[1] The exhibition took its name from Pictures, a 1977 five person group show organized by art historian and critic Douglas Crimp (1944–2019) at New York City's Artists Space gallery.
[9] 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.
[11] Artists in the Met exhibition included art stars of the 1980s such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Robert Longo, David Salle, Richard Prince, Jack Goldstein and Sherrie Levine, together with lesser-known contemporaries such as Troy Brauntuch and Michael Zwack.
[6] As time has gone on, other writers have argued that artists not included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art show, such as Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel, were a part of this group.
Norman Rosenthal, the curator of Schnabel's 2011 retrospective at the Museo Correr in Venice, in that show's catalogue calls the artist "a leader and an outsider of the so-called Pictures Generation".