Postmodernism: Appropriation, Irony, and the End of Originality (1970s-2000s)

In 1981, an artist walked into a museum, photographed a famous photograph, and presented her photograph as her own artwork. The original was Walker Evans's Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (1936), a Depression-era portrait of a sharecropper's wife taken for the Farm Security Administration. The artist was Sherrie Levine. She titled her work After Walker Evans and exhibited it at the Metro Pictures gallery in New York. She did not claim to have taken the original photograph. She did not alter it. She re-photographed it, framed it, and put it on a gallery wall. The point was not the image itself but the act of appropriation: taking an existing image and making it into a new artwork by changing its context. The art world was outraged. The estate of Walker Evans threatened legal action. Levine's work was confiscated from an exhibition. And the central question of Postmodernism was made visible: if an artist can take someone else's work and call it art, what happens to originality, authorship, and the idea of artistic genius?

Postmodernism in art is a broad cultural shift that rejected the modernist belief in progress, originality, and the autonomy of the artwork. It emerged in the 1970s and dominated the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodern artists used appropriation, irony, pastiche, parody, and reference to existing images and styles. They questioned the idea that art should be original, that the artist is a solitary genius, and that art progresses toward a purer form. Instead, they treated all visual culture as material to be borrowed, quoted, and recontextualized. The movement is associated with the Pictures Generation in New York, the rise of appropriation art, and the theoretical writings of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Douglas Crimp.

This entry covers what Postmodernism is in art, how it emerged as a critique of Modernism, which artists defined it, and how a movement built on questioning originality became one of the most influential frameworks in contemporary art.

What Is Postmodernism in Art?

Postmodernism in art is not a single style. It is a set of strategies and attitudes that emerged as a critique of Modernism. Where Modernism believed in progress, originality, and the progressive refinement of each medium (painting about painting, sculpture about sculpture), Postmodernism rejected all three. Postmodern art is characterized by several key strategies: appropriation (taking existing images and recontextualizing them), pastiche (imitating multiple styles without privileging any one), irony (using humor and distance to undermine seriousness), and reference (quoting art history, popular culture, and mass media).

The critic Douglas Crimp organized the exhibition "Pictures" at Artists Space in New York in 1977, which introduced the work of Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Troy Brauntuch. Crimp argued that these artists were not making original images but working with existing images, re-presenting them in ways that exposed how images construct meaning. A second version of the exhibition, "Pictures 2," was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979. The term "Pictures Generation" came to describe this group of artists, who became the core of Postmodern art in America.

The Albertina Museum in Vienna presented a major Richard Prince exhibition in 2026, bringing together some 150 works from the 1970s to the present. Prince, who emerged alongside Sherman, Levine, and Barbara Kruger in the late 1970s, is described by the museum's chief curator of photography as someone who "could be described as someone brought up through cinema and television." The exhibition explores how Prince made the already-circulated photograph the raw material of his practice, rephotographing advertisements, magazine images, and popular culture. Read more at Europe Says.

Historical Context and Origins

Postmodernism in art emerged in the mid-1970s, but its intellectual roots go back to the 1960s. The French theorist Roland Barthes published "The Death of the Author" in 1967, arguing that the author's intention does not determine the meaning of a text. The reader, not the writer, produces meaning. This idea was extended to art: the artist's intention does not control the meaning of the artwork. The viewer, the context, and the cultural codes surrounding the work all contribute to its meaning.

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1981) argued that in contemporary society, images have replaced reality. We experience the world through representations, and these representations refer to other representations, not to any original reality. Baudrillard called this state "the hyperreal." This theory directly influenced Postmodern artists, who used existing images precisely because they understood that all images are already copies, already mediated, already detached from any original.

The term "Postmodernism" itself was first applied to architecture, not painting. The architect Charles Jencks published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in 1977, arguing that Modernist architecture had failed and that architects should return to historical styles, ornament, and reference. Michael Graves's Portland Building (1982) in Oregon, with its decorated facades and classical references, is an early example of Postmodern architecture. In art, the term was adopted in the early 1980s to describe the work of the Pictures Generation and related artists.

Rosalind Krauss, professor of art history at Columbia University, published "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" in 1979, arguing that Postmodernist art "provides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore, and for an organization of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium." In other words, artists were no longer confined to painting or sculpture but could combine materials and approaches freely. This essay remains one of the most influential theoretical texts of Postmodernism. A 2026 exhibition at Centro de Artes in San Antonio, A Postmodernist Says Que?, applied Krauss's ideas to Latino art, showing how Latinx artists blend mestizo aesthetics with postmodern practices. Read more at Glasstire.

Key Artists and Pioneers

Cindy Sherman (born 1954)

Sherman is the most influential Postmodern artist. Her Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) is a series of 69 black-and-white photographs in which Sherman photographs herself in various poses and settings that mimic the visual language of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood and European art films. She is not playing a specific character from a specific film. She is constructing a type: the ingénue, the femme fatale, the career girl, the vulnerable woman alone in the city. The series exposes how mass-media images construct female identity. Sherman continued the project in color through the 1980s and 1990s, with series including the History Portraits (1989-1990), in which she restaged Old Master paintings using prosthetics, costumes, and props, and the Society Portraits (2008), which satirized wealthy women of a certain age.

Sherrie Levine (born 1947)

Levine's After Walker Evans (1981) is the defining act of appropriation art. She re-photographed Evans's Depression-era FSA photographs and exhibited them as her own work. The point was not to claim she had taken the original photographs but to question the concepts of originality, authorship, and ownership. Levine also re-photographed works by Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and Alexander Rodchenko. Her work forces the question: if the meaning of an image changes when it is placed in a different context, who is the author of that meaning?

Richard Prince (born 1949)

Prince worked in the clipping department at Time-Life Inc. in New York, producing magazine tear sheets. This job sparked his interest in appropriating advertisements. Using a small 35mm camera, he rephotographed printed images from magazines, cropping out text, logos, and commercial context. His Cowboy series (1980s) rephotographed Marlboro cigarette advertisements, removing the branding and presenting the cowboy as a pure image of American masculinity. The Albertina Museum's 2026 exhibition includes seminal series such as Fashion, Gangs, and Cowboys, alongside sculpture, painting, and collage. As the curator notes, Prince's work asks: "Can we ever look at the world with fresh eyes, or is our perception always already shaped by images, media, and pictorial traditions?"

Barbara Kruger (born 1945)

Kruger appropriates advertising imagery and overlays it with text that challenges assumptions about gender, power, and consumption. Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) shows a woman's face split into positive and negative, with the text printed across it. I Shop Therefore I Am (1987) places that phrase over a found image of a hand. Kruger's work combines the visual language of advertising with feminist and political critique, exposing how mass media constructs desire and identity.

Jeff Koons (born 1955)

Koons is the most controversial Postmodern artist. His work embraces kitsch, commercial imagery, and the aesthetics of consumer culture without apparent irony or critique. Rabbit (1986), a stainless steel sculpture of an inflatable bunny, sold for $91.1 million at Christie's in 2019, the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction at the time. Balloon Dog (1994-2000) is a monumental stainless steel sculpture that mimics a twisted balloon animal. Koons's defenders argue that his work exposes the mechanisms of desire and consumption; his critics argue that it simply replicates them. The debate is itself Postmodern: the question of whether the work is critique or celebration is deliberately left open.

Phases and Evolution

Postmodernism's first phase runs from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, centered on the Pictures Generation and the emergence of appropriation art. This period is defined by the work of Sherman, Levine, Prince, and Kruger, and by the theoretical writings of Crimp, Krauss, and Baudrillard. The second phase runs from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, when Postmodern strategies spread across the art world. Appropriation, pastiche, and reference became standard tools for artists working in every medium, including painting (David Salle, Sigmar Polke), sculpture (Koons, Haim Steinbach), and installation (Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger).

The third phase, from the late 1990s to the 2000s, is marked by the dissolution of Postmodernism into the broader category of "contemporary art." By the 2000s, the strategies of appropriation, irony, and reference were so widely adopted that they no longer defined a specific movement. The term "Postmodernism" fell out of use as a label for contemporary art, replaced by terms like "relational aesthetics," "social practice," and "post-internet art." But the Postmodern critique of originality, authorship, and progress remained embedded in contemporary art practice.

Legacy and Influence

Postmodernism's legacy is paradoxical. A movement that rejected originality produced some of the most original art of the late 20th century. A movement that questioned authorship created artists whose names are now brands. The strategies Postmodernism introduced, appropriation, recontextualization, the use of mass-media imagery, the blurring of high and low culture, are now standard in contemporary art. The questions Postmodernism raised about authorship, ownership, and the meaning of images have become more urgent in the age of digital reproduction and AI-generated images. A 2026 exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Milan paired Marcel Duchamp and Sturtevant, exploring how Duchamp's readymades and Sturtevant's repetitions of his work prefigured the questions about originality and reproducibility that define the digital age. Read more at Thaddaeus Ropac.

Related Terms

Postmodernism grew out of Dadaism, which first questioned the idea that art requires originality and skill. Duchamp's readymade is the direct precursor of appropriation art. Postmodernism reacted against the formal purity of Color Field painting and the intellectualism of Conceptual Art, though it shared Conceptual Art's emphasis on the idea over the object. The Pictures Generation's use of photography connects to the broader history of photorealism and the role of photography in contemporary art. For more on the broader context, read our post on appropriation art from Duchamp to the present.

See Postmodernism in Person

The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds Cindy Sherman's complete Untitled Film Stills series, acquired in 1995. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds significant works by Sherman, Prince, and Kruger. The Albertina Museum in Vienna's 2026 Richard Prince exhibition is the most comprehensive recent presentation of appropriation art. The Broad in Los Angeles holds Koons's Balloon Dog and other major Postmodern works.

If you want to trace Postmodernism from its origins to its legacy, start at MoMA for Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, then visit the Broad for Koons, and check the Albertina for the 2026 Prince survey. You will see how a movement that questioned originality and authorship produced work that is now itself canonical. For more on the broader context, read our entries on Dadaism and Color Field painting, or explore our post on appropriation art from Duchamp to the present.