism to Andy Warhol and the popular themes of Pop Art, the spirit of artistic novelty had only continued to accelerate since.  

Of particular popularity by the 1970s was a focus on the imagery of mass media; from photography to advertising art, the pictures of this new era proved a remarkably influential source for a rising network of artists. This is how they became known as “The Pictures Generation,” as they used modern imagery and media as a springboard for their work. Beyond simply absorbing these images, though, these artists sought to critique the prevalence of such media in the contemporary world. 

They debuted this approach at the 1977 Pictures Generation exhibition at the Artist’s Space in New York. The showcase included work across different media, from short video clips created by artist Jack Goldstein to photographs by Richard Prince. Despite these diverse modes, these works united around a critical commentary of the image in popular culture. They ranged from the humorous to the sober, but these works encouraged the viewer to contemplate more deeply the impact that these types and tropes of contemporary media have on our psyches. 

The Pictures of The Pictures Generation

To get a sense of the various means by which the artists of The Pictures Generation refocused the art world’s attention on mass media’s influence, let’s take a closer look at the work of the artists who were part of the 1977 exhibition or were included in curator Douglas Crimp’s 1979 follow-up catalogue. 

Sherrie Levine (1947 – ) 

Fascinated by the potential of conversations between artists and across time, Sherrie Levine’s work in photography, painting, and sculpture is heavily indebted to the practice of appropriation from the work of others. She is consistently careful, though, to credit these sources, and thus her work, like After Walker Evans: 4 (1981) or  Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp) (1991), becomes a striking space to contemplate the practices of reproduction and translation of art.

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Louise Lawler (1947 – ) 

Since her work in the 1970s, Louise Lawler has continued to use her art to challenge the ways imagery is made and showcased, both in our everyday world but also within the space of the museum or gallery. She is deeply invested in exploring the meaning behind the making of an image, so her works often reflect a sense of powerful introspection. At the same time, she is known to converse with artists via appropriation similar to Sherri Levine. For example, her photograph, Is She Ours? (1990) focuses on one of Edgard Degas’ bronze ballerinas and in doing so raises parallel questions about the reproducibility of a bronze cast and a photograph. 

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Jack Goldstein (1945-2003)

A conceptual and performance artist, Jack Goldstein is probably best known for his film and audio recordings that often document some of his performative works. He also wanted to use the space of these recordings to bring to light facets not normally accessible. His “A Faster Run,” for example, featured the pounding hooves of a stampede. Later, Goldstein turned to painting but used the space of his canvases, like Untitled (#103),  to challenge the viewer by offering momentary glimpses that nevertheless required time-consuming, painstaking executions. 

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Richard Prince (1949 – )

Similar to Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince found a particular power in the appropriation of images, particularly from the realm of advertising art, which for him was particularly impactful as he focused much of his artistic production in the realm of photography. He typically would photograph iconic images used in advertising – for example, the “Marlboro Man” used in Marlboro Cigarette advertising of the era – and repurpose it by taking it out of that context and giving it a new name in photographs like #14 Untitled (Cowboy Watering Horses) (1983).  Prince has continued this practice into the 21st century in his photography quotations from social media outlets like Instagram, raising questions still over authorship and originality.  

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Philip Smith (1952 – )

Blending his interest in both painting and photography, Philip Smith centered early his artistic practice on the making and materials of photographic imagery. He has been particularly inspired by the presence and potential of the photographic negative in two ways. On one hand, his work incorporates numerous photographs of materials ranging from historic manuals to modern-day advertising art as source photography for his paintings. On the other, he uses the negatives from such exposures as their own art form since they have accumulated bits of paint or other signs of wear from the painter’s studio. Smith then scans and explores these imperfections through computer graphic manipulation as a clever commentary on the accidental versus conscious creation of art.

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Robert Longo (1953 – )

Though his main medium is drawing, Robert Longo has earned an international reputation for his almost photo-realistic style of draftsmanship. Renowned for the precision of his forms, Longo also captures an almost dimensional quality in his drawings that accentuates his often playful or manipulated figures. Men in the Cities, a 60-drawing series rendered between 1979 and 1982 captures this perspective: each work features the silhouettes of men and women in animated poses seemingly frozen in monochromatic time. Each is depicted against a pure white ground, allowing Longo to tease the viewer with a photograph without any landscape landmarks. 

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Cindy Sherman (1954 – )

Cindy Sherman carved out her own space within this Pictures Generation with her singular focus on the concept of the self-portrait. Serving as the protagonist in all of her photographs since the 1970s, Sherman manipulates her body via props, prosthetics, and costumes to take a seemingly endless array of guises. From her black-and-white Hitchcockian Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s to her more recent portraits that play with the idea of the selfie and social media filters, Sherman points across all of these images to the way we can construct an identity – even a false one – behind the lens of the camera.

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Troy Brauntuch (1954 – ) 

Since his contributions to the seminal Pictures Generation exhibition in 1977, Troy Brauntuch echoed the ideals of his fellow artists in his insightful critique of media. Pulling from newspaper and television sources, Brauntuch translates these images onto paper via photographic exposures or printing techniques that he then augments with drawn additions. The result is a tantalizing experimentation with tones that is intended to raise questions as to the authenticity and accuracy of the image being relayed. 

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The Pictures Generation More Relevant Than Ever

The artists of The Pictures Generation were drawing contemporary attention to the rise of mass media and the manipulation of images in fields like advertising. Their critiques continue to be thought-provoking today, however, given the prevalence in the 21st century of social media. It is perhaps thanks to this ongoing importance that curator Douglas Ecklund aimed to recall The Pictures Generation in his 2009 show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, not simply because many of these figures  are some of the most in-demand in today’s art world but also because their work encourages us to question what we see and dive more deeply into the images in the work around us.