The Pictures Generation
Started: 1974
Ended: 1984
KEY ARTISTS
 | John Baldessari Quick View  Artist Page |
| John Baldessari |  |
| John Baldessari, born in 1931, is an American conceptual artist. He often combines image and languages in his art. His early works were canvas paintings that were empty except for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. His juxtaposition of image and text is reminiscent of Rene Magritte's surrealist paintings. Art Story: John Baldessari Artist Page | ||
 | Cindy Sherman Quick View Artist Page |
| Cindy Sherman | |
| Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art. Art Story: Cindy Sherman Artist Page | ||
 | Barbara Kruger Quick View Artist Page |
| Barbara Kruger | |
| Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of Kruger's work merges found photographs taken from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text. Her captions engage the viewer in the work's greater struggle for power and control. Art Story: Barbara Kruger Artist Page | ||
 | Jack Goldstein Quick View Artist Page |
| Jack Goldstein | |
| Jack Goldstein was a Canadian born, California-based performance and conceptual artist turned painter in the 1980s art boom. During the 1970s, he became one of the linchpins of the Pictures Generation. Art Story: Jack Goldstein Artist Page | ||
 | Sherrie Levine Quick View Artist Page |
| Sherrie Levine | |
| Levine is an American photographer, appropriation artist, and seminal figure of The Pictures Generation group. The subject of much controversy in the 1980s, Levine is best known for her rephotographs of work by Edward Weston, Vincent van Gogh, and Marcel Duchamp. Art Story: Sherrie Levine Artist Page | ||
 | Robert Longo Quick View Further External Info  |
| Robert Longo | |
| Robert Longo is a contemporary American painter, sculptor and filmmaker. Longo first became prominent in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities," a well known series of paintings depicting well-dressed young men writhing and jutting their bodies in improvised movements. Longo is also known for designing several album covers and directing music videos, for bands like R.E.M. and The Replacements. Longo was also a co-founder of the Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, along with Cindy Sherman, Charles Clough and several others. Further External Info | ||
"re-presentation, not representation"
Summary of The Pictures Generation
The Pictures Generation was a loose affiliation of artists, influenced by Conceptual and Pop art, who utilized appropriation and montage to reveal the constructed nature of images. Experimenting with a variety of media, including photography and film, their works exposed cultural tropes and stereotypes in popular imagery. By reworking well-known images, their art challenged notions of individuality and authorship, making the movement an important part of postmodernism. The artists created a more savvy and critical viewing culture, while also expanding notions of art to include social criticism for a new generation of viewers saturated by mass media.
Key Ideas
Beginnings:
The artists who would be involved in the Pictures Generation grew up in the 1960s when consumerism and mass media began to have a large impact on society. They were the first generation of artists raised with television.
Important Art and Artists of The Pictures Generation | |
  | Blasted Allegories(Colorful Sentence): Surly Swoon (1978)Artist: John Baldessari Artwork description & Analysis: John Baldessari began his artistic education in San Diego and began introducing text and photographs into his paintings during the late 1950s. By the 1970s he had expanded his practice to include sculpture, film, installation, and printmaking. Like others of the Pictures Generation, Baldessari read newly available critical texts extensively, incorporating the theories of structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss into his artwork, particularly in the photomontage series Blasted Allegories. For Blasted Allegories, Baldessari arranged a series of photographs on a board to organize images as one would words in a sentence, playing with syntax and rhyme, destabilizing models of construction visually and linguistically. The stills depict various objects, stills from films and television, and bits of pop cultural ephemera. His work is humorous, juxtaposing visual jokes with seemingly straightforward text to obfuscate direct meaning. The words are relevant to the image shown, but when strung together with other sentences, they are not fully coherent. Through the prescribed images and text, the viewer acts as an active reader, scanning the visual and verbal sentence through the physical line, deriving his or her own sense of the work through various readings of the arrangement. The viewer is thus situated as an active producer of the work's meaning, questioning traditional notions of authorship and creativity. Photographs on board - Ron L. Feigen & Co., New York |
 | Untitled Film Still #21 (1978)Artist: Cindy Sherman Artwork description & Analysis: For Untitled Film Stills series, Cindy Sherman began photographing herself staged in various scenes that appeared to be from classical Hollywood films: a girl arriving in the big city, a girl cooking over the stove, a girl in lingerie dressing herself. The stills seem recognizable, but are taken from no particular movie, mimicking typical cinematic angles, lighting, and dramatization to convey a sense of the familiar. Critics have commented on Sherman's representation of females as "making strange" - forcing the viewer to be a more critical observer of the constructed re-representation, categorizing Sherman's work as a feminist intervention. Sherman draws attention to the fact that a woman's appearance is often associated with her identity: a woman is valued in society to be looked at. The film theorist Laura Mulvey established the term "male gaze" to illustrate the typical perspective of a filmgoer, who assumes the role of male subject. Taking the term from psychoanalysis, Mulvey surmised that vision works as a function of sexual and developmental drives, and male-directed films of the mid-20th century often served to place women in subjugated roles, relegating women to fetishized victims or villainous femmes fatales who were unable to be agents of their own destiny. Sherman's reworking of these archetypes, as creator and character, interrupts the male gaze and re-establishes the women in the photographs as agents, while simultaneously complicating the relationship as she freezes herself in these multiple roles. Gelatin silver print - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 Artwork Images | Men in the Cities (1979)Artist: Robert Longo Artwork description & Analysis: One of Longo's most well known series is Men in the Cities, a group of charcoal drawings that depicts various individuals frozen in exaggerated movements. The people are dressed in business garb, suits, jackets, ties, prim dresses, and heels, thrusting and careening wildly. The critic Craig Owens points out the "aestheticization of violence" within Longo's practice, as he freezes these ecstatic figures in moments of frenzy. There is a disparity, however, between the conservative attire and the jerky motions that renders these images somewhat mysterious and awkward. The men and women are still but convey kinetic movement in their positions, suggesting movement beyond the white background, beyond the frame. In the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan-era politics became synonymous with big business concerns and corporate branding, artists investigated how identities were being divorced from individuals, enforcing a type of alienation. Longo studied sculpture and he slyly insinuates three-dimensionality through suspension, hitting pause to question how citizens are complicit in the society in which they participate despite an adherence to so-called proper appearances. Charcoal & graphite on paper - Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium |
More The Pictures Generation Artwork and Analysis:
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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 22 Apr 2015. Updated and modified regularly. 
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