This week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,†a look back at the gang of mostly New York artists who came of age roughly between the loss of Vietnam and the fall of Richard Nixon. The first generation to grow up in the age of TV news and pop culture, the close-knit group of artists adopted black-and-white photography as their principal medium, a cool, critical distance as their style, and Hollywood, art, and advertising as frequent subject matter. The show features breakout early works by Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Laurie Simmons, but also pieces by some less famous “post-conceptual pioneers†like Jack Goldstein and Nancy Dwyer — and it’s something of a comeback for seventies star Richard Longo, whose huge works hang prominently in the museum’s Great Hall. See ten highlights now.
